They didn't speak.
Words had long since become inadequate—too soft, too sharp, too predictable. What passed between them now existed only in breath, in the way the air around them crackled like a storm trapped in a bottle.
Liora lay beneath him, wrists tied with velvet rope above her head—not in cruelty, but clarity. She had asked for it. Demanded it.
"I don't want to move," she had whispered.
"I want you to ruin me exactly where I lie."
Heian didn't smile. He never smiled in moments like this. His devotion wore the face of silence, of ritual. He lit a single candle. Then another. And another. Until the room was pulsing in golden flamelight.
Her body was already marked—smeared with deep plum paint, dried blood, ash rubbed in circles across her stomach like a spell half-finished.
He traced her ribs with a brush dipped in black.
"Do you want this?" he asked.
"I want you," she replied.
He kissed her inner wrist. Then her collarbone. Then lower—until she arched against the bindings like a violin string tightening beneath his hands.
When he entered her, it was slow—deliberate.
A worship.
A wound.
A warning.
She gasped—not from pain, but from the way her body betrayed her. From the way pleasure and violence blurred until they became the same tongue, the same prayer.
"I want you to hurt me like you need me," she choked.
"I do need you," he murmured against her throat. "That's the danger."
He moved inside her like he was painting—not fast, but deep. Deep enough that she could feel him in every breath, every bone, every scream that wouldn't come.
She cried quietly.
He didn't stop.
Because this was the only language they shared.
This was where their madness met.
When she came, it wasn't a climax. It was collapse.
And when he followed—mouth open, eyes shut—it wasn't pleasure. It was a death.
They lay tangled, sweating, pulsing, ruined.
Liora whispered:
"This is the only way I feel real."
And Heian—still inside her—replied:
"Then stay with me, and you'll never be fiction again."