Bucket.

His eyes searched her face, flicking from her eyes to her mouth, then back up. The frown deepened.

"The ring," he said, and there was something in his voice now that hadn't been there before, something that sounded almost like fear, buried under the controlled features. "You put the ring in the chest, did something. You brought me here."

She stared at him.

Right. So. Not a drunk actor. That left her with someone eloped from an asylum, or a veteran with some kind of shock.

She forced herself to take a breath, to level her voice to a stay, calm tone, the way you'd talk to a spooked horse or a confused child.

"Listen, sir," she said. "I don't know what you've got going on in that head of yours, but I am not a witch, I don't know anything about any ring, and I would greatly appreciate it if you got off me. Now."

----

He studied her properly now.

Really examined, now that the immediate threat of the -whatever that thing was she'd tried to brain him with- had been neutralized.

The clothing was wrong. Scandalously wrong. She wore a blouse with short sleeves that ended above the elbow, leaving her forearms bare. And the neckline! God. The neckline was cut in a V that plunged toward her chest with no chemise beneath, no modest linen to preserve decency, with buttons made of something that caught the light, like shell or bone, beaconing the eyes toward the tantalizing curve of her-

His eyes snapped back to her face, jaw tight.

No respectable woman dressed like this. No lady certainly, but even common women knew better than to display themselves so openly unless they were advertising a service. Also, the carmine on her lips. He had never seen such a brazen display.

So. A whore, then? Or a service in whatever establishment he'd been dragged to after being drugged and robbed? The building smelled strange. Earth and growing things, yes, but also that underlying wrongness he couldn't place. And the light overhead wasn't firelight, wasn't candlelight, but something steady that didn't flicker, didn't smoke, just existed like it had been summoned there and told to stay.

Magic. Had to be.

His head was pounding. His ribs ached with every breath. And this woman was staring up at him like he was the confusing element in this situation.

"If not a witch," he said, keeping his voice level with effort, "then what are you, wench?"

Her eyes went wide.

Then they narrowed, and something in her expression shifted from fear into outrage so quickly he almost missed the transition.

"Wench?" she repeated, her voice climbing half an octave. "Did you just call me a wench?"

He frowned. "You object to the term?"

"Get off me, you brute!"

She shoved at his chest with her free hand. Not hard enough to move him, but hard enough to make her intention clear. The outrage was burning off the fear now, replacing it with something that looked a lot like indignation.

He didn't move. Didn't understand her sudden fury.

"I asked you a simple question-"

"A simple-" She made a sound that was half-laugh, half-disbelief. "You pinned me to the floor, accused me of being a witch, called me a wench, and-"

"You tried to strike me-"

"Because you're a stranger in my stockroom!"

"after summoning me here with dark magic-"

"I didn't summon anybody!"

They were talking over each other now, voices rising, and he could feel his own temper fraying. He was tired. His whole body hurt. He'd woken up in a hovel filled with plants and dirt, and that gods-damned light hanging from the ceiling like something out of a fever dream.

Wasn’t a candle, nor a lantern, just a spark that had no business existing without flame inside an unbelievably thin glass.

And now this woman, this… temptress with her bare arms and her plunging neckline and luring lips, was acting as though he was the unreasonable one.

As though she hadn't put that cursed ring in the tournament chest.

As though she hadn't brought him here, wherever here was.

He leaned in slightly, dropping his voice to something harder, more controlled.

"Listen to me very carefully," he said. "I don't know what game you're playing, but I woke up in this place with your plants scattered around me and that-" he jerked his head toward the overhead bulb without taking his eyes off her, "thing burning without oil or wick. The ring on my hand is still warm from whatever spell you cast. So you can tell me what you want from me, and where I am, and we can handle this civilly-"

His grip on her wrist tightened slightly.

"-or you can keep pretending you don't know what I'm talking about, and I'll get the information another way."

She stared up at him, breathing hard. For a moment, he thought she might bite at him, she looked angry enough for it.

Instead, with a kind of forced, brittle calm:

"You are insane."

He blinked.

"I'm- what?"

“In-sane.” She pronounced it carefully, as though he might not know the word. “Crazy. Not right in the head. You need a doctor.”

Not right in the head.

The words landed somewhere specific, which was the problem.

There had been men along the country who said it without ever saying it outright, in the way conversations faltered when he stepped into a room, in the way former companions clapped him on the shoulder a shade too carefully, as if he were something that might splinter or lash out depending on the day. 

Barnes came back wrong, was the version that traveled fastest, passed between cups of ale and lowered voices in corners they assumed he wouldn't overhear. Too quiet. Too watchful. Sleeps alone, drinks alone, doesn't speak of the time he was missing.

Not right in the head.

As though he hadn’t entertained the possibility himself.

In the particular hours between midnight and dawn, when sleep refused him and the walls of whatever rented room he happened to be in seemed to inch steadily closer, he had considered it more than once.

And now here he was.

Sir James Buchanan Barnes.

Pinning a strange woman to the floor of a room full of crushed plants, in a place he didn’t recognize, beneath a light hanging from the ceiling like a captured star, after being brought here by a ring he had put on for no better reason than to see if it fit.

Not right in the head.

Maybe he was.

The breath left him before he could stop it. Short, sharp, entirely without humor, and yet somehow adjacent to it. The nearest thing to a laugh he’d produced in longer than he cared to reckon, wrung out of him by the worst possible circumstances imaginable, which felt fitting enough to almost be funny.

Then he looked back at her, and his expression settled into something harder, flatter. Guarded.

The joke, such as it was, was over.

“Where is this place,” he said.

Not a question.

She opened her mouth. Closed it. Then tried again.

"You're in my stockroom," she said carefully. "The Sweet Briar. It's a flower shop on Camden Street."

"What city."

"New Wintermouth."

He stared at her.

New.

"What county."

"Hancock."

The name meant nothing. He watched her read that in his face.

"Maine," she added, as if that clarified anything.

It didn't. That meant nothing either, and somehow that was worse than if she'd said a name he could place and dispute.

"New Wintermouth," he repeated, very quietly.

She nodded.

He looked at the wall, at nothing, at the impossible reality that someone had taken the name of Lord Morrow's seat -the city he'd ridden into a hundred times through the eastern gate, where he knew which taverns watered their ale and which armorers charged fair prices- and transplanted it somewhere else entirely.

Hancock.

Maine.

The place was wrong.

Everything was wrong.

He looked past her, toward the strange window set high in the wall. Pale grey light filtered through, early morning by the look of it, and beyond the clear glass…

He couldn't see much from this angle. A wall, maybe. Brickwork. Something metal, dark and angular, running up the outside of the building like a ladder but too narrow, too precise. Too uniform.

"Hancock County," he said again, quieter this time.

She nodded, still pinned beneath him, still watching him with those wide eyes that were starting to look less afraid or mad and more worried, which was somehow more unsettling.

He stood slowly.

She was already moving before he'd fully straightened, scrambling to her feet and putting the width of the stockroom between them. Her back hit the shelving on the far wall with a soft thud, and she stayed there, breathing hard, watching him.

From standing, the room rearranged itself into something even stranger.

Every surface was occupied with objects that made no sense. He turned his head slowly, cataloguing against his will, his mind trying and failing to organize the wrongness into categories he understood.

The black device mounted on the wall, the thing with the coiled cord she'd been holding before she'd tried to brain him with the trowel. It hung there like some kind of sleek, modern artifact, its purpose utterly opaque.

Beside it, a small table.

And on that table: a cup, and some little storage boxes, made from metal.

He stared at it.

Ceramic, pale pink, a color so uniform and so perfect it could not have come from any potter's wheel he'd ever seen. Too smooth. Too flawless. Not a single variation in the glaze, not a fingerprint or settling mark or any of the small human inconsistencies that came from an object being made by hand.

It looked as though it had been conjured into existence fully formed, which -given present circumstances- he could not entirely rule out.

His attention drifted back to her, because she was the only thing in this room that made any sense, except she didn't.

She didn't make sense at all.

The short sleeves. The scandalous neckline. The hair, uncovered and unpinned like no modest woman would wear it.

And her mouth. A deep red like crushed berries or wine, and he had never seen a woman paint her mouth like that outside an itinerant play.

But she'd said she sold flowers.

Then his gaze dropped lower, following the line of her blouse, and that was when he saw them.

Her legs.

He hadn't noticed from the floor. He'd been too focused on neutralizing the threat, on controlling the situation, on trying to make sense of where he was and how he'd gotten there.

But now, standing, with the full measure of her visible from across the room, it was impossible not to notice her skirts ended below the knee.

Not down the ankle, where they belonged.

Below the knee.

The hemline sat several inches beneath that joint, casual and deliberate, as though this were perfectly normal. As though she had simply decided that the entire lower half of her legs were public information and dressed accordingly.

The shoes buckled neatly at the ankle with thin straps, propped up on heels that were barely wider than his thumb.

Heat crawled up the back of his neck.

He averted his eyes. Glanced back, because he was trying to assess the situation, and that required looking at all of it, required understanding what kind of place allowed -expected- women to dress like this.

But God's wounds, her legs.

He jerked his gaze back to the room, sensing the flush spread from his neck to his cheeks, feeling like an untried boy who'd never seen a woman's ankle and was now being confronted with several square feet of information he had no idea what to do with.

Focus.

There were more objects. Incomprehensible things demanding his attention.

A flat rectangular object on the worktable, smooth and dark. A row of metal implements along the wall, too identical to each other, like they'd been cast from the same mold a dozen times over.

And then, on the wall beside the door, what it seemed to be a calendar. It had Arabic numerals, instead of Roman, but the month across the top was in clean, uniform letters.

Still, he didn't recognize the paper; it was too white, too perfectly flat, without the texture of vellum or the slight yellowing of parchment. Or the image above: flowers rendered in such flawless, vivid detail that they looked real. Not painted or illustrated with some improved technique. Something else entirely. Something that made a cold shiver run down his spine.

He took a step toward it and looked at the numbers. The month. The year in the corner, small and plain.

1955.

He stared at it for a long moment.

Then he heard himself say, from a very great distance:

"What year is this."

A pause from behind him.

"1955," she said. Carefully. The voice of someone delivering bad news to a person they weren't sure could handle it, which under other circumstances might have offended him.

His stomach dropped.

He turned away from the calendar, one hand reaching blindly for the shelving unit beside him, gripping the edge hard enough that the wood bit into his palm.

The room tilted.

He bent forward, bracing himself, trying to breathe through the sudden lurch of his body trying to reject this information the only way it knew how.

Nothing came up. He hadn't eaten since before the tournament, which was perhaps the only mercy available, so his body produced only a long, miserable contraction that did absolutely nothing except inform his bruised ribs -in exhaustive detail- exactly how much they resented this recent turn of events.

He straightened slowly and breathed through his nose.

Across the room, she was watching him with her arms crossed over her chest -covering that scandalous neckline, finally- still concerned.

"Are you-"

"Fine," he said.

His voice came out steady. He was distantly proud of that.

She pressed her lips together, clearly unconvinced. The red paint held, he noticed with the detached part of his brain that was still cataloguing details. Whatever she'd used, it didn't smear or fade. Just stayed there, perfect and crimson, even when she pressed her mouth into a skeptical line.

Focus.

"1955," he said aloud, because saying it a second time didn't make it better, didn't make it more believable, but at least made it real. A thing that had been spoken and could not be unspoken. "That is the year."

"That's the year," she confirmed quietly.

She was still watching him like he might collapse. Or bolt. Or do something else unpredictable and damaging.

Fair enough. He felt like he might do all three.

----

She watched him stare at the wall.

The anger had gone somewhere quieter while she wasn't paying attention, replaced by something she wasn't entirely sure she wanted to be feeling toward a man who had, not ten minutes ago, pinned her to the floor and called her a witch.

But he looked… lost. That was the word that kept circling back. Not dangerous-lost, not the wild-eyed unpredictability of someone you needed to run from. Just lost.

His eyes were staring, but whatever they were seeing, wasn't in the room. It was something considerably worse than whatever floral calendar and shelf of terra cotta pots were actually in front of him.

She'd seen that look before.

On men who'd come back from overseas and sat in the pews at St. Benedict's on Sunday mornings, staring at the stained glass with that same hollow, distant focus. Present but not present. Seeing Normandy or the Pacific or some foxhole outside Bastogne instead of the story of Pentecost rendered in jewel-toned light.

Poor thing, she thought, against her better judgment and every reasonable instinct of self-preservation.

The real question now was where he'd come from, and whether anyone was looking for him.

The state institutions weren't, by any account she'd ever heard -and she'd heard plenty- places that took particularly good care of anyone. Overcrowded, underfunded, and more concerned with keeping people contained than actually helping them get better.

Some families made their own arrangements instead. An attic room, a trusted relative, a situation that worked well enough until it didn't.

She looked at his clothes again, cataloging details she'd been too frightened to notice before.

The quality of the leather in that belt, in those boots. The weight of the fabric in his shirt, even dirty and sweat-stained as it was. The craftsmanship in the stitching, the buckles, the strange straps running down his thick thighs.

Not cheap. None of it was cheap.

Wealthy family, then. Wealthy enough to commission custom theatrical costumes, or whatever this was. Wealthy enough to keep their troubled son at home rather than surrender him to the state system. Wealthy enough to preserve the family name by keeping the problem private.

And then he'd gotten out somehow -wandered off, slipped away during a moment of inattention- and ended up here.

In her stockroom.

On her begonias.

She uncrossed her arms slowly, a deliberate gesture of peace, or at least of temporary ceasefire.

Alright.

"I have an immersion heater," she said, keeping her voice gentle, unthreatening. "Do you want some chamomile tea?"

He turned from the wall and looked at her with that steady, unreadable gaze.

"Chamomile," he repeated. “What is… tea?”

She blinked at him. He couldn't be serious.

"It's… like a herbal broth, I suppose." She gestured vaguely toward the little table, where she had a tin of teabags and the mug. "You put hot water and the dried flowers that come into a little bag. It's calming. Helps with..."

She trailed off, unsure how to finish that sentence. Helps with shock? Helps with whatever is going on in that head of yours?

"It's nice," she settled on. "Soothing."

Something moved across his face. A flicker of recognition, maybe, or consideration. His gaze went to the tin, then back to her, assessing.

A pause. He seemed to be weighing this information against some internal metric she couldn't guess at. Deciding something.

Then: "No."

Simple. Firm. Final.

Not exactly hostile, but borderline rude.

She blinked. "No?"

"No," he repeated. His hand was still braced against the shelving unit, white-knuckled, like he needed it to stay upright. "I don't need some herb-water. I need to think.”

Fair enough, she supposed. Though he looked like he could use something warm and settling, standing there pale and swaying slightly like a man who'd taken a harder hit than he was willing to admit.

But she wasn't about to force tea on someone who'd already demonstrated he had very effective reflexes, and a concerning assumption she was a practitioner of dark arts.

"Alright," she said. "No tea."

She shifted her weight, smoothed her skirt once more with both hands, and decided that if they were going to be standing in her stockroom together so early in the morning, the least they could do was know each other's names.

So she gave him hers.

He held her gaze for a moment, eyes narrowing with suspicion. But then, his shoulders dropped into a stiff, old-school posture, seeming to accept the exchange.

"Sir James Buchanan Barnes," he said. Each word precisely articulated, formal. "Knight of the Realm."

She blinked.

Knight. Sir.

They were committing fully to the delusion, then.

Hospice or relative's attic, definitely. Or perhaps a family arrangement gone wrong, some relative's responsibility until he'd slipped away when their back was turned. Poor man, probably thought he was Richard the Lionheart half the time.

"Right," she said, very carefully. "It's nice to meet you, Mr. Barnes."

----

He frowned.

No curtsy. No change in her posture, no dip of the chin, no clasping of hands or murmured sir or any of the thousand small genuflections that should have followed an introduction like that.

She'd just looked at him, the way one might acknowledge a tradesman. A merchant. A peasant.

Either she didn't recognize what a knight was, which would mean she was poorly educated -but that made no sense, because even the lowest-born knew what a knight was, even children knew- or she knew perfectly well and was choosing to ignore it discourteously.

An insult delivered with that same gentle, careful voice she'd used to offer him a herbal infusion.

The third option, that the title meant nothing here, that it carried no weight at all in this place, he set aside. Pushed it into the same corner of his mind where he was keeping 1955 and New Wintermouth and the impossible light hanging from the ceiling.

He wasn't ready to look at any of those directly yet. Wasn't ready to line them up and see what picture they made together.

It didn't matter. Not right now.

What mattered was the door behind her, and what lay beyond that door. What this place was, and whether the wrongness ended at the stockroom walls or continued out into the streets beyond.

He needed to move. Needed to get outside and find a street corner, a landmark, a church spire, something. Anything he could use to orient himself. Because right now the walls of this small room were doing something to his breathing that he was going to attribute entirely to the bruised ribs and not examine any further.

He pushed off the shelving unit, steadying himself.

"I'm leaving," he said.

It wasn’t a request. Just a statement of fact.

"Wait-" she started, taking half a step toward him, one hand lifting in a gesture that might have been placating or restraining or both. "You don't look so good. Maybe you should sit down for-"

"I'm aware," he said.

The words came out hard, but God's wounds, he didn't need her to tell him he looked like hell. He could feel it in every breath, every movement. Could taste it in the back of his throat, all dust and bile.

He probably looked exactly like he felt.

Which was, to put it charitably, like shit.

He ignored her and made for the door, the one that presumably led out of this cramped back room and into the rest of whatever establishment she was running.

"Is there someone I should call?" she asked behind him.

He paused, with hand on the doorframe.

Call?

The word hung there, strange and contextless. Call as in... summon? Send for?

"Give notice to, you mean?" he said, not turning around.

A beat of silence. Then: "I- yes. Someone who'd be worried. Family members, or..."

"No," he said. "That won't be necessary."

He pulled the door open and stepped through.

----

The proper shop opened up before him, and he stopped.

Well.

She hadn't lied, at least. She did, apparently, sell flowers.

The room was larger than the stockroom, lined with tables and shelving at different heights. Buckets and vases everywhere, stuffed full of blooms in various states of opening, roses, lilies, things he didn't have names for in colors that looked almost too vivid to be real.

Along the walls: more displays. Wreaths hung on hooks. Arrangements in ceramic containers. A small table near the window held potted plants, their leaves dark and waxy.

He walked further in, boots heavy on the wooden floor, his gaze moving over the inventory. The flowers were fine. Good quality, even, from what he could see. Fresh, well-tended, the kind of stock that spoke to either a reliable supplier or exceptional luck.

But flowers.

Flowers.

He tried to reconcile the economics of it and came up blank.

They were... what? A luxury for feast days and weddings. A merchant's wife might buy a small bouquet for her table if she had coin to spare and wanted to show it. A nobleman might send flowers as a token to a lady he was courting, but even then, it was usually a single perfect one, not an entire shop's worth.

How could this possibly sustain a business? Not a shabby street stall where overhead was low and expectations lower, but an entire building. With a dedicated stockroom.

Who was buying this many flowers?

His gaze drifted back toward the stockroom door, where she was still standing there, one hand braced against the doorframe, watching him as though he were the source of confusion here.

He broke eye contact first.

Because looking at her for too long made his thoughts arrange themselves in directions he did not care for. The scandalous skirt and the colored lips. The shop full of flowers that could not possibly keep a roof over anyone’s head unless the flowers were not, in fact, the point.

A front, then.

A respectable veneer for a less respectable trade.

He felt his face go hot.

Whatever this establishment was, whatever this city was, whatever madness had brought him here, he would not find answers standing in the middle of a flower shop while a half-dressed woman studied him like a puzzle she was trying to solve.

He needed air.

He needed sky.

He needed to see the street.

So he turned toward the front door.

“Mr. Barnes-”

The name stopped him for half a breath. Not Sir Barnes. Not Sir James. Mr. Barnes, again, as if she had decided the rest of him was decoration.

He did not turn around.

“I said I’m leaving.”

“I really don’t think that’s a good idea.”

"Your concern," he said, reaching for the door, "is noted. And dismissed."

There was a chime above it. He noticed it only when the door opened and the thing gave a bright, ridiculous little bell, cheerful as a jester's cap.

He made it three steps past the door before the world stopped making sense.

Next Chapter

It’s being taken..

I can feel it..

Feel the missing parts as if someone has scooped them out with a spoon. The edges itch.

I can feel it in my hair, no matter how hard I pull on my scalp I can feel it like worms.. bugs…digging my head..  

Eating away..

I claw until my skin burns, trying to press down on the splitting pressure inside my skull.

Maybe I can hold myself together.

Idiot

“Remember...”

There’s faces that comes to me sometimes.

People I’m supposed to know. Who matter..

But I don’t know them..

Sometimes I remember names.

Can taste them on my tongue.

Steve. Rebecca…

“3255…”

A thought, the inside of my ribs like a fist. An arm slung across shoulders. A laugh. Jerk

I can’t hold onto them

Try harder and the fog turns into static.

Static becomes noise.

“3255… please…. 38”

Noise becomes rage.

My nails are broken. There’s dried blood under the beds of them where I’ve been digging for something that isn’t there. Clawing at skin.

My skin is dirty. Wet

Hunger is a constant animal gnawing at my gut, but it’s not the worst of it.

The chair

That fucking chair

It’s stealing me

Swapping me with another man.

No.. not someone else

Swapping me with nothing.

A ghost something you can’t even see.

I can fight a person.

“32557..7..7”

How do you fight an emptiness?

I remember the wrong things now…

Remember the first time I woke up with the arm, I tried to slam it into the concrete until my shoulder screamed and my teeth rattled. I tried to rip it off with my other hand, fingers slipping on cold metal.

So much blood.

The taste of my own bile.

Hate this metal

I remember the chair.

The chair is not a memory I can lose.

They made sure of that.

Words in a language I don’t understand.

I understand the pain anyway.

I’m always shaking. Always wet with sweat I don’t have the strength to wipe away.

Somewhere outside, a door slams. Footsteps. A man clears his throat.

My heart tries to climb out of my body.

Not yet.

Please. Not yet.

The light under the door doesn’t change.

I pace the cell until my bare feet raw.

The metal arm swings too heavy at my side…I have to clutch it to my chest like a shield.

I don’t know why I keep doing that.

Maybe because it’s attached and everything else is slipping.

“3255…3255”

Where does it all go?

I press the heel of my palm into my eye until bright stars bloom.

The fuel is running out. The fight…

I can feel it.

Every time they take me to the chair, something goes..

I know I’m missing pieces..

I keep trying but it hurts to try some days..

“325… 38…38.. please.. it’s in there… I know it is..I’m in there”

I punch the concrete until the skin splits across my knuckles and my fingers swell.

But the pain is sharp and clean, for a moment it’s the only thing in my mind.

“Please remember.”

Then the emptiness surges back in, so does the panic.

If you stop trying they win

I press my forehead against the wall and sob without sound.

I’m so tired

The tears are hot. My throat won’t open for the noise. They taught me that early.

Names are dangerous.

Names are how you belong to something.

Belonging is how you remember you’re human.

I’m a person

I’m still a person

I slide down the wall, metal arm clanging against the floor.

Across from me, on the far wall, there are stains. Old ones. New ones. Dirt and blood and something darker that never fully washes away.

I’ve stared at that wall so long I could trace the cracks blind.

There’s something there I didn’t notice before.

Maybe I noticed it a hundred times and forgot.

A word.

Painted, smeared, written wet and red. The letters are crooked, desperate. The last line drags down written by a weak hand.

It’s fresh enough to shine.

It shouldn’t be.

No one gives me anything to write with.

I crawl closer, dragging the metal arm with me, the weight of it scraping across the floor.

The word stares back.

Bucky.

The room tilts.

I read it again.

Bucky.

The letters mean nothing.

My chest hurts, tight pressure. I press my forehead to the wall beneath the word, smearing my face into cold concrete.

I want to scream. Nothing comes.

My whole body shakes. I want to claw the letters off the wall, to swallow them. I want to be whatever that word is supposed to be.

But my mind is a room they keep emptying.

The fuel is gone.

The grief, the panic, the sheer, sick exhaustion….

I slide down the wall like my bones have decided they’re done holding me up.

My hand comes up to my face without permission.

The tears sting.

Gash open on my palm.

Wide. Ragged.

The blood on the wall…mine?

Why can’t I remember?

But my mind is a room they keep emptying,

I’m so tired.

The metal arm drags heavier across my lap, as if it’s growing weight on purpose, as if it knows I don’t have enough left to carry it. My shoulder burns. My whole body feels hollowed out, split open, scraped clean.

I stop fighting and lie down on the floor, cheek to cold concrete,

May 2026

tiny moves by @nonotwithoutu | +18 | one of the guys on bucky's team has been going on about his wife's pregnancy, and after a particularly long mission apart from you, he's been having some thoughts. it turns out he's not the only one.

in the red dark by @sergeantxrogers | His eyes trapped yours in their vice-like grip as he stared up at you, fingers brushing against the hem of your jeans, and you swallowed heavily. You felt the rush of alcohol in your head fizzle out into smoke and embers as you sobered up quicker than you ever have in your life.

by @aquaticmercy

Waffles and Ice Cream | fluff | Neither you and Bucky were ready for your son’s first day of school. 

Emergency Contact | After dating for six months, Bucky is now your emergency contact. Yelena, your best friend, finds out the hard way.

by @blowingbarnes

Teacher's Pet | +18 | series | Professor Barnes is the absolute worst type of professor. He doesn’t know how to teach, he wants you to already know all the answers. And you… poor you, living for academic validation.

Passenger Princess | +18 | Lee Bodecker x reader | First date with Lee after so so much tension and he’s not nearly as stealthy as he wishes he was. You don’t mind it though.

fluff moment by @smorgaswhored | fluff | fluffy sugar daddy bucky moment.

by @buckybarnes82

Tech gone wrong. | fluff | A mission going wrong leads to you getting minorly injured. You and Bucky both stay in a safe house together, and when the thought of looming feelings comes to the forefront, do you both finally admit how you feel?

Valentine’s | fluff | Valentine’s Day was always one of those “holidays” you didn’t care much for, until you met Bucky.

by @buckyscaptain

SKINNY JEANS | you never got the whole fighting in skinny jeans thing, so as team movie night turns into just the two of you, you decide to bring it up.

I'M YOUR SWEETHEART? | having your appendix removed has you waking up wondering what's real and what's not, your boyfriend included.

by @witchywithwhiskey

something brutal and beautiful | +18 | when your car breaks down on the way to your parents' cabin, Bucky Barnes comes to your rescue. you end up staying in the unfamiliar alpha's cabin longer than you expected, with his far-too-enticing scent driving your omega wild. then, the atmosphere in the cabin shifts suddenly and the tension that's been building finally snaps.

safe and sound | comf | you're alone at your parents' summer cottage with your dad's best friend bucky barnes when a thunderstorm strikes in the middle of the night and the childhood fear that has followed you into adulthood rears its head—so all you can do is ask bucky if you can sleep with him.

safe and sound part 2 | +18 | you've fallen asleep in the arms of your dad's best friend bucky barnes, but when the thunderstorm that found you in his bed wakes you, things between you and bucky turn from comforting cuddling into something more.

on the clock | +18 | feeling unfulfilled by your job, you sign up to become a member of the Pleasure Portal network, which allows you to have sex with monsters around the world for money. then, when you connect with an anonymous monster on a boring summer day at the office, it leads to an afternoon delight—and something more.

knocked up by the mafia enforcers on halloween night | +18 | stucky x reader | tired of your boring, lonely life as a mafia princess, you go out on halloween looking for a little fun, and end up running into two of your father's most feared enforcers. you expect them to ruin your night, but maybe they're exactly who you need to make your life more meaningful.

careful what you beg for | +18 | one night, you go to sleep naked, which turns out to be an unintended invitation for an incubus—one he can't resist.

by @vunblr

Brown Sugar and Gunmetal | +18 | comf | Who would have thought that an inconspicuous vent in a bakery alley would be what brought them together: the omega who never felt right with any alpha, and the asset who wasn't supposed to want at all.

A Star Without a Sky | +18 | A wounded Sheriff Barnes seeks shelter in a young widow’s home, and finds himself wrapped in a warmth he no longer believes he deserves, and longing for something he thought long buried.

the grooms best by @apricotsflavors | Your brothers wedding is coming up, as much as you are exited, you dread the whole rehearsals scheme of it. To make matters worse your brother has named Bucky Barnes as his best man; meaning you’ll have to face him after all these years. The same Bucky Barnes you had a one night stand years back, that stupid teenage summer romance, before he ghosted you to go to college.

it's been a long, long time by @buckytakethewheel | series | Sergeant Bucky Barnes from the 107th gets injured a lot. And when he does, there's only one pair of hands he allows near him.

Redamancy by @renxzs | Maybe it was a bit naive to think moving in with your best friend and long-time crush, Bucky Barnes, was going to be some smooth road that led to an admittance of mutual feelings for one another and a happily-ever-after ending, wrapped up nicely in a bow. Naive indeed; especially when you have to consider the fact that Bucky is the biggest womanizer you know.

JAMES? by @you-have-a-metal-arm | : When you call Bucky “James”—a name no one else dares to use—he reveals to a stunned Steve and Sam.

pull out? yeah right? by @slutdier | mickey henry x fem!reader | +18 | On a risky midnight balcony in Athens, you let Mickey Henry fuck you against the railing despite your nervous protests, only for him to promise he’ll pull out and then deliberately fill you with two hot loads while groaning “sorry, felt too good.”

eleven o'clock sin | lee bodecker x fem!reader | +18 | A late-night donut delivery turns into something far sweeter and filthier, than Sheriff Bodecker ever expected from the town’s purest little angel.

Stitches by @woncheolisms | You’re just a clueless new medical student. You’re not equipped to deal with charming, witty, handsome doctors. Especially not ones with pretty blue eyes that make you weak in the knees.

spilled wine by @sunmoonandeddie | You’re nothing more than a servant who happens to warm the bed of the king.  At least, that’s what you thought you were.

by @buckysdecaflove

Ficception. | +18 | Writing fanfictions sounds fun until your muse is aware of what you're writing about him.

Bucky's sweetheart. | +18 | After Bucky gets injured on a mission, your secret gets exposed.

Happy Mistake by @sunlightdances | Being assigned roommates with modern!Bucky. He's a giant and looks like he's a bully, but he's actually so shy and soft.

dust to dust by @autumnsghosts | When you come back from the blip in the graveyard having just been at your grandmother’s funeral, the cemetery seems like the safest place to be. Cleaning old gravestones had certainly never been a dream of yours, but now you find yourself there most days, scraping dirt and moss and algae from stones of people long dead and most likely long forgotten. It also doesn't hurt that a certain blue-eyed super soldier visits the cemetery weekly, placing flowers over two plots.

Too Hot, An Arm Cold by @t-lostinworlds | Cuddles from Bucky Barnes was probably one of the greatest things ever. But it was difficult to prove that point true in the middle of a heatwave while the apartment air conditioner was broken. Good thing he has a cold metal arm.

by @fckmebarnes

two bad bitches at the same damn time | +18 | stucky x reader

put on a show | +18

alabaster walls by @unificsation | +18 | avengers x reader | teamwork makes the dream home work. call america’s best to remodel your home: lay down pipes, screw your drawers, paint your walls—anything you need.

spoiled milk by @perdidosbucky-yyo | +18 | Every Tuesday morning the housewives of Waiting Willow Lane eagerly wait for the handsome milkman. Pearls around their neck, red lips and a tight apron to accentuate their waist, at 5AM ready to bat their eyelashes at Bucky, not you though, but what happens when you smell another woman's perfume on your husband's shirt?

you all along by @juniebjonesin | +18 | being best friends since childhood with rebecca barnes meant a life full of adventure with only one hard rule: don’t ever flirt with her brother. but that rule doesnt make room for an anonymous pen pal or a love that happens anyway.

Borrowed Fairy Tales by @ilovolderman | You take a last-minute princess job at Morgan Stark’s birthday party expecting easy money and screaming children. You do not expect a grumpy Beast ruining your life with soft looks.

by @venigrantrogers

making a bracelet for roommate | +18

doctor! doctor! anything-please! | +18 | Bucky hated seeing you like this, tired, anxious, always on the edge of breaking. He'd do anything to help you feel good.

delirium by @flowersforbucky | +18 | stranded in the middle of the alaskan wilderness with no means of communication after being exposed to a foreign drug, you're reluctant to accept help from the one person who has a shot at saving you.

by @dearwalker

Supersoldiers in Paris | +18 | Bucky x Reader x John | Retrieving vials from an abandoned Red Room facility gets you infected with sex pollen. You may have to make a stop in Paris with John and Bucky before you can get back home.

Would you still love me if I was a worm? | +18 | A stupid little question turns into a makeout session. Your teammates hate to see it, except for one.

by @societyfolklore

Double Take | On your first major production, all you want to do is prove you belong. One simple task;  deliver Bucky Barnes’ harness, check his notes, and get him to the rigging bay… should be easy enough….right?

Dexterity | When Bucky Barnes develops a Rubix Cube/ speedcubing obsession, you discover that watching his focused hands at work is far more distracting than it has any right to be.

by @metal-armed-muse

A TORTURE CALLED LOVE | +18 | You and Bucky have history. History of hating each other. One messy fuck in a bathroom later, you’re both scrambling to pretend it didn’t change anything. What better way to save one’s heart than by breaking the other first?

neighbour | +18 | congressman Barnes is your neighbour.

first aid | +18 | What starts as first aid gets dirty fast.

Uniform Inspection. by @w1nter-fairy | +18 | Bucky had been trying to adapt himself to modern world getting a new job at the Fire Department. He only meant to stop by before his shift, but things escalated quickly after you saw him in his uniform.

needed me by @godmadeaterribleerror | +18 | you can't stand bucky barnes. despite all your attempts to get rid of him, he's always somewhere in your orbit. you say you hate it. hate him. but you're also a very good liar.

His Name Was Never Just Bucky by @marvelstoriesepic | +18 | Falling for a mysterious man has been exhilarating, until you discover his biggest secret and realize you’ve been loving the most dangerous man in the city. But can you run from a monster in his own home when his eyes and ears are everywhere?

This is Her Favorite Song by @steelpaperboats | steve kamp x reader | +18 | It comes as a surprise to absolutely no one, yourself included, that Steve gets off on being a doctor. You know this; you have seen it time and time again through his well-established 'profession.' And given you aim to please, you pose the question, "Can I be your patient?"

In The Dead Of Night by @mickimoo1409 | stucky x reader | +18 | After spending so much time researching Steve and Bucky, they begin to visit you in your dreams, but are they really dreams at all?

wouldn't it be nice to live together? by @rh1nestcned

doesn’t trust by @sunskisser

by @imnotjustreadingg-volume-two

I just wanna feel you | +18 | I’d like something like reader and bucky wedding day where they’re both anxious and nervous and they called each other because they wanna went but then things gets heated and spicy during the phone call

Current boyfriend | You apply your cream and primer and then right when you take the concealer, the door of your studio opens. Your boyfriend Bucky Barnes enters.

dating by @shadyfestivalperfection

mission shipwatch by @ellebarnesx | The New Avengers start a full-on investigation when you and Bucky look a little too comfortable in your ''fake'' relationship.

Courage by @buckysknifecollection | After a busy month of avenging, you and Bucky finally make it to Tony’s Halloween festivities and there’s a Haunted House you just cannot miss, no matter how much of a scaredy cat you are.

gasoline by @iamthatonefangirl | +18 | despite everything in your past, despite the circumstances under which you got together and the circumstances that have dictated the majority of your relationship until now, being with James is fun.

Payment in Blood by @buckybarneslittledoll | +18 | In which your brother owes the bratva money and the pakhan decides to take you as a payment.

DRUNK NEIGHBOR by @idontexistrightnow | +18 | Bucky has had certain needs but he didn't think getting drunk would highten the need to act upon on those needs.

Love Stands Guard by @navybrat817 | During a fun and relaxing afternoon, Bucky overhears someone making fun of your body. He doesn’t take too kindly to that.

rush week by @flushedmilk | bucky barnes is the last person a cheerleader should fall for. unfortunately for you, he seems to disagree.

perfect by @smorgaswhored | +18 | imagine bucky’s got a girlfriend

pud that down! by @danysdaughter | +18 | you suggest taking a break from your deeply attached boyfriend. he reacts poorly and things somehow get worse from there.

Laundry Day by @starling-in-the-sky | On Tuesday nights, you and Bucky do laundry together.

AO3

Omega Retreat by Shamrock_Queen | +18 | As an unmarked and lonely omega you find a flyer for a service called The Omega Retreat. You are paired with a compatible alpha to spend your heat or just a week at a luxurious cabin at a forest resort. Amenities and Utilities included. Enjoy the beautiful scenery, fresh air, as well as the company of an alpha of your choosing. What could possibly go wrong?

<part14 ...

This was probably the worst decision you have ever made.

But, hell, now you officially jumped without a parachute, the ledge is gone, the air is passing by quickly, and your only hope is that you’ll somehow learn how to fly on the way down and you’ll be able to land on your feet.

The hallway outside has lost its symmetry, as you have lost your sanity, and now nothing seems to make sense anymore. Everything seems longer and crueler, your panic stretching the hallways into a long, suffocating throat. Each of your hectic footsteps makes you feel too exposed in this big mansion, they seem to echo your exact coordinates throughout the floors. Every hallway hears you, the walls themselves are turning their heads.

You take the first turn on instinct, then another, and another, trying to remember the route, trying to retrace the thread that brought you here, but your terror and all that bottled-up panic smashes sequence, steals direction, leaves you with nothing but speed because you know that if you stop, you’re done.

Your feel your heart everywhere. In your throat, in your ears, behind your eyes, beating against your teeth.

You blow past a side table where a cluster of pale lilies sits, blooming so aggressively, looking so wrong and even ugly in the corner of your eye, you have to take another turn.

You’re no longer thinking, you’re just running.

Your chest is a hollow chamber and all you hear is your own pants when you pass a maid who startles and calls something you don’t catch. You pass a window tall as a church promise and for one insane second consider throwing yourself through it. 

Somewhere behind you, from the office, you hear a loud crash. His voice follows. His voice. It sounds so much more blood-curdling now. 

He’s calling your name. Loud and baffled and then sharper. He doesn’t sound angry yet, but definitely alarmed in a way that makes every warning bell inside you turn rabid. Because there is something uniquely petrifying about hearing alarm in the voice of a man like him. It means you have disrupted the script. It means he does not understand. It means he is coming.

You run harder, every nerve in your body overflowing with adrenaline.

But, as expected, the house doesn’t simply spit you out. Corridors feed into corridors, archways into alcoves, burnished halls into rooms you have never seen, and every choice you make seems to slide you deeper into the belly of the place instead of toward freedom. 

With a ragged and desperate breath, you shove through one swinging door expecting another passage, and stumble instead into a kitchen vast enough to feed a wedding. There is all this gleaming steel and those butcher-block islands and hanging copper, bright under the lights in a way that feels grotesque after the dim severity of the office. 

It is wrong, all wrong, too open and yet somehow still a trap, because there is no front hall here, no visible exit, only counters and cabinets and startled staff, and you realize with a sick plunge of your stomach, that you have run yourself into a dead end dressed as luxury. 

This is bad, this is so bad. 

You stop abruptly, spinning around helplessly. The breath tears in and out of you like it is trying to escape without the rest of your body. The halls behind you are full of pounding footsteps, and you know it’s just one single set, but you also know it’s him.

He’s advancing and you can’t keep escaping.

A woman near the far counter goes still with a mixing bowl in her hands. Another man freezes by the sink with his hands in water. No one speaks. No one moves. The whole room seems to hold itself in suspension around your panic, everyone watching without watching, and then from somewhere behind you in the corridor comes Bucky’s voice sounds again, practically yelling your name—no confusion left now, only alertness, apprehension; and it punches you in the gut. It rings through you, through the kitchen, through the bright metal and tile and silence, and you know it has all been for nothing. 

But before there is anything you can do, before the ground can open a portal for you to fall through, Bucky appears in the kitchen doorway, looking like an avalanche with a name. A big name. A dangerous name. A name that will be the end of you. 

He doesn’t look raging in the obvious way, but he’s lost a bit of control. And for the man that he is, you don’t know how to survive it. And this intensity with which he came thundering after you is so extremely frightening because it looks expensive on him, tailored to fit, like one of his suits, like one of his watches, like all the impeccable and dangerous things he wears so naturally you once mistook them for elegance instead of that blaring warning sign they actually are. 

Why just have you been so stupid, my god.

He’s totally got you wrapped around his finger—and dick, as embarrassing and daunting as it is—or you would have maybe been able to open your eyes for a second, you idiot. 

But now they are open, wide, wide open, and you see him. You see him as the man he is. But maybe it’s a little too late now. 

He stops the moment he sees you pressed half-backward against the dark island, sees the way your hands have come up slightly as if your body has decided on defense without consulting you, sees the wet shine gathering in your eyes, the terror you are no longer managing to powder over, and something happens to his face that is so brief and so devastating, but all you can do is stare at him so you see that clean strike of realization. 

He doesn’t look confused anymore, and it makes him even more menacing.

He knows. He knows that you know. And he probably knows what he’s going to do to you now but you don’t know if you want to know that.

The air seems to cinch around you, seems to wrap itself around your throat, and squeezes. You can’t breathe. You don’t try to.

Bucky—James, your mind insists now with a sick recoil, James Buchanan Barnes, James Buchanan Barnes, biggest crime boss in the city—does not look away from you when he tilts his face to the staff. That, more than anything, makes your blood run strange. His attention stays fixed on you with a steadiness so absolute it feels like a physical thing, a hand at the back of your neck, while his voice turns toward everyone else in the room and comes out low and unquestionable. “Everyone out.” 

His command is dropped into the kitchen and nobody argues. The immediate obedience of his people makes you visibly shudder. 

A woman near the stove sets down a towel with trembling fingers. The man by the sink lowers his eyes and moves. Another staff member glances at you once with a quick look that seems almost guilty, almost pitying, and you feel the pulse of it pounding all around you, everywhere inside you. 

Nobody looks at you too long, nobody does anything besides leaving the fucking room. They won’t meet your fear and they won’t step between it and the source. Nobody here belongs to themselves enough to choose you over him. But it’s clear that they don’t. They’re his people for a reason. Nobody here will be on your side, whatever happens. 

A door swings. The kitchen empties in a matter of seconds, everyone slipping out with the furtive speed of people evacuating a room where something dangerous has just unsheathed itself. They leave with the scene in their eyes. They leave you with him. And the silence after the last one goes is so sudden it roars.

You take another step back and only feel the unhelpfully solid press of marble against your spine. There is nowhere else to go unless you want to climb onto the counter like a cornered animal, and for one hysterical beat of a second, the idea does not even seem ridiculous. 

You keep your eyes on him because looking away feels somehow more chilling, but your gaze is frantic within that line of sight, darting to the side entrance, to the swinging service door, to the corridor beyond him, to windows that suddenly seem decorative rather than useful, to every possible seam in the room where escape might be hiding in miniature.

There is none. The whole kitchen gleams at you with pitiless order that’s just full of steel and stone and copper, knives in their block and pots all around. 

He notices you looking, but you can’t care; all you have to care about is the distance between you and him, the distance between you and anything that might become escape if panic suddenly grew wings. 

Could you run past him? Maybe, if he were anyone else. Maybe, if this were some ordinary man with ordinary reflexes and an ordinary body and an ordinary life. 

But he is none of those things. You’re in this damn situation because he’s none of those things. 

He fills the doorway without even trying. He stands there in the collectedness of his dark clothes and encroaching presence, looking at you as if he can hear your thoughts tripping over each other and your fear has turned you transparent. 

His shadow has finally caught up to his skin and you now realize how dark it is.

Even if you got around him, where would you go? The front hall might as well be on another continent. Every corridor in this house has already left you stranded. There is no map in your mind now, only panic. No way out.

The knowledge gathers in your chest until it hurts. Behind your eyes, heat stings. Your throat tightens around a lump and only something choked leaves your lips. 

And Bucky sees all of it. You keep trying to shrink back from him because his very outline has now become a threat, and it doesn’t make your situation better, but he already knows, so you don’t have to pretend anymore. 

And his face alters. It’s as if the floor has given way under him. As if he had stepped expecting hard tiles and found air.

He does not advance. That should help. It does not. He stays where he is, one hand dropping slowly from the doorframe to his side, as if he understands that any sudden movement from him might send you straight through the nearest pane of glass. 

There is a fervor to him now that feels different from the one you knew in bed, at dinner, in the soft-lit luxury of his attention. It has made you feel protected, loved, worshipped. 

But there is no feeling of that anymore, none of that, because now it’s stripped of adornment, revealed as what it perhaps always was beneath all that heat and gentleness. It’s focus. Pure and frightening focus. 

His eyes are on you in that unwavering, devastating way of his, but the expression in them is nothing easy. There is something dark in there, something grim and braced, something that knows a door has just slammed shut and is already calculating what can still be salvaged from the wreckage. 

His mouth is set. His jaw is hard enough to cast shadows. He looks, absurdly, heartbreakingly, like a man who has been struck and is refusing to touch the bruise. But he stands, and he’s still so tall, much taller than you thought he could become, and he is not the man you thought you knew. 

He stands there with his hands visible, shoulders squared but not aggressive, and the intensity in him is bridled.

His stare does not feel like a threat in the crude sense, but it’s so full of attention, too much attention, because total attention from a man like him is its own species of fear. 

“Sweetheart.”

His voice has changed. It is calm but only in pretense. It is soft, technically, but not the way it was before. Before, his softness had warmth in it, a hand held out in the dark. 

But this is lower. Straighter. It has gone cool around the edges. It’s not vicious or unkind in any sense, but your body clocks it instantly. It’s almost formal in its restraint, as though he’s speaking across the lip of something that’s close to breaking and he’s trying not to widen the crack.

And that nickname makes you want to let the tears fall. Whatever he tries to achieve by calling you that, it doesn’t work. It’s just torture how familiar he tries to make it sound. 

His gaze falls in fast snaps over your face, your posture, your trembling hands. “This looks bad,” he concedes roughly. His throat works once before he continues. “I know it does. But it isn’t what you think it is.”

The words land in you and do nothing. They just sink. Sit there.

He studies your face, sees he has not reached you at all. “What did you see, baby? What has you—” He breaks off with a crack, shakes his head slowly, and lets out a shuddering breath, eyes still on you. “Tell me what you saw.”

What answer could you possibly give him? 

That you are looking at his mouth and thinking of all the times it softened around your name, and your own mind keeps turning traitor and overlaying that tenderness with headlines, with whispers, with ravening rumor? 

That the same voice which once coaxed and soothed now sounds capable of making rooms empty and men obey and whole situations forgotten? That the current version of his voice is a masterclass in control and it terrifies you to no end?

That his hands are hanging open at his sides, looking so damn human and ordinary, as though they’ve never done anything wrong? 

Which is a lie, you now know, a lie that runs deep and leaves you scarred, because all you can think is that these bare hands are the same hands you’ve had under your chin, lifting your face to his, tucking hair behind your ear, buttoning you up against the cold, and you’ve had them gripping you tight in the dark, moving inside you until you couldn't breathe, wrecking you in the best way possible.

These hands were your favorite things. 

But looking at them now, you picture what they are doing when you aren’t around. Doing the dirty work, the ugly work, the unspeakable work, hidden back in the blacked-out corners of a life he kept under lock and key.

Your throat feels too dry to talk and you stay quiet, letting the stillness in the room ripen, letting your lack of words and the fear in your eyes speak for themselves.

A hard, hollow tension knots his face, makes his jaw grind, and look as solid as a piece of rock. His hands ball into fists and when your eyes snap to them immediately, your body already flinching, he flexes them, but it seems forced. There is an almost brute rigidity to his throat, a silent scream of dread choked down only barely.

“What do you know?” he grits out through clenched teeth. 

The question is gentle in shape and brutal in substance. It makes your stomach turn. Because it sounds like a test. It sounds like inventory. It sounds like the kind of thing a ruthless man would ask before deciding what to do with the damage.

You let your fingers grip the edge of the counter. You can’t answer him. All you can do is try to breathe. All you can do is stare at the exit behind him, and his body standing between it. 

He draws in a slow breath, lets it out. “Look at me, Y/n. Please.”

You didn’t know some part of you would still obey, but you notice too late. Maybe it’s better this way. Your eyes lift fully to his. 

And you can actually see the way he has lost his grip. It’s right there in his eyes. If you were to describe it you’d say it looks distraught. As if he’s lost, his entire biography that’s been neatly written on paper now ripped away and he can’t find the next line. 

Judging by the way you act and look at him, he knows you know something, he just doesn't know what, and the mystery is eating him alive. Just for one disorienting second he doesn’t look that much like this untouchable figure from all those disturbing rumors, but rather like a simple man who knows that if he tries to force his way out of this, he’s just confirming your worst fears about him.

“My name,” he starts with a little hesitance. The gravelly low timbre of his voice makes you shudder, “is James Buchanan Barnes.”

Something in your face gives you away. 

You feel it the moment it happens. Some tiny involuntary flinch. Some helpless widening. 

Because something crosses his expression, his throat bobs hard enough to show that everything inside him is suddenly in pieces. 

He sees that the name is not new to you. He sees that you are already standing several steps ahead of where he hoped this conversation was.

He goes very still.

“You knew that already,” he acknowledges, and it almost hurts how he tries to sound calm about it all. 

Your mouth is dry. Your whole body feels like a struck match. You let out a pitiful small breath.

He takes one careful step forward, and it’s not really a step, not even truly an advance, but you recoil so sharply, you ram your whole body against the wall of marble behind you. Your back stings, but your eyes sting more. 

His face changes with your reaction, something like pain flashing through the severe framework of him before he reins it back in. 

“How?” he asks, and he’s no longer trying for calm. He ducks his head, pleading eyes on you, and he speaks with a wounded quiet. “Sweetheart, how did you find out?”

Your throat works around the answer. “Your tags.” It comes out so faint it is almost nothing, just a shaking breath that accidentally caught a few letters on the way out. 

For a second he shuts his eyes. For just one cut of time. 

His head tips back the slightest amount, and he deflates. A breath of air leaves him in a hitching, rattling shudder, like he’s finally run out of things to hold onto.

He looks back at you and seems briefly at a loss. James Buchanan Barnes, man of closed doors and fixed outcomes, with no ready sentence in his hands. 

It is strange and unnerving and it makes you talk more, bracing for him to yell and threaten and turn cold. 

“And,” you whisper, voice wobbling and blundering around in your mouth, “there was a gun.“ 

You want to explain, want to urge that you didn’t mean to find it, didn’t mean to come across anything at all. You want him to know you would like to dump your eyes in a container of white paint so your vision is a blank canvas and you can color it with other pictures, but it’s too late, and your words already seem to break across him, differently.

He does not move at first. He almost flinches, but catches it halfway, as if his body forgot for a moment to be disciplined. 

His eyes stay on you, and all that’s in there are things you’ve never seen in him before. Or in anyone, really. It is a stricken grief, resulting from the way every new piece of your fear is arriving inside him one by one and finding purchase. 

He looks at you like he can see the exact route your mind took from one discovery to the next, and hates every mile of it.

“Baby, I—” he croaks, having to pause. Instead, he starts toward you again, even slower this time, palms open a little, perhaps meaning only to soothe, perhaps meaning only to be nearer, but simply more trepidation triggers in you before thought can intervene. “Please listen to me—”

Your gaze snags on the knife block. 

The sleek black handles. The bright clean suggestion of defense. It’s without thought that you run to grab one. 

It is graceless and frantic and you don’t brandish it like someone brave in a film. You don’t know how to do this well enough for that and you don’t have the nerve to think about it. 

Your hand shakes around the handle almost immediately, and you pull it close to your chest, because fighting this vile man would be ludicrous considering who he is and who you are, knife or not, but you use it to protect yourself with the mere fact of holding something sharp. Hopeful that this thing will keep your horror from spilling out of your body altogether. 

The blade catches the light and makes it meaner. You hate that you have done this. You hate more that you had to.

Bucky stops dead.

The whole room seems to stop with him.

His eyes go first to the knife, then back to your face, and what crosses his expression then is so nakedly agonizing it is difficult to bear. 

Because he sees that you are not trying to threaten him, unlike how someone in danger might. 

You are not foolish enough to think a kitchen knife turns you into his equal. You are holding it because your body needs one small fiction to survive on—the fiction that you are not entirely empty-handed in a room with a man who could ruin you if he chose to. The fiction that you still belong, in some tiny harrowed way, to yourself.

“Hey,” he says, and his voice cracks clean through the middle of the word.

You have never heard that happen to him before. Never heard his composure split like badly fired glass.

His stare stays locked on yours, but now there is no distance in it, no coolness, no stranger’s cadence. Just a visceral, human ache. “Hey,” he says again, softer, but it sounds so incredibly heavy. It’s the way you’d talk to someone who’s just woken up from a nightmare and doesn't know where they are yet. “I’m— I’m not going to hurt you.”

Your grip tightens. The knife trembles visibly. “Don’t come closer.”

He stops breathing for half a beat and nods slowly. 

“Okay.” The word is a single rasp. “I won’t.” He swallows. You see the muscle move hard in his throat. “I won’t come any closer.”

You cannot stop shaking, no matter how hard you try, because a man with his power shouldn’t see you be so obviously afraid, but there is nothing you can do.

“Please believe me, sweetheart, when I say that I never intended to hurt you,” he swears, and there is no command in him now, none of that cold-sounding authority from a moment ago when he emptied the room with few syllables.

This is worse, in its own way. This undone version of him, this man trying to hold himself very still because the sight of you recoiling has clearly perturbed something structural inside him. “I have a thousand sins on my head, and it’s no use to claim otherwise now,” he speaks with a vulnerability in his tone that washes past you. “I’ve done a lot of things I can’t take back, but hurting you was never on the table. Okay? It was never even a possibility. You were supposed to be the only thing I didn’t ruin,” he ends with a lacerated wince.

You stare at him and have no idea how you can understand anything at all.

The knife handle bites into your palm. Your chest rises and falls too fast. The kitchen is suddenly too loud with all that humming of the refrigerator, the lights, the distant bloodstream of the mansion; and in the center of it all he stands facing you with that wrecked look in his eyes, as if your fear is not merely inconvenient to him but unbearable, and he’d rather be struck than watched this way by you.

And in a world that wasn't currently collapsing, maybe you’d actually care, maybe you’d actually notice how he would take a bullet to the chest just to stop you from flinching, but all you can think is that you are standing in the house of James Buchanan Barnes, with a knife against your own ribs as much as against him, and the man looking at you like heartbreak has found him at last is still the same man the city says should never be underestimated.

It’s so silent all of a sudden that the kitchen seems to be held in a trance. It feels as if there is a vacuum pressing against the walls and now the molecules of the room are terrified to touch the mess of what’s happening. 

The last bit of help you could have possibly still leaned on due to your desperation has vanished, echoes of footsteps now pull back into the depths of this mansion.

The overheads feel hostile, throwing down a flat glare that skims over the stainless steel and floorboards with an inert eye. 

And centered in that manufactured peace is him. 

James Buchanan Barnes.

The name has already erupted once inside your chest, but it keeps echoing, reverberating through your bones in smaller aftershocks. It feels strange to attach it to the man standing in front of you, when his hands have mapped every part of you—right to the most intimate ones—you’ve come to recognize his voice even in half-sleep and his laugh once wound through the cage of your ribs, vibrating against the bone until you couldn't tell its rhythm from your own heartbeat.

It feels like a wronged ownership. It feels like a glitch, an error in the logic of the world, but who are you to find a way out of it. Surrounded by him, in a mansion that is now suddenly as big as the world itself.

But you see it now. And god, it’s so painfully clear. So agonizingly obvious. 

You were delusional, you know that. It’s what hurts so terribly bad. You know exactly how this looks to anyone else. After all, this all started with you dating a guy for over a month and not even knowing his actual, legal name. But when you’re used to being nobody, a little bit of hyper-focused attention feels like a drug. He looked at you as if you were the only person in the room, and you would get this tight, anxious knot in your throat, thinking don’t ruin this. Asking for a last name or a background check felt like a quick way to feel high-maintenance, and you didn’t want to give him a reason to feel uncomfortable and walk away.

It was a habit born of pure insecurity, being so grateful for the crumbs of love that you don’t dare ask who’s baking the bread. He must have picked up on that on day one. He must have realized right away that as long as he kept making you feel special, you’d keep your mouth shut and let him stay hidden.

He used your loneliness, your blind spots. You were so desperately hoping to be seen, that you fell for the most obvious trap. And it’s your own fault, really. But it still makes you feel completely hollow, like someone scooped the air right out of your lungs with a cold spoon.

Now you have to live with the shame of that mistake.

Your jaw aches from clenching it, trying to swallow down the urge to throw up right there on the kitchen floor.

His presence alone seems to pull at the corners of the ceiling, dragging it down to squash you like a grape. He anchors the room to his foundation, consumes it with all he has, and tracks you with a pinpoint focus that has you shivering and sweating, because his gaze is treating the harsh thudding of your pulse as more vital than the massive, blood-stained kingdom currently cooling its heels on the other side of the door.

The roar in your ears turns outwards, seemingly engulfing the whole room with your panicked pulse. Your vision narrows down until the room stops spinning, and for the first time, you actually feel the air in the kitchen

And in the quiet, your awareness gives you the alarm that there is still something jarringly chilling resting just above your heart. It takes you a moment to realize it’s something physical. There is a weight there that now suddenly feels so deeply misplaced. 

Your hand moves on its own, your fingers lifting toward your throat to find the source of that cold, sinister pressure.

The tips of your fingers brush pearls. 

And for a moment, you stay frozen there, grazing the smooth curve of one luminous bead where the necklace drapes across your throat. 

It once made you smile, had your shoulders drop in ease when you made contact with this present of Bucky. But it no longer feels like a present at all, it feels like a bribe, a hook, a trap because its ultimate purpose surely wasn’t meant as a gift but rather to restrict your freedom and keep you bound to him.

This necklace, these shiny pearls, they aren’t about you. Honestly, you don’t think anything is about you. It never was. It’s just a reflection of what he wants you to be, confining you in his version of your identity.

He manipulated you and stole you and wanted to make you believe you’re the luckiest damn girl in the world.

And you had been. But now you’re just the stupidest.

And you keep on being, because your mind just continues jumping back to the evening he gave it to you, how it felt so soft and intimate, something chosen carefully and fastened around your neck with that glint of pride that lived in Bucky’s eyes. And you want to cry and break down at the way he stood there in front of you so awkwardly with the luxurious velvet box in his hand like it was something far more serious than jewelry. The way his voice had gone rough when he said he saw them and thought of you.

And now, sitting against your collarbone all cold, these are no longer gems, but tiny hooks sinking deeper into your skin, reminding you with every little sting, that you walked into this prison willingly.

You let James Buchanan Barnes clasp it around your neck. The man whose name crawls across newspapers like a stain. The man whose stories carry blood and conspiracies and savagery in their wake.

Somehow you manage to close your fingers around the strand despite of their shakiness.

Across the kitchen, Bucky’s gaze drops to your hand the moment it moves.

The necklace feels impossibly smooth beneath your touch, each pearl round and shining like a row of innocent little moons.

A gift.

From a man you didn’t know.

Or maybe a man you knew too well, just not in the way the world did.

Your throat feels hot suddenly and you know it's the cursed pearls burning holes there, pressing into your pulse with every overwhelmed beat of your heart.

You cannot stand it.

Your fingers curl harder.

Bucky's gaze snaps up to your face, then quickly back to your hands, and then he goes still. But still in the way of an animal that sensed the crack of a branch in the forest. Every line of him tightens in subtle increments, his shoulders locking, his breathing halting so abruptly you see the pause ruffle through his chest.

He knows what your heart doesn’t yet.

His attention sharpens and his eyes grow wide. It almost seems like he’s about to move toward you.

“Hey—” he starts softly, though the word is unfinished, frail, fearing the direction your thoughts are taking.

But your brain is no longer interested in choosing to make decisions carefully.

The necklace feels oppressive, every inch of it tied to a truth you did not have when he first placed it there, and so you can’t think or react any differently.

Your hand jerks in one swift motion just as Bucky releases a desperate choking sound.

The strand snaps free from your neck with a sharp little noise, like a thread breaking under too much strain, and now the pearls explode outward from your hand and scatter across the kitchen floor like a sudden spill of tiny white stars. They strike the tile with a bright, haphazard clatter that echoes far too loudly in the empty room.

tik—tik—tik—tik—

Some bounce high, ricocheting against cabinet legs. Others roll wildly across the floor, spinning in spasmodic circles before coming to a stop beneath stainless steel counters and chair legs.

The sound fills the kitchen in poignant, crystalline bursts.

A rain of little impacts.

A beautiful mess.

For a second you don’t even breathe.

You just stare at them—those small, perfect pearls—rolling farther and farther away from each other, punctuating the heartbreak in the air.

Across from you, Bucky doesn’t move. Something is breaking across his face. His breath leaves him in a soft, stunned exhale, and all he can do is stare with his eyes unguarded. It startles you.

He takes a step back. Not a deliberate one. More like his body forgot the floor was there. His boot slides half a pace behind him as though the sound of those pearls hitting the tile physically pushed him away from you.

His mouth parts.

For a moment he looks like he cannot quite process what he just witnessed.

His eyes—those confident, storm-colored eyes that usually hold such controlled intensity—have widened in a way you have never seen before. It doesn’t seem to look like anger, or anything like it.

It looks like hurt. Pure, unhidden hurt.

His gaze falls to the floor, tracking the scattered pearls skittering across the kitchen tiles, watching them roll away from where you stand with that look in his eyes that says he never wished to see them destroyed.

Then his eyes return to you. Slowly. And the expression there is devastating.

Because it is not rage.

It is not even disappointment.

It is heartbreak so unexpected and unfiltered it seems to hollow his chest from the inside.

His jaw tightens as if he tries to speak, but no words come immediately. The muscles along his throat move with a hard swallow, his chest rising and falling once in a slow, unsteady breath.

You realize then that he is looking at your bare throat.

The place where the necklace used to rest, and he stares at the place with sullen eyes.

Then his eyes lift again, meeting yours, and they are still wide, still aching.

For the first time since you’ve known him, Bucky Barnes looks like a man who has just watched something precious fall apart in his hands and realized too late that he cannot gather the pieces fast enough to put it back together.

And in the bright, echoing kitchen, the last pearl finishes rolling.

Tick.

Then silence returns, and your dread turns harrowing and now Bucky doesn’t seem to know where to put his hands, which is such a small, irrational thing to notice in the middle of your terror and yet your mind notices it anyway, because this is a man who has always seemed like a structure that was built out of conviction, who has been a straight line for you to follow in your world of scribbles, a man who enters every room as though the room had the good sense to expect him, and now he stands before you with your fear pointed at him in the shape of a kitchen knife and looks, inarguably, like he has been shoved off-script and dropped into the crack that formed in his foundation and now he is walled in by the very bricks he laid.

His eyes stay on your face, then the knife, then your face again, careful, heartbroken, alert in that frighteningly intense way of his, and you feel yourself shiver as he is tracking every tremor in your fingers, every drag of your breath, every microscopic shift in your balance in case you bolt again or collapse or cut yourself by accident on the trembling edge of your own panic.

“What you think you know about me,” he starts, and his voice is lower now, roughened at the seams, “what you’ve heard… what people say, it isn’t the whole truth. It isn’t even most of it.”

You barely hear the words. They hit the air and fall uselessly to the floor. Because what else would a man like him say, standing in a cathedral-sized kitchen in a house full of people who obey him before he finishes speaking, after you found the gun and the tags and the name that can turn a city’s rumor mill rabid by itself?

No matter what he says, no matter that he looks so unbelievably shattered—the shape of him is wrong now. That is what your body keeps insisting on. Wrong in the doorway, wrong under these lights, wrong with that caution and that gentleness still trying to live in his face as if it is genuine. You cannot make him fit into one meaning anymore. He is split down the middle in your mind—tender and terrible, gentle and catastrophic—and the fracture is making noise inside you.

He takes a breath, slow, as if he is trying not to startle you even with the sound of his lungs working. “I know how this looks.”

A cough breaks in your throat, or maybe it's a huff or a wet laugh, or whatever, but it hurts coming up and out of your throat. Your hand shakes so badly the knife glints in nervous little flashes. “You used me.”

The sentence leaves you wheezy and small and much too true-feeling inside your own head. But they are out, and you take a whimpering breath, and two tears fall. They don’t arrive elegantly, and they sure as hell don’t spill subtly. They feel hot and you feel humiliated and betrayed, so deeply betrayed, and you hate that they are coming in front of him, giving him the satisfaction because your body is not able to choose a fight, to give you steel and armor and an exit and a miracle. All it can provide you with is dread and tears, and a terribly shaking kitchen knife in your unpractical hands. Your whole body has become an argument against calm and there is nothing you can do.

His face changes so sharply it is almost like watching a flame twist drastically in wind.

“No,” he gets out quickly, and his voice trips over itself. It is denial stripped to the bone. Pure and cruel because he’s genuinely the greatest actor on earth. “No,” he chokes out again, softer and somehow more desperate. “No, no, I— It's not— I never—” He swallows, the line of his throat moving hard. He looks like he is about to walk barefoot through broken glass without letting you see the blood. “You matter to me. You— God, shit, that doesn’t even come close to—”

“Stop,” you whimper while a fresh tear slips down. You shake your head because the words feel obscene now, feel almost insulting in their tenderness, like someone laying roses on a crime scene.

“I’m not pretending.”

“Stop.”

His jaw flexes. He looks toward the ceiling for half a second, and it seems like he is trying to gather language before it deserts him entirely, and when his gaze comes back to you there is something naked in it, something grim and pleading and painfully real. He seems to grope for something that keeps him standing.

“I wanted to tell you,” he despairs, voice scratchy. “I was going to.”

You stare at him through your blurred vision. Every instinct in you rejects the sentence on impact. It sounds nonsensical. The knife quivers against your chest with each breath you are somehow able to take, but they are shuddering.

“When?” you choke out. “After what? After I was stupid enough? After I—”

“No.” He takes a step before remembering himself and stopping immediately, hands opening at his sides. “No. When it was safe.”

The word safe almost makes you laugh, except there is nothing funny left in you.

He hears how deranged it sounds in this room, and grief moves across his face in one dark, swift shadow. “Listen to me,” he presses, and his voice cracks, stripped of that expensive control he wears so well. “I know this life is ugly from the outside. I know what my name sounds like to people. I know what kind of stories get told. I knew if I handed you all of it too soon, all at once, you’d run before you ever had the chance to know what was real.”

Your tears keep coming and you don’t have it in you to wipe them away. You fear your heart won’t ever be able to unclench again after this day. If you even make it out of here. “So you thought you’d just let me” —fall in love first— “into your life the way you did?”

He closes his eyes, and you know the sentence hit exactly where it meant to. When he looks at you again there is nothing smooth or seamless about him, and you have never seen him this way. Because you have never really known him. He is no longer buttoned-up and bulletproof. He honestly looks about ready to be hit in the heart one final, fatal time. “I thought I would give you time,” he supplicates quietly, voice husky. “I thought I would let you know me before the rest of it ruined everything.” The breath that follows his words sounds full of sorrow and a deeply seated regret. “Which it seems like it has.”

Yes, it has. Yes, he ruined it. But would you have felt any other way if you found out another way? In another setting, maybe while you were tangled in the sheets together, or while he was holding your hands? You don’t know because it didn’t happen that way and you found out the way you did and now the world is upside down and all wrong-angled, and your mind is spinning in a room with no corners, completely unanchored by a lie you never saw coming, or maybe you have, because a guy like him couldn’t ever want a girl like you, and perhaps first and foremost you’re just mad at yourself.

Your throat has gone tight with crying, with fear, with the dizzying effort of keeping your body upright when your whole nervous system is trying to flee in eight directions at once. He sees you struggling and looks halfway to moving again, then stops himself so hard the restraint shows all over him.

“I’m a patient man,” he keeps going, and you just want to run past him, out of this hell. You don’t hear how there is no pride in his voice, no menace, just a worn sort of honesty, as if this is the one truth he can still offer without it breaking on impact. “I would have waited. As long as I needed to. I was waiting for the right moment, for when you felt safe with me, for when I knew you wouldn’t hear my name and only hear every lie this city tells itself at night.” His voice lowers further. “For when you loved me enough to at least stay in the room while I explained.”

You blink at him as if he has said something in a language your body no longer speaks.

And then, because this nightmare apparently still has room to worsen, he says, very softly, “Because I love you.”

All you can do is stare at this stranger, and it feels like you are looking at him through a broken window.

It is not the first time he has said it, not at all, and you had loved how he had no shame in telling you, how he pressed those very words into your skin night after night, even this early into your relationship.

Gosh, you had cherished it, fallen deeper for him because of it, and now you know it's all been part of his manipulation. So what else should it be now. But at the same time—why should he still be saying it? How can he still say that? How can he say that now, after all of this, after you know who he is, after the room has filled with the bomb of revelation? What kind of man says I love you while being the very thing you are trying to escape from?

You don’t understand him. You have no clue about who this man is and it is making your hands sweat around the handle. You don’t understand how his eyes can look this shattered, how his voice can sound this human, how his face can hold this much pain and still belong to James Buchanan Barnes.

The knife is still trembling against your chest. Your arm aches from holding it so tightly. The tears keep slipping down no matter how furiously you blink. He stands there with grief in his eyes and power in every line of his body, and both things are true at once, and both things are hurting worse because no single version of him will stay still long enough to be hated cleanly.

“I was going to ease you into it,” he explains achingly, as if confession has broken loose now and cannot be coaxed back in. “Slowly. Over time. I was going to tell you what I could, when I could, and let you decide what to do with it piece by piece. I was never going to throw you into the deep end and watch you drown in it.” His throat works. “Y/n, I’m so fucking sorry you had to find out like this.”

But you are not really listening anymore. Or rather, you hear every word and none of them settle. They clatter against your panic and bounce off immediately only to land in a repressed corner of your mind.

Because maybe he means them. Maybe that is the tragedy of it. Maybe he means every single inconceivable word. But meaning them does not open the door. Meaning them does not make this house less of a trap or his name less of a threat or your pulse any less palpitating in your throat. Meaning them does not undo the gun, the tags, the scathingly smooth way everyone in this place disappears when he tells them to. Meaning them does not turn James Buchanan Barnes back into only Bucky, back into the man whose shirt you wanted to pull on because it smelled like him.

All you need now is a way out.

You don’t want justice, or answers, or even the damn truth. You just want a way out of this. You want to get the hell away from him and everything that smells and looks like him. And the room starts reorganizing itself around that instinct. The service door behind him. The hallway to the left. The distance to the far counter. Whether he is standing on the balls of his feet or flat. Whether the island might slow him for a second. Whether dropping the knife would help or harm you. Whether there is any point at all in planning when this is his house, his kingdom, his maze, and you are just a girl crying in the center of it with shaking hands and nowhere good to go.

He sees your eyes move and something in his face folds inward with understanding, with woe, with the excruciating knowledge that while he is pouring his heart out in rough little pieces, all you are doing is looking for exits. He looks completely emptied out, as if his ribs had been pried open and the only soft part of him had been torn away.

“Baby—” And now he just sounds pleading. But he doesn’t get the chance to keep on going with his drama.

The kitchen ignites with noise before you even understand what you are hearing. There was just you with your messy breathing and Bucky standing a few feet away with that awfully gutted look on his face and then the door slams open so hard the plaster cracks and the sound ricochets against your nervous system.

A crowd of men comes flooding through the opening, like a breach in a dam, so fast and threatening and all of them primed for dirtier work than anyone should ever have to do. The floor shudders under their hard slam of boots. Nobody hesitates and nobody asks questions. They all just move on some sick instinct, weapons out and raised in the space of a single heartbeat.

And now all of them are pointed at you.

The sound that hitches in your throat is not at all dignified or brave. You wish you could stare at the end of your life with at least a small sense of bravery, but it doesn’t seem like it. Every weapon these uniformed men hold is fixed on your ribs, your throat, your eyes, and the paring knife you are gripping feels pathetic. It is a useless piece of household metal against a wall of black iron, against men who don’t care that you are small and fearful.

Even so, your knuckles go numb around the handle from how hard you are gripping it. Your fingers lock up, your skin flashing from freezing cold to scorching hot while your heart thrashes against your ribs.

You think, irrationally, that this is how it happens then. There is no big speech, no lightning strike from the sky. It is just going to happen here on the linoleum, next to a bowl of apples on the counter, and a row of clean water glasses that are catching the light of the kitchen while strangers decide to put bullets in you.

Bucky pivots.

It happens so quickly it feels supernatural, like a weather change, like the room altering under the weight of him. He steps in front of you without quite blocking you, but enough that every single man in that doorway seems to remember all at once who exactly they have just disobeyed.

His expression does not merely harden; it shears. Whatever softness had remained in his face a moment ago is gone so completely it is frightening, scraped away until all that remains is authority in its most lethal form.

You feel fused to the counter behind you. You wish you would be.

He fixes his stare on his men and his eyes become glacial, pale and freezing, incandescent with a fury that somehow feels far more menacing than an outburst. He speaks, and the volume is so low that the room has to go completely breathless to catch it.

“Guns down.”

The response isn’t fast enough. No one moves quickly enough. One of the guards hesitates—just a fraction, just long enough to die for it in any other circumstance—and Bucky’s gaze lands on him so heavily, it’s as if he is deciding where to leave the body.

“I said,” he repeats, and his voice comes out with a rough friction, stripped of any emotion except the promise to do harm, “if any one of you ever points a weapon at my girl again, I’ll put you in the ground myself and make sure nobody bothers digging you back up. Do you understand me?”

His words are deadly. It doesn’t even sound like he’s acting at all, he just sounds absolutely lethal. He talks as though he has already buried people before and wouldn’t think twice about doing it again.

Around you, the momentum of the raid falters. The guards look genuinely unnerved, expressions switching so quickly between shame, panic, and obedience in ugly little flashes. Guns lower and now point toward the floorboards. A muted apology gets muttered into the silence and some of them take a step back. But it is too late, far too late, because the last thread inside you has already snapped, and your body no longer cares about reason.

You run.

There is no time for anything else; you simply hurl yourself at the nearest gap in the room, toward the delusive hope of open space, of slipping between bodies, of somehow becoming smoke, becoming speed, becoming anything but this cornered and shaking thing inside your own skin.

You aim for the narrow corridor between Bucky and the island counter, convinced by sheer panic that if you can just get past him this once, just this once, the house might cleft and let you go. Your shoulder twists, your breath catches, your feet slip against tile and then catch again, and the world blurs into motion and noise and the blood-bright animal need to escape.

But Bucky is faster.

His arms hook around your waist in one brutal, seamless movement, and it yanks you backward before you’ve even made it past his shoulder. Suddenly you are no longer running, your feet lose the air, leaving you floating for half a heartbeat, before you are driven hard into the breadth and heat of his chest.

The cry you let out this time actually tears your throat. You thrash on instinct, your body fighting him with the full deranged force of your mind freaking out, and somewhere in that struggle your hand jerks.

The knife you have been using as a means of senseless protection, hits resistance. It slides cleanly, sinking into skin and it makes you gasp sharply, your lungs suddenly jamming. It’s not your skin.

The blade has opened a shallow red line across his forearm.

And that’s gotta be it. You’re now totally and completely fucked.

The knife drops from your hand and clatters to the floor.

For one aghast second you stare at the bead of red welling against his skin, bright as a neon sign, and horror crashes through you so adamantly it almost eclipses your fear.

But Bucky does not let go. He does not even flinch properly or draw back his arms. His wounded arm stiffens only enough to keep you from pitching forward, his other hand coming up to cradle the back of your head, not pinning now so much as containing, as if he is trying to physically keep something from breaking apart right there in his grip.

He seemingly is completely blind to his own bleeding skin, as if the knife you were holding was never a danger to his life and only a threat to yours. Even with his blood on the floorboards, his only instinct is to pull you deeper into his chest.

“Hey, hey, hey,” he calls, and the transformation in his voice makes your head spin, because the man who just threatened death into a roomful of armed soldiers is gone again, folded away, leaving only this hoarse, pleading tenderness that feels almost more agonizing. His mouth is at your temple, right at your hairline, his breath gasping against your skin. “Baby, baby, stop. Please—please, don’t do this, you’re gonna hurt yourself.”

You fight him anyway because your body refuses to do anything else. Your hands shove uselessly at his chest, your shoulders wrench, your whole body convulses with the effort of getting free. But he is built like a locked gate, and every single push only burns through the last of your energy. Tears pour hot and shamefully down your face. Your lungs burn. The room swims at the edges. Somewhere nearby, boots shuffle, and Bucky snarls over your head without releasing you.

“Out.”

It is one word, but every person in the kitchen obeys it instantly. You hear the kitchen staff backing away, hear the door open and shut, feel the room empty until there is no one left but you and him and the sound of your own sobbing.

Bucky’s hold eases just a fraction, softening the pressure so you can actually draw in air even if inhaling right now feels like swallowing water. He presses his cheek against your hair for one heavy second, and when he speaks again his voice is breaking in places you have never heard it break before.

“Listen to me,” he murmurs, each word roughened by strain, by remorse, by something that sounds so heartbreakingly sincere you almost hate him for it. “Hear me out, sweetheart, please. I got you. I got you. Nobody’s gonna touch you, nobody’s gonna lay a hand on you. I won’t! I would never. You hear me? You’re safe.”

Safe.

The word is a total deformity. It is so grotesque in this moment you could probably laugh, except it comes out as a broken cry instead.

You feel the way his body tenses around the sound, how it seems to travel straight through him with his heart as the target. He bows his head, his lips brushing your temple by accident or desperation, you cannot tell which.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and now there is nothing controlled left in him, no command, no careful poise, only a man fraying in real time. “Jesus Christ, I’m so sorry. I wanted you to know, doll, I did, just—not like this. Fuck, not like this. You mean everything to me. You gotta believe that. You are everything.”

You shake your head against his chest, small and uncoordinated, feeling spent. You do not know whether you are denying him, begging him, or simply coming apart. His shirt is damp beneath your face now, whether from your tears or the sweat chilled over your skin or the blood from his arm, whatever it is, it feels symbolic somehow—one more blurred line in a night made of them.

“I wasn’t gonna let anybody hurt you,” he whispers, and even that seems to drag through his throat, hitting the walls of it. “Nobody would ever be able to hurt you. Especially me, my love, especially me! I swear to God.” His forehead grinds into yours until you can taste the heat of his skin. “I’m still the same guy who kissed you this morning. I don't care if I’m a monster to the rest of the world, but not to you, sweetheart, please not to you. I would never—god, I would cut my own hands off before I ever used them to hurt you. You have to believe me, darling, please!”

But your body no longer knows the language of swearing, or soothing, or reason. Your muscles don’t translate his pleading into safety. Your body only knows that he is stronger than you, and that the arms holding you are the same arms that can dismantle a life without raising his pulse. The palm mapped so carefully across the curve of your head is the exact same hand that commands a firing squad, directs the local precincts, and seals fates with a slight tilt of his chin.

Every touch from him now delivers a repulsive duality—a rescue that feels like an arrest, a stroke that resembles a chokehold, an overwhelming affection that wears the exact outline of a cell.

You can feel how easy this is for him, how negligible his effort is in keeping you contained even while he tries his best to appear harmless. That insulting fact finally starves out the last bit of resistance left in your veins. Your nervous system runs out of fuel, leaving your body to go completely toothless against his chest, without actually surrendering or any returning trust. Your body is simply done.

Your fingers drop their useless leverage against his chest, your joints go limp and your knees refuse to carry your weight anymore.

You sag in his hold all at once. The sobs keep coming, but weaker now, thinning out, scraping instead of breaking. Bucky feels the change immediately. His grip loosens just enough to become support instead of restraint, his palm rubbing between your shoulder blades in one of those soothing motions you used to love so much and it makes your chest ache with a fresh wave of grief.

“That’s it,” he coos, though his voice sounds completely mangled by the words. “That’s it, honey. I know. I know.”

You don’t know what he means by that. You’re not sure he does either. Perhaps he simply recognizes that your stamina has bottomed out, that even the sharpest panic has its boundaries, and that the rush of survival instincts always burns hot and fast, leaving behind this full-body collapse.

He holds your dead weight upright anyway. He keeps murmuring into your hair but it doesn’t glue your broken pieces back together or erase the reality of what he is, what this fortress hides, and what you stumbled into. His sliced arm stays locked around your waist. You can feel the sticky warmth of his blood soaking through your clothes. It is startlingly human, and it should probably make him look less like a monster, the simple fact that he can bleed. But it makes every detail about your situation so real and dreadful.

When your body finally ceases its rebellion entirely, it isn't an act of submission. It is pure depletion.

And Bucky, keeping you pinned against the wall of his chest, seems to grasp that exhaustion better than anyone else could. His lungs expand and contract in uneven hitching motions. He drops his chin heavily onto the crown of your head. He closes you in not like a conqueror taking a prize but like a man trying, too late, to keep a catastrophe from widening under his hands.

Beyond the kitchen threshold, the entire estate drops into a dead, listening sort of silence, as if the plaster and timber have cocked an ear to the room.

He keeps holding you as if you are something he has no right to touch anymore and still cannot seem to make himself release, and it’s crazy that even like this, even with your body rigid from all the things you have learned too quickly and too late, he is still somehow heartbreakingly careful, his hand spread wide and warm between your shoulder blades, his hold immovable but never bruising, his mouth close to your temple as though he cannot bear to put distance between you if distance means losing you for good.

It is all just so utterly confusing because this is not entirely what you had expected would happen.

“The way you looked at me,” he continues, and his voice comes out rough as gravel dragged through water, ruined by restraint, by panic, by the sheer effort of trying not to frighten you further with the depth of what is in him. He does not sound like the man in the hallway, not like the man who commands rooms into silence with a glance, not like the man whose name can make other people blanch and step backward and say yes, sir, with their pulse all up in their throats. He sounds flayed open. He sounds like the sight of your fear has gone into him like shrapnel and lodged somewhere vital. “The way you looked at me in there—” He stops, breathes in shallowly, like he has run straight into a blade and is trying not to lean on it harder. “Christ. I’ve taken bullets that didn’t hit like that. To have you look at me like I’m something you need to survive.”

Your face is turned into his chest, your tears soaking through the expensive dark fabric of his shirt, and still your whole body is listening against your will, because his voice is all around you now, low and urgent and splintering in places that make something cold move through you.

His hand slides back up the back of your head, not forcing, only cradling, his fingers threading carefully into your hair as though the gesture itself aches. When he speaks again, there is something almost disbelieving in him, some stunned grief that does not seem feigned, cannot possibly be feigned for this long without becoming madness.

“If I could do it over, I would do every goddamn thing different,” he breathes brokenhearted. “Every part of it. I would tell you sooner. I’d tell you cleaner. Shit, I should’ve just told you. I should’ve given it to you straight before it got this messy and before you had to figure it out by yourself and piece me together out of all the worst parts with nobody there to shield you. I would have died before I let it happen like this. I swear.” He swallows hard enough that you feel it where your cheek presses near his sternum.

The kitchen is too bright and everything is stinging so harshly with those clean counters, the severe gleam of copper pans above the island, the neat little arrangement of knives in their block where one slot is now empty, the overhead lights turning everything brutally visible.

There is nowhere for your agony to hide. It shivers right out in the open, lives in the tightness of your lungs and the salt on your mouth, and the fact that every soft word from him only makes the unreality of this more baffling. Because he sounds sincere. He sounds devastated. He sounds like a man speaking over the body of something precious he helped kill.

He says all of this like he’s offering you his throat, while all around you the evidence of his power still glints and twinkles from every glazed surface, every distant footstep, every forced silence in a house built to keep his secrets and carry out his will.

He is talking with all the gentleness he has. He is nearly breaking with it. And still, inside you, fear sits and it pants and it is unconvinced, because love does not make a cage less locked simply because the hands closing it are shaking.

You make a small sound then—not a word, not even close, just some thin and wrecked little fracture of breath—and he tightens around you reflexively, then instantly checks himself, as if terrified you will read force into even that involuntary movement.

His next words come faster, crowding each other, not panicked exactly but pressed by urgency, by the sense that you are slipping through his hands even while he is still physically holding you.

“I know what I am.” He breaks off again, and this time you feel the tremor that runs through him. “I know what kind of man I’ve been, what people say about me, what they’re right about. I know exactly what it looks like from where you’re standing.” His voice goes raw. “But, darling, I never meant for you to be afraid of me. This was never supposed to happen.”

The words enter you but you just don’t know where to store them. There is something so naked in the way he says them that your mind keeps tripping over it, keeps trying and failing to fit it beside the other truth—the guns, the guards, the coldness in his authority, the name that belongs in whispers, the empire standing tall all around you in all its obedience. Or maybe it’s just loyalty. Respect? What even is it?

It’s hard to acknowledge that he still sounds like himself. James or Bucky, the man who kissed sleep into your skin and tucked blankets around your legs and pressed absent-minded kisses to your shoulder while reading beside you in bed still exists inside this other, larger, more terrible man. He has not vanished cleanly enough to make your fear simple. You give a small whimper.

“I was selfish,” he rasps, and now the confession lands without defense. “That’s the truth. I was selfish as hell. Because I wanted you anyway. I wanted you even knowing I should’ve stayed away from you. I know I should’ve left you out of all this. A girl like you deserves something clean and safe, and I’m neither of those things. I knew that. Fuck, I knew that. And it’s been killing me. I let myself have you and it’s been so fucking selfish.”

His breath hitches around the last word, and the grief in it is so unexpectedly torturous it almost makes you nauseous. His forehead lowers for a second against your hair, and he scarily looks so weary, suddenly too full of feeling to carry it elegantly.

“Because you are...” He exhales a broken laugh with no amusement in it whatsoever. “Christ, sweetheart, you are the best thing that’s ever happened to me. You couldn’t ever imagine what you walking into my life did to it.”

Your eyes squeeze shut and fresh tears slip out anyway. Somewhere inside you, some tired and furious part wants to scream at him for speaking like this now, for laying tenderness over terror as if one can cancel the other out, as if love—even if it is love, even if it is real and not just another instrument in his alluring hands—can unmake what you know. But before you can push any of that into sound, he keeps going, quieter, the words drawn so close to your skin they seem less spoken than confessed into it.

“If you want to go,” he states, and there is a pause before it, the kind that tells you the sentence is costing him blood, “I’ll let you go.”

Your breath snags. You don’t trust it nor believe it instantly, but even imagining the words coming out of him feels like a tectonic event, a mountain bowing. He does not release you yet, but his body changes with the promise, some iron set inside him going rigid with the effort of saying it and meaning it.

“I will,” he says, with more force now, as if he knows you don’t believe him and cannot bear that either. “If that’s what you want, I will. I’m not gonna keep you somewhere you don’t wanna be. I’m not gonna turn into that for you. But, baby—” and here his voice gives way altogether, drops into something so human and stripped down it hardly seems to belong to the same man who froze a room full of armed guards with one look, “—I am begging you not to make that choice before you hear me. I am begging you. Stay this one night, give me one chance to explain it all to you, to answer every possible question you could have. One chance to do this right, even if I already did it all wrong.”

Begging. The word would sound absurd from almost any other man. From him, it sounds cataclysmic. His hand shakes at the back of your head before steadying, his chest rises too sharply under your cheek, and he continues speaking as if silence might kill him.

“I love you too much to let this be the end of it if there’s anything I can do to stop it,” he croaks. “Too much to let you walk out of here thinking none of it was real. It was real. Every second of it was real. Me wanting you, loving you, worrying about you, making room for you in my life in ways I never made room for anybody—none of that was a lie. The only lie was thinking I could hold both worlds apart long enough to protect you from what I am. That was the lie. That was my arrogance. My mistake.”

The mansion remains hushed in that eerie, cathedral-like way that comes after a disturbance, as if everyone occupying this huge mansion is pretending not to hear the aftershocks.

But here in the kitchen, everything feels narrowed to his voice and your breathing and the blood drying on his forearm and the fact that he is speaking to you like a man on his knees, even if he is still standing, even if his arms are still around you, even if his kind of desperation does not know how to unclench fully.

There is a daunting sincerity in him now, not because it is soft but because it is not. Because it is fierce. Because even his tenderness carries the shape of obsession, of decision, of something chosen with his whole irreversible heart.

What can you possible answer here. What can you possibly think.

“I’ll do whatever I have to do.” He sounds so full of conviction. Technically, the words are quiet, but there is a hard core somewhere in his tone, and it glows fiercely. “I’ll do whatever it takes to make you feel safe again. To prove this to you. To earn back one inch of your trust. I don’t care how long it takes, I don’t care what you ask for, I don’t care what I have to lay down at your feet. I’ll do it. I will.” He takes a beat and the next words are so low you almost miss them. “I know I don’t deserve another chance and you have all the best reasons to run, but I’m asking for it anyway, Y/n.“

At that, finally, he leans back just enough to look at you. It’s not much, but the hand at the back of your head can guide your face up with painful gentleness, giving you every opening to pull away if you need to, though you are too wrung out now to do much except tremble.

His eyes find yours and stay there, and the sight of his face nearly brings you to your knees all over again. There is no coldness in him. No cruelty. No mockery. Only a kind of bereft intensity, a ravaged devotion, and beneath it the severe understanding that he is seeing himself reflected in your fear and cannot survive the image.

The whole fact of how broken he sounds starts to mess with your head. It cracks the armor of your panic, if only just a little bit. You’re trying to hate him. Because, honestly, you want to. You want the fear to be this insurmountable wall between you, but his voice keeps crumbling pieces of it.

The worst part is that you can’t just flick a switch and stop loving the guy you were tangled up with this morning. You fell for him so fast, so completely, because his version of happy felt like the safest place on earth. But with all those shocking revelations, that same love feels like a trapdoor that just dropped you into a cellar, and you are so angry at your own heart for still wanting him to hold you.

Underneath the exhaustion, there is a nauseating doubt starting to rot everything you remember about the last few weeks, and you really don’t need your mind going that far, but it does. You start wondering if you ever actually loved him, or if you were just hooked on the way he looked at you.

He treated you like you were the only important thing in the world, and you just hung off that affection, soaking up the protective way he took care of you. Even though he’s standing here right now, bleeding and hollowed out, swearing that every single touch was real, how can you ever be sure? Every memory you have is suddenly poisoned by the thought that it was just a beautifully built illusion, and the whole thing makes you feel completely seasick.

It’s just too much to handle all at once. Your brain is trying to hold two completely different men in the same space—the gentle guy who tucked the blankets around your feet in the dark, and the boss who froze a kitchen full of killers with one word. They are both real. They are both right here in front of you, and the fact that he isn't a cartoon villain makes it a hundred times worse.

If he were just a monster, you could run. But he’s a monster who tells you he loves you with this gut-wrenching, unyielding honesty, and looking at his ruined face, all your willpower just turns to mush.

“I should have asked more questions,” you whisper, and still, your voice breaks, the words tumbling out of you like loose gravel. You aren’t trying to be eloquent anymore, you are just trying to get the noise out of your head before it chokes you. “From the start, I— When you wouldn’t tell me things. I— I don't know, I was scared, I guess.”

Your fingers tighten into the expensive wool of his lapels just to keep your knees from giving out. Letting this mob boss know about your fears is probably a bad idea. But your life consists of you making bad decisions and so your mouth keeps opening. “I think I just liked the way you were to me too much to risk messing it up.”

The words drag themselves out of you like they do not want to be born, like each one has to force its way through the knot in your throat and the salt on your tongue and the simple, mind-numbing fact that nothing in you knows where to place anything anymore—not him, not yourself, not the last weeks, not the hands that held you so tenderly and the empire those same hands command with a flick of the wrist.

Bucky’s gaze is piercing as he looks down at you, listening with his breath visibly held.

“But I— I still don’t understand. I think.“ Your voice comes thin at first, scraped nearly transparent by crying, but it sharpens on pain the way a blade sharpens on a whetstone. “I just— I saw this gun, and—,” you blur out, the memory making your heart do that awful stutter against your ribs again while Bucky nearly flinches. His eyes go wide, pupils shrinking until they look like two dark pinpricks. “It was an accident. I swear it was an accident. I was just— you told me to grab a shirt of yours but I couldn’t reach up your wardrobe and so I was just going to go grab the shirt you've been wearing, but your jacket was there and then it just fell out. And I— I completely lost my mind because I realized I didn’t actually know anything about you, and I’ve been so stupid, and I’m really not good at this. I'm not good at talking things out or figuring out the right things to say. It’s just— this is so much to take in.”

Bucky´s chest hitches, a rough, dry stutter or air that sounds like he just took a fist to the solar plexus. His face looks almost unrecognizable with the pain plastered on it. You feel his hands tremble against you and he slowly takes them away, putting himself at a small distance to perhaps give you some space. His palms stay open, as do his eyes. He looks entirely unhinged by the clumsiness of his own life seeping into yours.

How could anyone understand how a man can kiss your forehead like a saint and still have blood and fear braided into his name. It’s so hard to understand how someone can look at you the way he is looking at you now—like you are both miracle and mortal wound—and still have lied, still have omitted, still have arranged the world around you so skillfully that you walked through it unknowing, barefoot and bright-hearted, straight into the center of his hidden life.

You do not understand what parts were real and what parts were merely curated, and worst of all, there is a terrible little splinter of you that already suspects the answer is not clean enough to save you. That some unbearable amount of it was real.

Your mouth trembles and you know that he can see it.

“You lied to me,” you sob, and although you mean for it to, it doesn’t sound like a weapon you’re throwing at him. It just sounds sad. “You made it so easy. I didn’t even think about it. I just— I just woke up every day and trusted the way you looked at me. And the whole time, I didn’t even know you.”

You look down at his chest so you can stop having to meet those devastatingly sunken eyes. “You let me fall in love with you not knowing who you were.” Your sentence has a shape now, the grief in you finally managing to find a spine. But you still can’t make your words sound all that accusing. Because you got yourself into this situation. You’re supposed to be furious at yourself first.

You haven’t used the word love before. You just dropped it, being the first time it cleared your teeth and the timing of it feels completely disastrous.

And Bucky suddenly undergoes a drastic freeze, as if his nervous system has been struck by lightning. He seems to tip back just a tiny bit but stays in your orbit. He stares down at you, his mouth parted, his chest stalling on an intake of air that he forgets to let back out.

The fact that you love him—and that you are saying it right now, while covered with dread and shivering nearly against his chest—seems to completely break his brain.

There is a dark heat flooding his face, his jaw tight enough to snap a tooth. He looks agonizingly vulnerable like this, the dangerous mob boss utterly gutted by four letters. His fingers twitch where they are now hovering near your neck, desperately wanting to bury themselves in your hair and pull you back into his skin, but he forces his hands down to his sides, his knuckles trembling against his tailored trousers.

“You…,” he starts, eyes burning with a starved intensity that makes the air in the kitchen feel boiling hot. He swallows loudly, taking a moment, staring out into some space behind you, and switching focus back to you. “Don’t call yourself stupid,” he goes on, voice dropping into a rasp that shakes with the failure of his own arrogance. “None of what you told me and none of what you felt makes you stupid.”

His face leans closer to yours and somehow you only shrink back a tiny bit, not really at all. You can feel the wavering rhythm of his breath against your lips. He looks thoroughly undone by his own greed, stuck in the realization that he won the only thing he ever wanted, right at the exact moment he stopped being the man who holds you in the dark and turned into the reason you’re afraid of the dark.

“The love was real,” he sounds so convinced. His face is breaking, but his voice is not. He knows what he is saying. “Every single second of it was real. I am the one who ruined it. But what I feel, and what we have, that isn’t a lie. I swear to you on my life, it was never a lie.” His eyes close briefly, and it looks like he is losing his footing somewhere internal. “I know how it feels from where you’re standing. But I wasn’t playing some game with you. I wasn’t trying to—” He drags a hand over his face, and for an instant he looks older than you have ever seen him, not in years but in burden, in wear. “I wanted more time. That was my sin in it. I wanted time. I wanted to tell you in a way that didn’t make you look at me like this.”

Like this.

The phrase feels unkind. Because yes—there it is again, the damn nucleus of the whole thing. The way your eyes have changed on him. The way he has noticed every flicker of fear in you as if each one were a cut and he keeps taking your terror not as an insult to his pride but as an injury to something much more private and much more vulnerable. And that, more than any fake excuse could have, is so hard to process. 

Because men who only know cruelty do not usually grieve like this over being feared by the woman they supposedly love. Men who are only monstrous do not usually look half-unmade by it.

You don’t want that thought, you honestly don’t, but it does arrive.

Because he has not hurt you. He hasn’t done a single thing to hurt you, and that makes him so much more complicated at the exact moment you most need him to stay simple.

He has had a thousand opportunities by now to become the thing you are bracing against. In the hallway. In the office. In the kitchen. When you ran. When you fought. When you took the knife. When you cut him. At every turn, there has been room for rage, for punishment, for the kind of retaliatory violence your frightened mind keeps expecting from a man like him, and instead he has done nothing but hold himself on a brutal leash, speak softly, plead, bleed, look at you as if your fear is the one thing in this world he has no defenses against.

And it makes you weaker.

Because fear is easier when it is clean. Outrage is easier when there are no counterweights. But now your thoughts begin to buckle under the strain of contradiction, and you feel yourself growing tired in some deeper way, not merely from running or crying or panic, but from the effort of sustaining one total version of him against the evidence of another.

The story you are trying to tell yourself—that he is simply bad, simply dangerous, simply false—keeps snagging on the memory of his hands shaking when he begged, on the way he threw his men out for aiming guns at you, on the heartache in his face now, open and unarmored and miserable with not knowing how to reach you.

None of it erases anything, how could it this fast, but still it matters, and still some fatal hope flares.

Your lungs are burning. You become dimly aware that your body is leaning, not exactly by choice, but because exhaustion is making choices for you now. The kitchen feels too bright and too far away at the same time. Your fingers feel chilled, your knees unreliable, your heart still overworked from all that horror. Even your anger is beginning to lose its clean edges, dissolving into something wetter and more helpless.

“I don’t know what to do,” you admit, and there is no strength in it at all.

The sentence is barely more than breath, but it changes him instantly, makes his misery seem softer, as if your confusion pains him almost as much as your fear did. His gaze searches your face carefully, greedily, looking for any sign that you have not vanished completely from him.

“You don’t have to know right now,” he comforts, and this time his voice is gentler still, worn down to the most tender parts of his body. “You don’t have to decide anything this second. I know I dropped all of this on you in the worst possible way. I know you’re overwhelmed.”

Overwhelmed. The word is so pitifully insufficient you want to cry some more, but the sound catches and turns to another shivery exhale instead.

Overwhelmed is a rainstorm. A bad day. A missed train. This is seismic. This is having the floor beneath your life cleave open and discovering it was built over a fault line all along.

Still, you know what he means.

Because beneath all the fear, and the betrayal and the urgent need to flee, there is now also this leaden, disorienting fatigue, this collapse of certainty.

You cannot keep all your alarms ringing at once forever. The body is not made for it. At some point even terror begins to sag under its own weight, and in that sagging comes the most dangerous thing of all. Maybe not trust or forgiveness yet, but confusion. A human confusion. The realization that if he truly meant to destroy you, perhaps he would have done it already. That if cruelty were the point, he has passed up too many easy chances. That whatever else he is—and God, he is still intimidating, still hidden, still a man with too much power and too many locked rooms in his life—his feelings for you do not look counterfeit. They look catastrophic. They look real enough to have ruined him too.

He had every opportunity to end this argument with force, not even making his hands dirty in a physical sense. But he didn’t, and that roughened sincerity that seems so deeply wounded keeps gnawing at all the things you thought you found out about this man, the stereotype you made him out to be. It makes a guilty stone drop into your belly and land with damaging intentions.

And you do not know what to do with all this honesty and realness, when real arrives dressed as the very thing you were trying to escape.

But you have to acknowledge that your lack of strength is not the only reason why you have stopped fighting him, stopped trying to get away.

Bucky seems to read some fragment of this in your face, because he does not press harder. He does not crowd you with arguments. He simply stays where he is, close enough for warmth, far enough now that his care has space to breathe. His injured arm hangs at his side, blood drying in a dark seam along his skin, ignored. His other hand lifts as if to touch your cheek, then stops halfway and falls again when he sees the flicker in your eyes. That tiny restraint breaks something in you all over again.

“I know I lied by not telling you,” he says quietly. “I know that. I’m not asking you to call it something prettier. I’m just telling you it wasn’t because you meant nothing. It was because you meant too goddamn much, and I was trying to find a way to bring you closer without making you run.”

The honesty of it is so ugly, so naked, so free of self-congratulation that it feels like he just threw a wet sandbag right at your chest, knocking every scrap of air straight out of your lungs. It’s not an excuse, not quite. More like the shape of the selfishness itself, held out in his own hands for you to look at. He wanted you. He kept you. He delayed the truth because he was afraid the truth would cost him the one bright thing he had allowed himself to love. There is no innocence in that. But there is something crushingly human.

Your eyes burn again and your grip on your own certainty loosens another inch.

You hate that, too, because, damnit, it would be easier to stand here shaking and loathing him if he would just become less tender and less heartbreakingly earnest in his regret. But he stays persistently, ruinously genuine, and all at once you feel not only afraid, not only betrayed, but emptied out by the effort of trying to hold every contradiction at once. He is a bad man. He may also love you. He lied. He is also hurting. He hid things from you. He is also standing here looking like your fear is flaying him alive. None of these truths cancels the others. They just crowd together until your thoughts feel waterlogged, too swollen to separate.

So all that is left is the simplest truth again.

You really are overwhelmed.

You are so overwhelmed that language itself seems too heavy to lift.

Your breathing has started to slowly settle in increments, like a storm reluctantly retreating from a coastline it battered too long. It feels like there are bruises left behind in your lungs, but it no longer aches with each inhale.

Your fear has ebbed enough to make you think again, to make you see again, to make you look at him not as the single monstrous shape your panic tried to build, but as the complicated, human contradiction standing in front of you now.

His shoulders are still too tight, drawn up, and perhaps trying to seem smaller. He keeps his hands visible and loose at his sides to perhaps avoid startling you. The cut along his forearm has darkened into a narrow seam of red, drying in flaking lines against his skin and remaining completely ignored by the man attached to it.

His focus hasn’t left your face. And in that focus, there is not an ounce of triumph. Rather, the opposite. There is only pain. Such a grave torment that lives in the corners of his mouth, the prominent crease between his brows, in the cautious way he keeps tracking your movements as though you still might shove him away and try bolting for the door again.

You swallow and feel the ballast of everything press back down on your chest.

“I—” you start, timidly, using every last scrap of your bravery. You don’t meet his eyes, staring at the floor beside him. “I’ve seen them.” Your voice sounds strange to your own ears, small but a little bit more poised now, like glass that hasn’t shattered but still remembers the impact. “I've seen the news, and the headlines. All the stories about you.”

The words suspend themselves in the space between you.

Bucky takes a moment to answer. His gaze drifts downward, just briefly, as if the floor might offer him something easier to look at than the defenselessness sitting in your eyes. The vulnerable questions there. When he exhales it is long and tired, and it sounds like all the versions of himself he has spent years outrunning are catching up to him anyway.

“Yeah,” he mutters out breathily. But a little flat. There is no denial in it or some sort of excuse. He drags a hand across the back of his neck, his jaw flexing slightly before he speaks again. “I figured you probably had.” He takes a shivering breath, his whole chest lifting. “They’re not all lies.”

You hold your breath, but don’t step back, don’t let fear take its seat at the forefront of your mind again.

He lifts his eyes back to yours then, and the seriousness in them deepens, intensifying into something resolute.

“I’m not gonna stand here and tell you I’m a good man,” he says. The words come slowly, and his eyes are searching yours while he talks. He is placing them carefully like he’s building something honest out of wreckage. “I’m not.”

Your heart stumbles in your chest, but you still keep your feet grounded and meet his eyes.

“I’ve done things I’m not proud of. Things most people wouldn’t forgive if they knew the full story.” His voice lowers slightly. His eyes are full of sorrow. Despite the things he’s saying he unexpectedly doesn’t look threatening at all and it makes something startle abruptly in your chest. “And yeah, I’ll probably keep doing some of those things.” He doesn’t force anything into his tone that maybe should be there. He´s not saying those things with pride or arrogance or even threat. He has just accepted the callous contours that make his life the way it is. “But not for the reasons people think.”

His eyes soften then, slightly. And it makes you realize that they’ve actually been soft all along.

“I do what I do because there are people in this world who deserve protection. People who don’t have the power to protect themselves.” His gaze holds yours a little more firmly now. “And sometimes the only way to keep those people safe is to be the guy willing to do the ugly work.”

Your throat tightens.

“I’d do just about anything to protect you, Y/n. Even if it’s me you want protection from.”

The kitchen feels very still.

You don’t know what to say to that. You’re not even sure there is something to say. The statement isn’t a justification so much as a window, and looking through it leaves you with more thoughts to sort through and you’ve already gone through so many. But you hear him. You really do.

And he seems to notice that you’re listening now—maybe not agreeing, not forgiving, but truly listening, hearing him out—and some small measure of relief loosens the tension in his shoulders.

He doesn’t move a single muscle, standing before you like a brick wall, his legs pinned wide on the kitchen tiles, his frame perfectly still except for the anxious heave of his chest. His arms are hanging at his side, and shit, your gaze just has to focus on that bloody trail on his forearm. Because right, you’ve cut James Buchanan Barnes through his expensive suit enough to make him bleed. The redness runs from his wrist to his knuckles and you see some dots on the floor. The fabric of his suit is soaking it up, turning a dark wet black around the tear.

He still doesn’t glance down at it. He’s still so entirely anchored to your face, his broad shoulders squared as if he’s trying to shield you from the very room he owns. The survival instinct that had you clawing at the air drops away and now there is a sudden freezing emptiness in your head. And in that blank space, something takes place.

You look at the knife on the linoleum, then at the wet red tracking down his arm, and your stomach completely plummets through the ground. The panic you felt earlier didn’t protect you, it turned you clumsy and ignorant.

“Oh, no,” you choke out, gaze fixed on his arm, your words hacking up from your chest miserably. “Bucky, I— Your arm, I— I didn’t mean— This is my fault, I swear I didn’t mean to—”

“Hey,” he cuts in, his voice lowering into a rough, immediate hush that clips the words right out of your mouth. “Hey, no, sweetheart. No.” He steps back into your space and his huge palms come up, traveling slowly until they map themselves carefully across your jawline.

His fingers are trembling and the pressure is incredibly light. His skin is warm, smelling of that same familiar soap from upstairs, and his thumbs softly brush the wet tear tracks off your cheekbones, forcing you to look straight into his eyes. He doesn’t even spare a glance at his forearm.

“You don’t ever apologize to me for that,” he whispers hoarsely, his chest hitching against yours as he tries to get his breathing normal. There is so much regret in his voice, it is too much for your heart to handle. “You were scared out of your mind and I did that to you. That?” He tilts his arm toward you, indicating that he is talking about the cut. “That is nothing, sweetheart. Nothing.” The corner of his mouth lifts faintly, but the expression is gentler and definitely much more somber than humorous. “I’ve taken hits that should’ve put me in the ground, and none of them touched me.”

You shake your head in his palms. “But, I—”

“Doll,” he shushes, his arms keeping your chin locked, but not firm at all. His gaze is drilling into yours and it feels like he’s bleeding more from the inside and not the outside. “That little scratch hurts a hell of a lot less than watching you run from me.”

Your hands slowly stop trying to find leverage against his chest. The heat of his palms against your jaw feels like a grounding force, something so familiar but also completely new. It’s not entirely unpleasant in its newness.

You look up into his eyes, seeing the complete lack of the monster he just unleashed on his guards, and you can’t help but feel a little unmoored.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now,” you admit breathily, your voice cracking as your forehead drops forward to rest against his tie.

Bucky lets out a long, ragged exhale, his chin resting against the top of your head as his arms wrap around your shoulders, pulling you into a hold that feels firm but unforced.

“You don’t have to figure it out right now, darling,” he eases, his words spoken with a splintered scrape into your hair. “You don’t have to decide anything today, or tomorrow, or next week. Take all the time you need. Turn it over in your head. Think about everything you saw, everything I am. And whatever you choose to do—if you want to pack your bags, and disappear, if you never want to see my face again—I will let you go. I will make sure you are safe, and I will support whatever choice you make. I swear it.”

He pulls back just an inch, his thumbs gently guiding your face up again so he can look straight into your eyes. There is something desperately begging in his stare, but he keeps his posture completely still, refusing to pressure you.

“But please.“ His knuckles tremble slightly against your cheek. “Just stay the night. Don't run out now while this is all still so new. Stay until morning. As soon as the sun’s up, the car is yours,” he promises sorrowfully, his thumbs catching the last of the dampness on your cheek. “If you want to leave, you leave. You can walk out of here and never look back, and I won’t follow you. I won’t look for you. If that’s what it takes to make you feel safe, I’ll let you go.”

He stops, his jaw clamping tight for a second, a sharp, jumbled hitch in his ribs breaking his breathing.

“But god, I hope you don't,” he shoves the words past the tightness in his throat, his eyes wide and burning into yours so achingly. “I will spend every single day of my life doing whatever it takes to fix this. I’ll earn back an inch of your trust at a time. I’ll show you the rest of me—the real parts—if you just give me the chance to try. I want you to love me again. I want that more than anything.”

He hitches his weight just a fraction closer, his large hands still framing your jaw with agonizingly slow caution.

“But just stay this single night,” he pleads with a strain in his voice, his forehead dropping down to rest lightly against yours. “Just stay until morning. Let me get you out of this kitchen, and you can just sleep. That’s all. Just tonight.”

You stare at the dark red crusting on his wool cuff, then look into that heavy, broken-down look in his eyes. Trying to picture next week or even tomorrow feels like watching a knotted ball of wire and not finding out where to start untying it.

But right now, your muscles are just running on empty, completely flattened and powerless from feeling all that panic. You let out one long shudder of air, asking your awareness for any reasons why you should still try to get the hell away from this guy, and come up with nothing yet. It’s all too fresh to truly give this some thought and right now all you want to do is curl up in those silky sheets and sleep it all off.

You give him a small nod. “Okay. Okay, Bucky, I’ll stay the night.”

Bucky’s shoulders drop with a massive, rattling relief. He doesn't say anything else, he just tucks your head back under his chin, his big arms closing around you to carry your weight out of the quiet kitchen, leaving the knife and the blood behind on the floorboards.

You don’t know what comes when the sun is up. You don’t know what loving a man like him means. You don’t know if the life he lives can ever exist beside the life you thought you wanted.

You don’t know if trust can grow again from the cracked ground beneath your feet, and considering your decision making skills, you shouldn’t let your heart handle things anymore.

But, frighteningly and also not all that much surprisingly after all, when you imagine leaving now—truly leaving, turning your back on him and walking out of this mansion forever—the image doesn’t bring relief.

It brings something bleak.

Because for all the discoveries of tonight and all that fear, all that shock, and the trust that has been abruptly broken, there is a bullheaded part of you that understands something you can’t yet put into words for him to hear.

You could run from this house.

You could run from his name.

But you are not sure you could run from him.

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple”

- Oscar Wilde

A/n: Looking at the word count now, I honestly probably could’ve turned this into a mini series but because this whole thing is essentially one long scene, splitting it up even more just didn’t feel right to me. So I guess I just have to admit that this became an unexpectedly long two-parter lmao.

As always, I would absolutely love to hear your thoughts on this continuation, if it gave you hope, or even if you expected something different to happen. I always enjoy hearing your interpretations and feelings after reading ♡

I also wanted to gently address something else. I’ve received a few critical comments regarding certain reactions, choices, and dynamics in the story, and I truly hope this second part helped answer some questions or at least offered a little more perspective. If it didn’t, that’s completely okay too.

What I want you to know, I genuinely do appreciate helpful criticism, especially when it comes to my writing itself, because I’m always trying to improve and become better at what I do. Constructive feedback that gives me something to work with is always welcome and appreciated. But if something in the story simply wasn’t for you, or you personally disliked a choice I made, then sometimes it’s okay to just move on from it instead of tearing it apart. And if you do choose to criticize something, I just ask that you do it kindly. We’re still a community here, and there’s no reason to be harsh or blunt. Talk to me like a human being.

I put a lot of time, emotion, and effort into these stories, not to be told this makes no sense or this is weird without any real conversation behind it. Sometimes I don’t think through every single detail deeply because at the end of the day, this is still fiction born from messy little ideas in my head, written for comfort, entertainment, and emotion—not perfection!

Still, thank you to everyone who continues to boost me and my work and helped me stay motivated to finish this part ♡

The city glittered beneath the pale wash of dawn, all wet neon and mirrored towers, the streets still slick from the night’s rain. From the upper floors, the Lowtown alleys looked pretty if you didn't know what moved through them after dark. If you did not know how easily money changed hands there. How quickly a body disappeared. How many men in clean linen suits had started the night laughing over drinks and ended it folded neatly into car trunks.

It was six-fifteen in the morning. You were already dressed. 

No one ever saw the manager of the Madripoor Continental looking hurried. Your hair was already pinned back, blazer pressed, and lipstick perfectly clean. You checked the mirror once and made sure there was nothing human enough in your expression to be mistaken for weakness.

You picked up the phone and dialed the 505 number. The line only clicked once.

“Good morning, Talia,” you said. “Prepare the staff for briefing, please.”

“Yes, ma’am,” she said.

Then you went downstairs.

The lobby was almost immaculate, perfumed with orchids, sandalwood, and gun oil. Your night staff had done well. There were no bloodstains in the grout. No broken glass beneath the lounge chairs. No bullet casings tucked beneath velvet curtains by some careless little amateur with more ego than discipline.

The bodies dumped in your back lot had been removed by sunrise. While a pain to your staff, it was technically outside your hotel, so it was fine.

Still, you noticed the imperfections. The marble near the centerpiece table was two days late for a polish. The vase nearest the wall had been shifted four inches to the left. Someone had been rushed. Not sloppy, but rushed.

You paused beside the vase.

The junior concierge at the desk froze.

“Have Housekeeping redo this section before nine,” you said, then looked at a trail of blood to the elevator. “And call a doctor for Mr. Keo. No one is bleeding to death in my hotel.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

You continued walking.

The morning briefing took place in the staff room below the main kitchens, behind a steel door disguised as a wine cellar wall. You took your seat at the head of the table and opened the leather folder in front of you. Inside were reports from the night before. Names, arrivals, departures, debts, a missing bellman who disappeared outside work hours, and one dead guest off property. Three requests for private dining from people who should not be in the same country, let alone the same hotel, all of which you planned to reject.

You read in silence.

Then, you saw an official notice: 

James Buchanan Barnes killed his marker on Moscow Continental grounds. The High Table declares him excommunicado. Bounty: $17 million. 

By the time you looked up, all you said was, “Be on high alert.”

You watched it pass from face to face as your staff adjusted themselves. They knew what this would entail: Security would double rotations, housekeeping would check vents, adjoining walls, hidden panels, laundry shafts, kitchens would inspect all incoming deliveries twice, valet would log every vehicle by chassis number, not just registration, and the front desk would let you know of every guest checking in, whether they were only staying for one night or three. 

“Any guest arriving from Russia is to wait in the east reception room,” you continued. “No exceptions. No direct access to the elevators. No private stairwell keys. No unscheduled service calls above the twentieth floor.”

Your head of security, Talia, looked at her tablet. “And if they object?”

“They may object outside.”

You closed the folder.

“We have received confirmation of instability in Moscow,” you said. “Until the situation clarifies, assume everyone is a person of interest.”

You stood.

“Double the roof watch. Triple the canal-side cameras. No personal calls on shift. No staff exits alone. If a guest dies on the doorstep, remove them before breakfast service.” You glanced toward Disposal. “Properly this time.”

One of the men bowed his head.

You left them with that.

By eight, the hotel had fully awakened.

A woman in a pearl-grey suit checked in under a name that had belonged to a dead French countess. A pair of twins from Singapore requested separate rooms on separate floors and then tipped the bellman extra to tell each other nothing. A Brazilian with bandaged fingers asked whether the hotel still stocked Cachaça. 

At ten, you denied a request for sanctuary from a man who was trying to escape his marker.

At eleven, you approved a private negotiation between two contract brokers and had the walls swept for explosives before allowing the tea service in.

At noon, you sent a handwritten apology to a guest whose sheets had bloodstains from the previous occupant. 

At one, you had lunch in your office while reading a list of fresh bounties.

The office was quiet, high above the lobby, with dark wood shelves and a wall of glass overlooking the harbour. Ships moved slowly through the water beyond the city, their decks bright with sun, their cargo likely legal on paper and unforgivable in practice.

Your assistant placed a silver tray on the desk. “Anything else, ma’am?”

You turned a page. “Find out who booked the blue suite under the Cairo account.”

Your assistant made a note.

You took one bite of lunch, decided you hated it, and kept reading.

By mid-afternoon, a pianist had started playing Bach in the lounge. 

After that, you spent an hour with Accounts reviewing coin movement through the lower vault. Madripoor attracted a particular kind of wealth: untraceable money. You approved three conversions, denied four, and marked one for investigation after noticing a pattern.

After that came Medical.

The doctor on rotation reported two treated stab wounds, one poisoning, and a guest who insisted the bullet in his shoulder was sentimental and should be returned to him after extraction.

“Was it?” you asked.

The doctor blinked. “Sentimental?”

“Clean.” You corrected. 

“Yes.”

“Return it.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

By five, you had changed your shoes.

By six, you had fired a kitchen porter for accepting an illegal envelope from a guest.

You had him escorted out through the west entrance with one month’s severance, a black mark on his file, and the very clear understanding that if he ever crossed the threshold again, it would be as cargo.

By seven-thirty, a contract killer you recognised from your stay in the Jakarta Continental two months ago stepped through the front doors with three men behind him who looked as though they had followed him in for the sole purpose of finishing what they had started outside.

“Madam Manager,” one of them said.

You didn’t look at him first.

You stopped in front of the men behind him, eyes drifting over the tension in their shoulders, the hands hovering too close to their coats. “Are we in a disagreement, gentlemen?”

“We were,” one of them said.

“How lovely,” you said. “And may I remind you of the rules of the Continental before anyone makes a career-ending decision?” you said, voice still pleasant, “or would one of you prefer to be excommunicado before dinner?”

For one long second, nobody moved.

Then, one by one, the men lowered their guns.

You smiled faintly. “Good choice.”

Only then did your gaze return to the man. It dropped to the dark stain spreading beneath his cuff.

“Though you are bleeding,” you said. “I hope that happened outside.”

His smile tightened. “Of course.”

By nine, you stood in the private observation room behind the bar and watched the hotel breathe.

Everything was functioning.

At ten-thirty, you made your final rounds.

The kitchens first. Then the lower corridors, where staff moved in pairs as instructed. Then the armoury, where every house weapon was sealed, catalogued, and monitored.

Near midnight, you returned to the lobby.

The concierge straightened. “All quiet, ma’am.”

You looked around and gave him a look.

He corrected himself immediately. “All contained, ma’am.”

“Better.”

You signed the night ledger at the front desk, approved two wake-up calls, denied a request for a helicopter before sunrise, and reminded Security that no guest was to be granted access to the roof without your direct authorization.

Then, finally, you took the private lift up.

The ascent was silent, your reflection staring back at you from the mirrored doors. The lift opened into the private corridor outside your quarters.

Unlike the rest of the hotel, this floor didn’t perform for strangers. It was quieter, darker, lined with old wood and soft lamps. Your staff never came here unless summoned. Your guests did not know the floor existed. 

You unlocked your door and stepped inside.

The room was dark except for the thin silver spill of moonlight through the balcony windows. You closed the door behind you with a click.

For one moment, you simply stood there, listening to a slow breath that wasn’t yours.

You set your keys in the porcelain dish, removed your gloves finger by finger, and looked toward the shadows near the balcony.

“I know you’re in here, James.”

For a moment, the room did not answer you.

Madripoor glittered beyond the balcony glass, pink and blue and poisonous, reflected in the dark windows of your sitting room. 

Then the shadow by the balcony shifted and Bucky fucking Barnes stepped into the moonlight.

He looked worse than you had expected.

You hated that that was what irritated you. Not the intrusion, not the breach of your private room. Not the fact that a damned man had somehow climbed into the manager’s quarters of the Madripoor Continental without triggering a single alarm.

Blood soaked into the left side of his shirt, dark and spreading, hidden badly beneath a torn grey jacket. There was more at his temple, drying in his hairline. His lower lip was split, and there was a tear on his sleeve near his metal arm. “Hi,” he said.

Your stare flattened. “What are you up to now?”

His mouth twitched into an almost-smile, and that annoyed you, too. 

“You changed the locks,” he said, almost relieved that you did.

“You bypassed them.”

“Eventually.”

You walked across the room slowly, not because you were afraid of him, but because every step gave you time to decide which version of yourself would reach him first. The manager or the old you, who used to wake up next to him. The you who used to stand behind him in the kitchen while he made toast for breakfast. The you who used to climb on his lap after a long day as he peppered kisses on your collarbone, both metal and human hands cheekily sliding under your shirt.

Your train of thought halted when blood dripped from his sleeve. Your eyes followed it to the floor.

“Sorry,” he said, huffing the smallest laugh, then winced.

You stopped a few feet away from him, close enough to smell rain, gunpowder, and copper on his coat. 

“Why are you here?” You asked. 

He looked at you, but not in the way guests looked at you. Not the way assassins did, searching for weakness or leverage. Bucky looked at you as if he remembered the old version of you. 

“Because I missed you,” he said simply.

Your heart did a stupid, treacherous little twist beneath your ribs, but you let none of it show.

“Try again,” you said, folding your arms.

He laughed like it hurt. His head tipped back against the wall for a second, eyes closing. 

“You always do that,” he murmured.

“What? Make you tell the truth?”

“No,” His eyes opened again, still blue in the most inconvenient way. “Assume the worst in people.”

“Well,” you sighed, taking your blazer off and putting it on an armchair, “You are excommunicado as of twenty hours ago.”

Twenty hours as prey. Twenty hours with every door in the underworld shutting in his face. Twenty hours for news to spread through the old lines and black markets and coded ledgers. Twenty hours for men with debts and grudges and ambitious sons to begin sharpening their knives and counting their bullets.

And he had come here, to you.

“You shouldn’t have crossed my threshold,” you said.

“I know.”

“You shouldn’t have entered this hotel.”

“I know.”

“You shouldn’t be standing in my private quarters, bleeding on my floor after I spent the entire day warning my staff to watch for exactly this kind of stupidity.”

His mouth curved up again, faint and guilty. “Missed your voice too, sweets.”

“James.”

He froze then.

There it was, finally. A man who knew when a line had appeared.

You stepped closer. “I should turn you in.”

His face changed, but only slightly. Anyone else would have missed the tiny tightening around the eyes and small shift in his throat. 

“You know what happens to this hotel if I don’t?” You continued. 

His eyes held yours as he nodded. “Yes.”

“No, I don’t think you do.” Your voice was low now. “This is not sentiment. This is not a favour between old lovers. This is the Continental and I am Management now.”

“I know what it is,” he winced.

“You know the rules,” you scolded, “That’s not the same thing as knowing the cost.”

His eyes dropped for half a second. 

You understood better than most what excommunicado really meant.

The closest thing you had ever had to a brother after being raised by the Ruska Roma together had spent the final years of his life beneath that sentence. He had killed more men than most people could name. He had survived what should have ended him a dozen times over.

But survival was not the same as escape.

In the end, like nearly everyone the Table marked excommunicado, he died.

Yes, John Wick died on his own terms, but he had died nonetheless. 

Bucky knew that.

He had to know what it had done to you— the grief, the rage, the way it had hollowed you out when the only person you had ever truly considered family died. He had seen the aftermath, heard the rants. 

In fact, that’s why you and him didn’t quite work out. Not because you stopped loving him, but because loving anyone after that felt like standing beside another grave before it had even been dug.

And now here he was, wearing the same sentence. Walking toward the same fate.

“If I shelter you,” you breathed in, “the High Table won’t send a polite letter. They won’t issue a warning and wait for my response. They’ll strip this hotel of consecration. They freeze every account tied to my name.”

He looked down and you thought, good.

Let him understand that this wasn’t just the two of you in a dark room pretending the rules could be kept outside.

“And it won’t stop with me. My staff will pay for it. The concierge who didn’t see you. The guard whose camera feed failed. The housekeeper who was supposed to be by the service door downstairs. The cook who sent up my dinner. Anyone who can be made into an example will be made into one.”

You could see it now, the part of him that understood collateral. That understood orders from the top. That understood exactly what institutions did when they wanted obedience restored.

“You think I’m protecting myself?” you asked. “I am protecting hundreds of people who live because I keep this place neutral. I am protecting a structure that prevents every animal in Madripoor from tearing one another apart in my lobby. I am protecting rules that only work because consequences are absolute.”

“I didn’t come to make you choose,” he said.

You laughed once. “You climbed into my bedroom excommunicado. What exactly did you think that was?”

His eyebrows furrowed. “I thought—”

He stopped when a helicopter passed over the harbour, its light briefly sliding across the balcony doors. 

“I thought I could see you before I disappeared,” he said.

Oh.

Oh, Bucky.

For a second, all the frustration inside you dissipated.

It didn’t go away. It was still there, hiding beneath your ribs, because he had no right to come here like this. No right to drag a death sentence through your balcony doors. No right to stand in your private quarters bleeding on your floor.

But the words pulled back a version of you that hadn’t had the chance to resurface in years. 

So now, as you looked at him, studying the blood spreading through his shirt, the rain in his hair, and all you could feel was fondness. 

You exhaled and stepped closer.

He watched you come near, as if he knew one wrong move might make you remember the alarm under the side table. His eyes followed your hands first. Then your face. Then the floor between you, where a drop of blood had fallen dark against one of your rugs.

You could see that the wound was worse up close.

“Sit,” you said.

His brow twitched. “I’m okay.”

“You are bleeding through wool and onto eighteenth-century floors.”

He looked down, as if noticing the blood for the first time.

“Wouldn’t want to damage the floors,” he murmured.

“No,” you said, taking his arm. “You wouldn’t. They’re older than some dynasties and significantly less replaceable than your pride.”

He let you guide him to the sofa, and that alone told you enough. 

Bucky doesn’t let people guide him unless he needs it. He lowered himself down, metal hand gripping the armrest, human one hovering uselessly near his side as if he could keep his blood inside by will alone.

You knelt in front of him before you had time to reconsider the intimacy of it.

“You keep saying that like it helps.”

“It used to.”

“No,” you said, pointing to the sofa. “It used to work because I liked you.”

The medical kit was hidden behind the locked lower panel side cabinet. Technically, it wasn’t in the official hotel kit. Technically, it didn't even appear on Continental inventory. This one belonged to you. 

You set it on the table beside him and opened it.

“Can’t call the doctors,” you said. “So, unfortunately, all you have is me.”

“Unfortunately?” He chuckled. 

When you looked up, his human hand had already lifted. He was reaching the way he used to when you were angry and he was trying to see whether the anger had a door in it.

His fingers brushed your cheek, as he cradled you there, feeling the warmth of your skin as if it was the last living hearth in the world. 

You should’ve moved away. You didn’t.

His palm settled against your face, gentle despite the blood on him. It was such an absurdly tender touch for the situation that for once, you struggled to find your voice.

His thumb moved once near your cheekbone. “You’re all I ever wanted,” he whispered. 

Your throat tightened.

You turned your face just enough that his hand slipped away. “Don’t say things like that when you’re actively bleeding.”

His mouth curved up, barely. “Fair.”

“It’s manipulative,” you said, though you knew it was an unfair assessment.

He shook his head. “Wasn’t trying to be.”

That was the problem. You knew.

You cut through the ruined fabric of his shirt with medical shears. The scissors slid through wet fabric, exposing the wound beneath: an ugly bullet tear along his side, deep enough to need work, bloody enough to explain the gray cast beneath his skin. Good news, though, it wasn’t immediately fatal. 

You pressed gauze to it as he hissed through his teeth.

“Still okay?” you asked.

His eyes closed. “Less okay.”

“Wonderful,” you chimed through gritted teeth, “really has entered the room.”

His breath almost became a laugh, but the movement hurt him. 

The closeness you felt now was unbearable in the most practical way. You had touched him before. Of course you had. But this was different.

This was not a safehouse with bad lighting. This was not the aftermath of a job. This was your hotel, which was supposed to refuse service to him.

And yet, your hands were still on him.

You cleaned the wound in silence for a while.

Bucky let you work. He didn’t fidget or argue. He didn’t even perform toughness beyond the occasional shallow breath and the faint clench of his teeth. He just sat there and trusted you.

When the bleeding slowed enough for stitches, you threaded the needle.

“So,” you said, because silence had become too dangerous. “Why did you kill the person who bears your marker?”

His eyes opened.

For a second, you thought he might deflect. He had always been good at that, in his own blunt way. 

This time, he looked too tired to bother.

“He wanted me to kill a kid to get to an enemy.”

Bucky looked toward the balcony windows, his face reflected faintly in the dark glass. For a moment, with the city lights bleeding over his features, he looked like a ghost of himself as the needle went through skin. 

“How old?”

“Twelve.”

Twelve.

You had heard worse things in your office before breakfast. You were not naive. Your world didn’t protect children simply because they were children. You once had a similar fate, being trafficked into this life. 

Still.

Twelve.

You looked back down at the wound because his face would have made you feel too much.

You pulled the thread through. Bucky’s hand flexed against his thigh, metal fingers opening and closing once.

“He said if I wouldn’t honor the marker, they’d just kill me and get someone else to do it. Said maybe they’d take longer.”

Your eyes closed briefly.

Of course that was what had happened. Of course Bucky Barnes had stood in a place where rules were supposed to be sacred and refused to do a job he had to do. Of course he had decided, in that self-destructive way of his, that the life of a child weighed more than his own future.

Of course he had damned himself for it.

“Always so noble,” you said under your breath.

He looked at you. “Wasn’t noble.”

“No?”

“No.” His voice was rough. “I was angry.”

You glanced up at him, nodding once and continuing the stitch.

“That, I believe.”

His mouth twitched faintly.

Silence settled for a while after that, but it was far from empty. It was crowded with all the things neither of you had said yet. With old arguments, old grief, old rooms. Your back against his chest in the back of a car at four in the morning. His teeth biting the lobe of your ear. His hand around yours under a table.

You tied off one stitch and started another.

“You should have gone to New York,” you said finally. “Winston, maybe. Even The Bowery, if you’re desperate. They have… experience with the situation.”

Bucky gave a breath that might have read as amusement if he had more blood to spare.

“The Bowery King would kill me for half the bounty,” he said, “he never liked me.”

“Hmm, because you’re very likable, Buck,” you shrugged, sarcastic. “And Winston?” 

This time, he took longer to answer. When he did, his voice was quieter. “Winston would tell me to come to you.”

Your hands froze again.

The bastard was probably right.

Winston, with his polished shoes, would have known exactly where to send a man like him. Not because it was safe. Not because it was wise. Because Winston understood human weakness better than most. He would know there was one door in Madripoor that might open for Bucky, even if the woman behind it hated herself for turning the lock.

You resumed stitching with more care than you wanted him to notice.

After the last one went in, you covered the wound with gauze and taped it down, smoothing the edges with your fingertips. Your hand lingered half a second too long at his side, resting over the bandage, feeling the warmth of him beneath it.

Bucky’s breath shifted.

Your eyes rose.

You realised now, that he had come here because he believed you might save him. Or because he believed you would kill him kindly. You were not sure which was more unbearable.

You pulled your hand away.

You gathered the ruined gauze and bloodied scissors, needing something to do with your hands before they betrayed you. At the sink, you peeled off your gloves and washed them beneath cold water. Spirals of red ribboned down porcelain, thinning and thinning until the drain swallowed it.

Behind you, the sofa creaked softly as he shifted.

“Are you gonna turn me in?” he asked.

For a moment, you didn’t answer.

You dried your hands slowly, folded the towel once, and set it down beside the sink. Then you stopped by the bar cart near the window. The bottle was already open from some night you had poured a glass and forgotten to drink it. Red wine, dark as his blood.

You took a glass from the shelf, watching the glass fill halfway and wondered, briefly, how many disasters in your life had begun with beautiful men bleeding in beautiful rooms.

You lifted the glass, turned back toward him, and finally met his eyes.

He looked pale on your sofa. 

You took one sip, “I haven’t decided yet.”

—

You spent the next hour making sure he wasn’t dying anymore.

Every five minutes, you checked his temperature. His pulse and pupils. You checked his bandage and stitches. You made sure he was breathing, looking out for any sign of fever or shock. 

“I’m fine,” he said.

“You were shot and are currently committing several violations of High Table rules by breathing on my sofa.”

His mouth twitched. “Oh yeah?”

“At least four.”

“Name them.”

“You brought business to two hotels now. You killed the person who holds your marker. You bypassed my security.” You pressed the thermometer under his tongue with more force than necessary. “And you are annoying me.”

His eyes warmed above it.

You hated that look. Yet, you’d missed it too.

The clean shirt you had given him hung open because you kept needing to inspect the bandage. That was your excuse, anyway. It was a good excuse. Practical and professional, but ruined by the fact that every time your fingers brushed his ribs, his breathing changed.

You knew him, so you knew the difference between pain and restraint. Knew the exact line of his veins when he wanted to touch you and was trying very hard to be respectful about it.

He was doing it now and that almost made you smile.

He knew you too well, too.

Every time you pressed the back of your hand to his forehead, his eyes softened. Every time you checked the dressing, his breath caught for reasons that were not entirely medical. Every time you scowled at him, he looked a little less like a doomed man and a little more like the one who used to make you forget the world you lived in.

It was unfair, really, that he could still sit there with a death sentence and make your chest ache with a half-smile.

You took the thermometer from his mouth and checked the reading.

“No fever.”

“See?” He said. “I’m not septic.”

“Not yet.”

“That’s comforting.”

“I’m not here to comfort you.”

“No?” His eyes flicked over your face. “Could’ve fooled me.”

You looked at him with half a scowl. He huffed a laugh, then winced.

Your hand shot to his shoulder, steadying him. “Don’t laugh.”

His skin was warm beneath your fingers. His metal hand rested on his thigh, but his human one was relaxed against the cushion, close enough to your hip that if he moved an inch, he would touch you.

You pulled your hand back and turned abruptly to the bar cart.

The bottle of red still sat open near the crystal glasses, and you poured yourself another glass.

“Can I have some?” Bucky tilted his head.

You turned with the glass halfway to your mouth. “You’re injured.”

“It was just a graze.”

“James.”

“What? This might be my last day alive,” he said, almost a huff, “just trying to enjoy the small things.”

You threw him a bottle of spring water. Mind you, it cost more than most beers. “Enjoy this.”

He caught it with his metal arm, not at all caught off guard. “Feels punitive.” Still, he twisted off the cap and drank half of it anyway.

“It is.”

He chuckled, and it almost reminded you of your Bucky as you remembered him to be, if you allowed yourself the indulgence. The man who used to steal bites off your plate and pretend he hadn’t. The man who knew where you hid spare knives. The man who once spent three hours bleeding in a Prague bathtub while you threatened to drown him if he passed out.

“You used to share,” he said.

“You used to knock.”

“I used to have a key.”

You took a sip of your wine again, and this time his eyes moved to your mouth. “You lost that privilege a long time ago.”

“I lost a lot of things.”

Oh, this is where we were going now?

Not Moscow or the bounty curling around his name like smoke under a locked door. No, he wanted to take you somewhere older. 

You could feel it in the air, in the way your fingers tightened around the stem of your wine glass. Whatever had lived between you had never died properly. It hadn’t been buried or burned. It had simply been locked in a room you both stopped visiting.

And now he was bleeding on your sofa, holding the key in his teeth.

You set the glass down. “You didn’t lose me,” you said before you could stop yourself. “I left.”

Bucky looked at you, and the faintest flicker of pain moved behind his eyes.

“I…” He breathed out, eyes dropping for a second. “I’m sorry anyway.”

Your hands clenched, then opened, then clenched again, like your body could not decide whether it wanted to let go or hold on. “No,” you said. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”

“I am.”

“Don’t.”

You came closer before you could think better of it, before you could stay safely across the room. You sat on the coffee table in front of him, close enough that your knees almost touched his. Close enough to see the dampness at his hairline and the way exhaustion had hollowed him out and left only honesty behind.

“I’m sorry I let you push me away,” he said.

His voice was quiet, but it landed hard.

You looked away immediately, as if refusing his eyes could save you from him. “You didn’t let me do anything.”

“I did.” His hand moved over yours carefully. 

You could have pulled away. You should have. Instead, you sat there with your heartbeat hammering beneath your ribs while his worn and calloused human fingers covered your own. 

“I told myself you needed space,” he said. “I told myself if I loved you, I’d let you grieve however you had to.”

“You were right.”

“No.” The word was almost nothing but a breath and a break. “I was scared I’d make it worse,” he admitted. “You were grieving, and I knew what it looked like when someone kept reaching after you’d already gone under. So I stopped reaching.”

Your throat tightened so sharply it hurt. “James.”

His thumb moved once over your knuckles, so endearingly gentle. “But I should’ve tried harder.”

“No.”

“But I should’ve.” His voice cracked. “I should’ve knocked on every door you shut. I should’ve called until you screamed at me. I should’ve let you resent me for staying, because at least then you wouldn’t have been on your own.”

You choked on your own breath, and the wine had nothing to do with the flush on your cheeks. 

“I’m sorry I let you be alone after John died,” he said finally.

Fuck.

Your face didn’t collapse. You didn’t sob, even when the room started blurring at the edges, and your lungs tightened like sorrow had reached up through the years and closed a fist around them.

“I made myself alone,” you said, but the words came out thin.

“And what did I do?” Bucky’s hand tightened over yours. “Fucking nothing.”

You hated him for saying it as he saw it. His eyes stayed on your face, tired and blue and unbearable.

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“Stop.”

“I’m sorry for tonight.”

“Stop.”

“I’m sorry I’m making you choose between the High Table and me.”

“James.”

“I’m sorry I still want you to choose me.”

“Please—”

“I’m sorry I brought this to your door. I’m sorry—”

You moved before he could finish.

Before he could make a martyr of himself in your living room. Before he could say sorry one more time and carve it straight into your bones. Before those blue eyes could make you forgive him for bleeding, for leaving, for coming back, for still being the one person who knew exactly how to break you.

You took his face in both hands and kissed him.

For only one second, Bucky went completely still beneath you.

Then he kissed you back.

His mouth opened against yours with a broken sound, his hand lifting to your waist and stopping there, trembling, like even now he was afraid of wanting too much. You felt the heat of him under your palms, the scrape of stubble against your fingers, the split in his lip brushing yours when he tilted his head and deepened it.

It was supposed to be a simple gesture to stop him from talking. But then his tongue touched your lips, slow and desperate, and your whole body remembered who he was.

You pulled back abruptly. “Fuck— I can’t.”

Bucky followed you, his mouth chasing yours on instinct. He hadn’t meant to do it, and couldn’t stop himself in time. His eyes opened when you moved back, lips parted, breathing unsteady.

“No?” he asked, voice hoarse.

You swallowed hard. “You know we can’t.”

“Why?” The question came out raw. 

You looked at him, at the blood under the bandage and the exhaustion dragging him down. “Because you’re hurt,” you said.

“I know.”

“You’re bleeding.”

“Not as much now.”

“Bucky,” you sighed, though you didn’t often use his nickname. “You lost blood and came here thinking you were going to die.” Your voice tightened. “I’m not taking advantage of you because you’re terrified and half-conscious and saying things you might not say if you weren’t—”

“I’d say them.”

Bucky’s eyes held yours, clearer now. 

You looked away as he leaned forward a little, then stopped when it pulled at his wound. His jaw twitched, but his eyes never left you.

“I know what I’m asking for,” he said.

“You don’t.”

“I do.”

“You’re not thinking clearly.”

“Sweetheart.” His voice broke on it. “I haven’t thought about anything clearly since I walked in here and saw you.”

That didn’t help. It made everything worse.

You dragged a hand over your mouth. “That’s exactly my point.”

“No.” Bucky shifted carefully, one hand braced near his wound, the other open on the cushion next to him. “I’m not asking because I’m hurt. I’m not asking because I’m scared.”

“You are scared.”

“Yeah.” He chuckled, but there was no humor in it. “I’m fucking terrified.”

You shook your head, but he kept going.

“But I wanted you before tonight,” he said. “I wanted you when you left. I wanted you every day I was stupid enough to stay gone. Fuck, sweets, trust me when I sat it isn’t the bullet talking.”

Your heartbeat hammered beneath your skin.

He looked down at your mouth again, and the hunger there was almost enough to make your knees weaken. Then he dragged his eyes back to your eyes with visible effort.

“If you don’t want this, say it,” he said. “Say you don’t want me, and I’ll stop asking.”

You said nothing, because that was the one lie you could not force out.

His voice only dropped lower. “Please.”

Your throat tightened. “James.”

“Please kiss me again.”

You closed your eyes.

The sound of him begging you should have felt like victory. Instead, it felt like standing on the edge of a cliff with a burning forest on the other side. 

Fuck. Fuck! 

You sighed, bridging the space between you slowly this time, his knees bracketed yours. His breath changed, but he didn’t touch you.

You lifted a hand to his jaw and his lashes dipped.

“Like this?” you whispered before kissing him softly.

You simply pressed your mouth to his. You were gentle enough to test the waters, slow enough to feel the shudder that went through him.

Bucky exhaled against your lips. “Mmhmm.”

You kissed him again, a little deeper, your thumb brushing over his cheekbone while his metal finally rose to your thighs. “Like this?”

His fingers tightened.

“Yeah,” he breathed. “Yeah, like that.”

You tilted his face and kissed him properly, mouth opening over his, tongue sliding against his lower lip.

Bucky made a low sound in his chest.

You pulled back half an inch. “Like that?”

His eyes opened, blown dark. “Fuck,” he rasped.

You kissed him again, harder this time, and felt his restraint fracture beneath your hands.

“Yeah,” he breathed against your mouth. 

You nipped lightly at his lip, and his human hand flexed at your waist.

“Fuck…” he gasped, “yeah... like that.”

That was all it took.

The words left him rough and ruined, and then his hand was on your waist, tugging you forward before either of you could pretend restraint was still an option. You made one weak, useless attempt to resist, palm flattening against his shoulder as if you were going to push him back, as if your whole body had not leaned toward him the second he asked. “James—”

He pulled you into his lap anyway, kissed you through it.

Your little sound of protest dissolved against his mouth, because his hands were already firm at your hips, holding you there like he had spent years imagining this. Your knees landed on either side of his thighs, your skirt riding up, expensive fabric bunching around your hips.

You pulled back just enough to glare at him.

“You’re hurt.”

“I know.”

“Bucky—“

He only looked at you, mouth swollen, eyes dark, face pale with blood loss and want. “I’m gonna fucking die,” he sighed desperately.

You froze, processing 

His grip on your hip tightened desperately 

“Maybe not tonight. Maybe not tomorrow. But they’re coming.” His eyes fell to your mouth again like looking at your eyes hurt him. “I came here thinking I’d never touch you again. I came here ready to leave with one look at you if that was all you’d give me.”

Your throat closed.

He swallowed, and his hand slid higher along your spine, trembling once beneath your blouse.

“Don’t make me be good right now,” he whispered. “Not with you. Not tonight.”

“Bucky…”

His lips brushed yours. “Let me,” he breathed. “Let me, please.”

Fuck.

You kissed him again, and whatever restraint remained between you went under.

Bucky’s mouth opened against yours, and the kiss turned hot enough to feel almost violent. Your hands slid into his hair, tugging once, and he groaned so low you felt it through your chest. His fingers found the buttons of your blouse, rough at first, impatient, then suddenly slower when skin appeared beneath the cloth.

One button.

Then another.

The backs of his knuckles brushed newly exposed skin, and his breath changed. Reverent and greedy all at once, like he remembered what the swell of your breast felt like and what the heartbeat underneath sounded like.

His mouth left yours, dragging down your throat.

You tipped your head back before you could stop yourself.

“You still wear the same perfume,” he murmured against your skin. “I thought about it in Berlin once.” His mouth moved along the side of your neck. “Smelled it on someone in a hotel lobby and almost turned around like an idiot.”

Your eyes burned.

No.

No, he wasn’t allowed to make you cry. Not when his hand was on your skin. Not when you were straddling him. Not when every assassin in the world would be looking for him before sunrise.

You tugged his hair, forcing his face back up to yours. “Don’t make this sad.”

His smile was devastating. “Too late.”

His mouth found the bare skin above your lace bra, stubble scraping, teeth grazing just hard enough to make your hips jerk.

Bucky hissed and met you halfway. 

“You are going to tear your stitches,” you sighed through gritted teeth. 

“Then stitch me up again.”

“Jesus—”

He kissed the word out of your mouth.

You meant to stay in control, but then his hand slid beneath your skirt, palm against the outside of your thigh, and your body betrayed every sensible thought you had ever had. His fingers traced upward slowly, almost teasing, the touch teasing enough to be maddening.

You rolled your hips once without meaning to.

Bucky groaned into your mouth.

“Fuck,” he breathed, forehead dropping to yours. “Don’t do that unless you mean it.”

You stared at him, breath uneven.

He looked wrecked. 

“If I’m gonna help you,” you whispered, “might as well make it worth it, huh?”

You could’ve sworn Bucky’s blue eyes sparkled at that.

“Atta girl,” he said as his fingers reached the edge of your underwear.

Even now, he looked up at you, waiting.

“Touch me,” you whispered.

His eyes darkened as he slid his fingers against you.

Your breath caught hard enough to hurt.

Bucky’s eyes dropped between you, then lifted back to your face. He had forgotten exactly how good it felt to have you falling apart over him.

“God,” he breathed against your mouth. “You’re so wet.”

“Proud of yourself, hm?”

As he hummed his response, you bit his lower lip.

He cursed, and this time, you deemed it to be too loud.

Your hand flew over his mouth to stop anymore from coming out. 

You stared down at him, breathing hard, his eyes wild above your hand. “Are you insane?” you hissed. “If any of my staff hears you, we are both fucked.”

Beneath your palm, he smiled.

You leaned closer. “Not a sound.”

He nodded once before his fingers moved again.

You almost hated him for how well he still knew you. For the pressure, the pace. Your hips rocked into his hand despite yourself, and Bucky’s eyes went half-lidded, like the sight alone was doing damage.

You kept your hand over his mouth until his breathing started to turn rough beneath it, until his lashes fluttered, until he kissed the center of your palm filthy

“Stop being smug,” you whispered.

His reply came muffled, but you knew exactly what it was.

No.

His hand worked you harder, and your forehead dropped to his. The pleasure built deep made worse by the danger of sleeping with a condemned man.

Bucky’s hips jerked up. You felt him hard beneath you, straining, and bit back your own sound.

You pulled your hand from his mouth only long enough to kiss him again, swallowing the next sound before it could leave him. His metal thumb rose to your lower lip when you broke apart, brushing there with an almost unbearable tenderness.

“I’ll tell you if it hurts too much,” he rasped.

“Will you?”

“No,” he admitted. “But I’ll try.”

You stared at him.

Then you laughed once, breathless and furious, reaching between you and unbuckled his belt.

Bucky’s head fell back against the sofa. The sound of the buckle hitting the couch seemed absurdly loud in the silence.

“Bed,” you whispered.

He opened his eyes, looked toward the bedroom, then back at you.

“Too far.”

“It’s right there.”

“Too far.”

You would have laughed if you had not wanted him so badly it hurt.

There was nothing elegant about the rest of it.

Your underwear was shoved aside rather than removed. His trousers were opened only enough. Your hands braced on his shoulders as you rose over him, both of you breathing too hard, as you sank down onto him.

Oh.

Bucky’s forehead dropped to your chest.

“Fuck,” he whispered. “Fuck, sweetheart.”

Your fingers dug into his shoulders as you felt the stretch. His hands gripped your hips, holding on while your body took him inch by inch and remembered every terrible, perfect thing about him.

Suddenly, he jerked beneath you, then hissed through his teeth, one hand flying near his side.

You froze. “No.”

“I’m okay.”

“No, Buck—”

“I’m okay,” he repeated, softer now. “Just…give me a second.”

You held still, chest rising and falling, forehead pressed to his hair. His arms slid around you, careful of the wound, and for one strange, unbearable moment, there was no movement at all.

His mouth brushed your sternum.

You looked down and saw red blooming faintly at the edge of the bandage.

“Fuck, you’re bleeding.”

“Little bit.”

“James.”

“Sweetheart.” His voice was gravel against your skin. “If I die tonight, it is not going to be because you rode me too hard on a sofa.”

You hated that you moved before you answered, testing with a slow roll of your hips.

Bucky’s eyes shut.

“Yes,” you whispered.

You moved up and down carefully at first, one hand pressed near his uninjured shoulder, the other buried in his hair. His hands guided your hips, metal cool and human hand hot, helping you find the rhythm that made your thighs tremble and his breath come apart.

The sofa creaked beneath you.

Below, the hotel stayed silent, but Bucky did not.

A groan slipped out of him. You had no choice but to clamp your hand over his mouth again.

His eyes snapped open.

“Do you want them to find their manager like this?” you whispered, breath ragged. “Skirt up, blouse open, fucking a man with a bounty on his head on her sofa?”

Bucky’s eyes rolled back for half a second as his hips jerked up, making you bite back your own moan.

His hand tightened on your hip in apology. You leaned down, keeping your palm over his mouth.

If getting caught didn’t mean death, if your staff coming through that door wouldn’t end in blood, you had the awful feeling his answer would have been yes. But even now, he would always put your safety first.

You picked up the pace.

His fingers found you again between your bodies, and the first touch nearly shattered your rhythm. Pleasure punched through you, and you had to bite your lip to keep from making a sound of your own.

Bucky watched you like he was dying already. Like the whole world could come through the door with guns and he would still be looking at your face.

Your hand slipped from his mouth to clutch at his hair when the pleasure reached too high. He seized the chance to kiss you, swallowing your gasp as you came apart over him. 

“That’s it,” he breathed against your lips, barely audible. “I’ve got you.”

His own control fractured seconds later. His grip tightened and you had to kiss him hard to muffle the rough sound that left him when he came. His hips pressed up once, twice, then stopped beneath you, his forehead dropping to your shoulder.

You stayed in his lap, forehead against his, fingers still tangled in his hair.

Then you kissed along his face.

His cheek, his jawline, the cut near his temple. 

“Don’t mistake this for mercy,” you said, breathless. You caught his chin, tilting him back to you. “If I were merciful,” you murmured, mouth brushing his skin, “I’d shoot you myself so you wouldn’t suffer under the hands of worse men.”

Bucky’s hands settled at your waist. “Then what is it?”

You kissed the corner of his mouth.

“Stupidity,” you said, though you didn’t mean it. “Clearly.”

For a moment, he only looked at you, far too knowing of your bluff.

He pulled you back down and kissed you again. “Keep saying it until you believe it, sweetheart.”

—

For a while, neither of you moved.

The room returned slowly, piece by piece, from the low gold of the lamps, the expensive ruin of clothes, the glass walls reflecting the city back at you in smears of neon pink and blue. Madripoor burned beyond the windows, while the Continental breathed beneath your feet like some great animal pretending it had not felt one of its own rules break.

Bucky stayed beneath you, forehead dropped against your shoulder, one hand loose at your waist, the other careful near his ribs. His breathing had begun to even out, though there was a tremor under it now. Adrenaline had started fading, and pain had started returning. 

Then you caught sight of yourself in the dark window: Hair undone, top hanging open, your lipstick ruined. And there, just above the line of your collar, darkening against your skin…

A fucking mark. A stupid little love bite. 

You went still.

Bucky lifted his head as if he had felt the change in your breathing. His eyes followed yours to the reflection, then to your throat, guilt flickering across his face immediately. “Let me explain.”

You turned your head slowly.

“I was aiming lower.”

Unbelievable.

A laugh slipped out of you before you could stop it. Quiet, disbelieving, frayed around the edges. It was the sort of laugh that came too close to tears.

You touched two fingers to the mark.

Management under the High Table, branded like a reckless girl in the back of a getaway car.

Your staff had eyes, and every assassin in the building had been trained to notice any slight difference in your appearance, and now Bucky Barnes had left this, visible on your skin.

You wanted to be furious. You were, a little.

Mostly, you were just surprised by how badly you didn’t mind.

Bucky watched your face like he expected the blow to come and would accept it. Instead, you climbed off him carefully, your body still unsteady, and the movement earned a sharp hiss from both of you. His hand went straight to his side.

You peeled the bandage off, chasing the damage of what you both have done.

Not torn. Thank fuck.

Pulled and irritated, yes. You saw a thin line of fresh blood where the stitches had strained, but nothing open enough to justify any kind of terror.

You cleaned the skin anyway.

Bucky’s hand hovered near yours once, then settled on the cushion instead.

The new bandage went on clean, and you had put a waterproof layer on this time. Your fingers smoothed the tape over his ribs, and he looked down with an expression that made you want to kiss him again and scream at him in equal measure.

You did neither.

You stood, gathering the gauze and gloves.

When you were done, you helped him stand.

He could do it on his own, but only barely. One hand was braced on the back of the sofa, shoulders rigid until the worst of the dizziness passed. You stayed close enough that if his knees went, you could catch him. 

You guided him into the shower.

Under the spray, with the glass fogging around you and water swirling toward the drain, practicality went out the window. He stood on his own, one hand against the tile, head bowed slightly beneath the water. You washed blood from his temple and rinsed dried sweat from his neck. You cleaned a scratch near his chin with your thumb while he watched you through wet lashes, saying nothing.

He looked different like this. It was as if he had been stripped of the dirty coat, the guns, the blood-soaked wool, he became painfully human. 

You washed the night from him as best you could, careful around the bandage, careful with the places pain had made sensitive. He let you. 

By the time you got him to bed, the lights had dimmed.

You gave him water, antibiotics, painkillers, and tucked him in underneath fresh linen. He took everything without protest, which frightened you more than his blood had. Bucky argumentative meant Bucky alive. Bucky silent meant exhaustion had finally dragged him under. 

He looked wrong in your bed.

You changed into a robe with your back turned to him, tying the belt tightly at your waist. In the mirror, the mark on your throat had deepened.

You touched it once, then you switched off the lamps and slid into bed beside him.

You curled into him slowly at first, then all at once, tucking yourself against the uninjured side of his chest. His arm came down around you. Your hand settled over his heart, feeling the beat beneath your palm like you needed proof. 

His body curled around yours as much as the wound allowed, protective even half-conscious, and you let yourself sink into him. You listened to the rhythm of his heart. You counted each breath until the panic in your chest began to loosen.

“You need rest,” you murmured. “You have to get up early.”

His arm tightened faintly around you. “Got a plan for me, huh?”

You stared into the dark and tried to choose your next words carefully.

“I can’t change your fate.” The words hurt as they left your lips. “But I can get you a head start.”

He didn’t answer for a long time. His hand only moved once over your back, as if to say, thank you.

For choosing me.

For sacrificing the rules.

For putting yourself in the line of fire for me.

Eventually, his breathing deepened. Sleep took him reluctantly, one guarded inch at a time.

—

Bucky woke at four forty-six in the morning, and for a second he was at peace. 

He felt your head tucked near his shoulder, your hand resting over his chest like you had fallen asleep making sure his heart kept going. Madripoor glowed through the half-drawn curtains in thin ribbons of neon, feverish gold leaking across the ceiling.

Then his side pulled tight with pain, and the world came back.

Right. The whole world was hunting him. The whole world but you.

Bucky lay still and looked at you.

You hadn’t slept well; he knew that even before you opened your eyes. There was a faint tension in your brow and the corner of your mouth, like some part of you had remained awake even while your body had finally surrendered. 

He should have regretted coming here more. He put you in danger. 

But grief and love made selfish creatures of people, and there was a terrible part of him that looked at the mark and felt comfort. Proof, maybe, that even if only for a few hours, he had been here. 

He moved carefully, every shift measured around the wound at his side, and lifted his hand to your cheek.

You stirred, but didn’t wake completely.

He kissed you, but it was barely a kiss. It was more of his mouth against yours in the dark, careful enough to be mistaken for a dream.

Your eyes opened, finding his in the blue dark, unfocused at first.

“James,” you whispered, voice rough with sleep.

He closed his eyes for half a second. “I’m here.”

The ghost of a smile almost reached you. It pulled at the edge of your mouth and disappeared before it could become anything tangible. Then your hand slid to his side, practical even half-awake, fingers finding the edge of the bandage beneath the sheets. You checked him by touch first, then by sight, shifting up on one elbow and pulling the cover down just enough to inspect the gauze.

Bucky watched your face instead of the wound.

You released a breath when you saw that it hadn't bled through. 

“You need antibiotics,” you murmured.

“I took them last night.”

“And you will take them again,” You insisted, eyes lifting to his.

Even in bed, even with your hair loose and half asleep, you could give him a stern look that made him shut his mouth.

You reached for the bedside table, shook two pills into your palm, and poured water from the carafe.You handed the glass to him, and he swallowed the pills under your watchful stare. Only then did you press the back of your hand to his forehead.

No fever. Good. 

You sat beside him in the dim room with your hand still near his heart, and for a few minutes neither of you said anything at all, thinking about what you had while he slept. Thank god he had stayed asleep throughout all of it. 

Out there were maps you hadn’t yet shown him. The cameras you had already disabled. The passage hidden in the back rooms of the hotel.

And then, sometime in the night, his bounty had risen to twenty million dollars.

Twenty million wasn’t just money. Everyone would wake up and see the number and become hungry. Dockworkers, concierges, brokers, doctors, tailors, priests, beggars, old friends, old enemies would suddenly remember how much a life could be worth if you stopped thinking of it as a person.

Then your eyes flicked to the phone on the bedside table. Bucky was looking at it. He saw the notification.

“You know.”

He didn’t pretend not to understand. “Yeah.”

You looked down at your hand where it rested against him. Your fingers curled slightly, catching in the fabric of the sheet.

“Twenty million,” you said.

He nodded.

“That kind of money makes people inventive,” you continued, and though your voice stayed quiet, something beneath it trembled. “It makes stupid men brave. It makes loyal men practical. It makes neutral men suddenly remember they have debts to settle.”

“I know.”

You shook your head. “You keep saying that.”

“I don’t know what else I’m supposed to say.”

For a moment, you looked at him like you wanted to slap him. Not because he deserved it, though maybe he did. Because frustration was easier than being afraid, and you had always preferred weapons you knew how to hold.

“You could say you’ll come back,” you whispered, words leaving you before you could stop them.

Bucky saw the regret dawn on your face. You shut down so quickly it was almost violent. “I…,” you started. “Forget I said that.”

“I want to,” he said, making himself small.

You looked away. “Then say it.”

For one selfish second, he almost did.

He almost gave you the lie. He almost told you he would survive the bounty, survive the High Table, survive every knife and bullet and hungry bastard between Madripoor and whatever country came next. 

But twenty million dollars was in the way.

And you deserved more than a pretty lie from a doomed man.

“I can’t,” he said.

Your face didn’t break, but he could see a thin fracture beneath the surface. He hated himself for being the reason why.

“I hate you for being honest,” you said, but your voice was smaller now. Bucky reached for your hand. He only offered, and after a second you let him take it. “I want the lie.”

His throat burned. “I know.”

“I would know it was a lie, James, and I would still want it.”

He lifted your hand and pressed his mouth to your knuckles. He felt the tremor you tried to hide. 

“I want there to be a version of this where I walk out and make it,” he said. “But I’m hurt. I’m tired. I have no protection, no doctor, no sanctioned routes, no allies who can admit to knowing me. The last thing I want is for them to find out you helped me.”

Your hand pulled free from his only so you could cup his face. “Don’t talk like you're already dead.”

He leaned into your touch before he could stop himself. It was humiliating, how badly he needed it. 

“I’m trying not to,” he said.

“Try harder.”

He almost smiled. You kissed his cheek once before climbing out of bed.

After that, the room became a swirl.

You got dressed first, with black trousers to hide the grip marks forming on your thighs, white blouse with a high collar, and a matching blazer.The mark on your throat disappeared beneath the fabric. Your hair went up and your lipstick went on. Piece by piece, you put on a mask that the High Table had given you, and Bucky watched it happen with an ache in his chest he had no name for.

He got dressed slower than you. The clothes you had left for him were dark, plain, and unmemorable. 

By 5:38, there was no evidence the night had happened.

The blood was gone from the sofa. The ruined towels had vanished. The wine glass had been removed. His old clothes were no longer in sight. Every surface looked untouched, nothing had given anyone a reason to suspect treason. 

When Bucky was finished getting ready, he saw maps covering the surface: service corridors, laundry shafts, maintenance passages, camera blind spots, staff rotations, dock surveillance. You had turned the whole city upside down and found him the least fatal route through it.

“At 6:13, the private lift camera enters a maintenance loop for four minutes,” you said.

Bucky looked at the route you weren't pointing to. “You want me to take the lift?”

“No. I want anyone auditing the system later to think someone did.” Your finger moved across the map with brisk precision. “The loop is bait. You will take the passage behind the wardrobe three levels down. Left at the old laundry shaft. Don’t use the first service door. Kitchen staff will be moving through until six-thirty, and I cannot guarantee discretion.”

He listened, memorizing every word, though part of him wanted to stop you. 

“The second door opens into dry storage,” you continued. “Camera blackout begins at 6:21 and lasts seven minutes, but assume you have four. If you’re not through by 6:25, retreat into the laundry shaft and wait for the next staff turnover. Don’t improvise unless someone has already seen your face.”

“And that?” he pointed, jumping ahead while cataloging everything.

“Dock Seven.” You slid another page toward him. “It has the least surveillance after 6:40. Not none. The west crane camera will be down for maintenance from 6:38. The warehouse camera facing Pier C turns east from 6:43 to 6:51. That is the best window you’re going to get.”

You pushed a passport across the table. “You’re Daniel Grant, Canadian. He’s boring, and keep him boring.”

He looked down at the unfamiliar face close enough to his own to pass if no one looked twice.

“After the dock?” he asked.

Your eyebrows furrowed, only slightly.

“After the dock, I can’t help you.”

There it was, the truth, the limit to your power. After the dock, there were no more cameras you could blind. No more corridors under your control. No more staff you could redirect. After the dock, he became a number again.

You picked up the black phone. “This gives you one call. Burn it after. It won't reach me directly. It will pass through three of my staff first. If you use it, say only what matters.”

“I’m not dragging you further into this.”

“You already have.”

The words weren’t meant to be cruel, but it sounded like it. His throat tightened. “I’m sorry.”

“No.” Your eyes sharpened. “Don’t apologize for needing me and then deny me the right to decide what I do with that.”

He stared at you, looking down. “I’m not worth your life.”

Fuck off, Barnes, you wanted to say. But instead, “Don’t say that to me.” 

“It’s true.”

You looked down at the maps for a moment. When you spoke again, your voice had changed. “When John died, Winston wanted to tell me what he was worth. What his name meant. What his death meant. The High Table, the contracts, the bodies, the legend. Everyone had a number, a title, a story.” Your hand curled against the edge of the table. “It was all useless. He was my brother— that was the only measure that mattered.” You looked up at him then, eyes sunken in a way that terrified him. “So don’t stand in my room and tell me what you are worth as if love has ever cared about market value.”

For one second, he almost said it.

The room was already evidence of it. Maybe naming it would make it less likely to disappear. But if he said it now, with the passage waiting and every sniper on his head, he would be leaving it behind like a body for you to bury.

You saw him swallow it.

“Coward,” you whispered.

Not like an insult, but rather heartbreak.

Bucky nodded once. “Yeah.”

You reached into the inside pocket of your blazer and took out a small leather ledger. You set it on the table.

“I’m going to settle every marker and debt I have.”

What?

“You’ll make yourself vulnerable,” he furrowed his eyebrows.

“I know.” Your voice was steady because you forced it to be. “I’ll close what I can. Pay what I owe. Call in what I’m owed. I’ll prepare a letter nominating Talia for hotel management. I will make myself as free as I can be.”

He forced himself to turn to you, to figure out what was running in that pretty little head of yours. “For what?”

“For the possibility that this is not the last time I see you.”

Oh.

You stepped closer.

“If there is a way, if you find it, if you can come back as something other than a dead man walking, then come back to me.” You swallowed, but your voice held. “And I will go with you.”

He looked at you and saw what the future could be.

You, far from Madripoor. You, far from gold coins and ledgers written in blood. You, in his kitchen with morning light on your face. You, scowling over bad coffee he made. You, looking at him across a room as if he had finally made it home. You, getting out and living the life your brother once had before the world took that away from him.

It was so beautiful he almost hated you for giving it to him.

But his status sat between you and that future.

He could feel the hunters already moving, the calls already being made. The underworld waking up to his name and doing the arithmetic. Most people didn't survive numbers like that for long.

He couldn’t promise anything.

He wanted to. God fucking knows, he wanted to. He wanted to take your face in his hands and swear he would come back if he had to crawl through half the world with broken bones. He wanted to tell you to pack a bag, to wait for him, to believe that he would survive the week.

But you were offering him your life. He wouldn’t repay that with false hope.

“Okay,” he said.

That was what finally undid you.

You stepped into him and pressed both hands flat against his chest, gripping the fabric of his shirt as if you could hold him in the room by force.

“You are not dead while I am touching you,” you said. “You are not dead until I am forced to hear otherwise, and even then I may refuse to believe it out of spite.”

A broken laugh dragged out of him.

“So go,” you whispered. “Go be difficult to kill. Go make every greedy little bastard who looks at that twenty million regret getting out of bed.”

His forehead lowered to yours.

His hand rose to your cheek, and you leaned into it before he had even touched you. 

He kissed you.

Softly at first, then harder, because the alternative felt too much like goodbye. Your hands fisted in his shirt. 

When you pulled back, your mouth still brushed his.

“I love—”

Your hand covered his mouth. Your eyes were shining now, broken and beautiful in the most unbearable way.

“Not now,” you whispered.

His breath warmed as he nodded, pressing a kiss into your palm.

Then he nodded.

You opened the panel behind the wardrobe yourself.

Cold air breathed out of the hidden passage, smelling like damp stone, old water, and dust disturbed for the first time in years. The darkness beyond it was narrow and void, a vein running through the Continental. Somewhere below, staff would move through corridors you had already arranged for him to avoid. The entire hotel, for a handful of minutes, would turn its eyes away because you had asked it to.

You handed him the bag.

For one final moment, he looked at you and your ledger still open on the table behind you. Your whole life was already beginning to come apart because he had come to you bleeding and you had loved him too much to turn him in.

He wanted to promise something, anything, so badly.

But chances were, he was going to fucking die.

So he only looked at you, and you understood.

“Be seeing you,” you said.

From anyone else, it would have been a threat, a warning, a death sentence tied to a century-old tradition.

From you, it sounded like the smallest sliver of hope.

Bucky held your eyes for one more second, then nodded once before stepping into the passage.

The panel slid shut without a sound, leaving you alone in the spotless room, pretending nothing ever happened.

You walked up to your desk, picked up the phone, and dialed 505.

The line clicked.

“Good morning, Talia,” you said normally, because you were fine. You had to be. “Prepare the staff for briefing, please.”

You surely are about to taste your own blood on your tongue any second now if you keep biting your lip so hard. But all you do is tighten your grip on those messy, dark hair your fingers are knotted into, and you can’t fight the reflex to shift your hips away an inch so that the embarrassing sob that is growing in your throat won’t make it out.

Though you should have known that that would make him stop. His mouth pauses against your clit, and you squeeze your eyes shut.

His hands remain firmly at your thighs, thumbs soothing those slow and drowsy circles against your skin. But his eyes lift to yours, the usual bright blue of them gone dark and concentrated in the dimness of his bedroom. His gaze is fierce enough to make your breath hitch, but melted into its depths is that softness you know is there just for you.

With his gaze still on yours, he begins to kiss a languid path up your stomach, pausing just beneath your ribs and letting his eyes flutter when worshiping your breasts with his skilled tongue. Your mind and soul are soaring up to his high ceilings.

Your teeth are imprinted upon your bottom lip, and you hope you can continue keeping your breathing as even as possible, though you’re not managing all that well.

His hands move slowly across the skin of your hips, pinning you to the mattress. He doesn’t use all his strength but enough for you to feel stuck in his hold.

He crawls further up your body with that deliberate drag that leaves you shivering and panting. He hovers over you and his bare chest brushes your heaving breasts.

His face is now inches from yours, his stubble grazing your cheek, smelling like vanilla and something like cardamom, and you breathe it in automatically. His pupils are blown as they sear into yours.

“Stop that,” he orders, though his voice is a warm whisper. He reaches up, his thumb catching your bottom lip and tugging it out from between your teeth. He soothes the imprint. “Don't you hide those pretty sounds from me.”

“Bucky, the guards,” you breathe out, your voice trembling, still weak from the way he used his tongue on you. Your face burns. The room feels enormous again, full of listening walls. “Your people. They will hear. They will think—”

Something flits across his expression. It seems to be something proud, even possessive. You could say it looks dangerous, but being the person that you are, and considering the sweet albeit intense person that he is, it turns you the hell on and makes you sigh.

“I don't care what they think. I want them to know.” He leans down, his lips hovering over yours, his breath hot and smelling of you. “I want every man on my payroll to hear the way you sound when I’m the only thing on your mind. I want them to hear who I’m answering to tonight. And every other night from now on.”

With a stunned shake of your head, you stare up at him, a huff of embarrassment trying to bubble up and fall out of your mouth but it fails because his mouth is on yours, kissing you aggressively before he dives back down, not waiting for you to argue. You’re entirely overwhelmed, but damn, not in a bad way at all.

His hands lock you into place, and the way he’s eating you out has you flying straight to heaven with a one-way ticket. He’s being greedy. He’s using his tongue with a blunt, feverish sort of worship that makes your head hit his pillow with a thud.

He’s a businessman, that’s what he told you. But as his mouth works over you with all that bottled-up intensity he carries around all day, you feel the latent power he usually keeps veiled behind a tie. He’s a man who takes what he wants, and right now, what he wants is to hear you break, and you might actually, because god is he good, so incredibly good, you could definitely get used to it. Maybe you already are, but who’s to blame you for it.

The first real moan tears out of you, and you cringe internally at how loud and breathy it sounds, the way it vibrates in the cavernous room, landing in the farthest corners of the high ceilings.

Bucky grunts against you, and it sounds so purely satisfied, it even seems to rumble within your own body. You gasp, trying to suppress another moan, and he only presses harder, licking and sucking and slurping, and it makes you feel like you’re the only meal on his plate.

His thumbs dent the soft give of your hips to make sure you’re pinned the way he wants you, the way he has the best access to all of you. It’s dizzying, it makes your gut lurch in the best possible way, and you feel like a queen and a ruin all at once. He’s gentle, yeah, but it seems to be the gentle kind you would use on a porcelain heirloom right before testing its breaking point.

Your hands don’t know what to do with themselves. Gripping the sheets or pillows, touching yourself—it all doesn’t feel like enough, so you go back to sliding your fingers into his hair and basically watch them disappear in it. You feel powerful and helpless, and oh god you should really keep those noises down or you won’t be able to look at his people anymore.

He is a mountain of a man, intimidating in ways you don’t understand yet, full of secrets; and yet here he is, kneeling for you and eating you out as if that’s all he’s been waiting for his whole life.

Damn, you’re a lucky girl.

He is drinking you in, his mouth molding to you with a suction that feels like he’s trying to draw your very soul to the surface.

It feels as though each individual bristle of his stubble is caressing your inner thigh, and it's abrasive and burning but also so damn good. It makes the gliding heat of his tongue feel so soft and vivid, and it pulls the tension right out of your bones.

He tracks you through his lashes, and you’re careful not to meet his eyes or that dark gaze of his would surely make you come already. But he doesn’t stop documenting you and the way you react to him. He thrives on it, so very much that it doesn’t seem to embarrass him in the slightest.

Then he dives past your entrance, his tongue finding that soft, sharp intake of your breath. And your spine bows upward out of pure blinding pleasure. The sound that leaves you is startled, too loud for your liking and so you try to clamp your hand over your lips.

He catches your wrist.

He’s not harsh with it, but he brings your hand down to the mattress and pins it there decisively. His fingers lace through yours.

“What’d I say,” he warns, voice low, husky.

You swallow, your eyes are fluttering. “Bucky—”

“Make the noise,” he whispers as he kisses along your inner thigh, eyes on you. “All of it.”

His free hand slowly wanders upward and it almost feels possessive how he ascends your heated skin. You glimpse that little hint of something feral, something prehistoric in the trail of his eyes. You’ve seen it before, and as always, it pulls you under completely. His ferocity isn’t some thrashing kind of wild, honestly, he seems perfectly comfortable with his position, as though he’s already done the math but there’s no clear solution and he just has to keep calculating. Has to keep going.

He lunges back and buries his face in your heat, his tongue flat and broad, applying a rhythmic pressure that whites out your vision and has you moaning without thought. It’s thorough and hungry, his mouth drawing you in eagerly, and it feels like he’s trying to pull the very center of you into his throat.

“Bucky—,” you gasp, your fingers tightly clamping around his, knuckles white.

He growls, and it rattles his entire chest, it vibrates against your sensitive skin. He uses his teeth—just a graze, a tiny, sharp nip that sends a scalding current straight to your core. Your hips jerk reflexively, his hands are pinning you open, and you are forced to take every unsparing lap of his tongue.

He shifts his weight, his nose dragging through your wetness as he focuses his attention on the very top of your nub. He works his tongue in a cadence so constant it sends the pressure straight to the back of your skull until the room dissolves behind your eyelids. It feels almost like a breaking point, but hell, you would throw yourself out of those high windows if he were to stop now.

He’s fast and skilled and you’re made to take it.

“Open up,” he commands against your skin, his voice muffled and wet although you couldn’t possible open up more for him.

There is no more warning before he fills you with two fingers, sliding them deep inside you and stretching you while his thumb maintains that dizzying pressure, and the friction burns a hole through your focus. The two sensations fight for room in your head, effectively demolishing whatever was left of your pride and it makes you let out the highest moan. You’re straining upward, seeking the release he’s dangling just out of reach.

He looks up at you, his face flushed, his breathing ragged against your thigh. A stray, damp shimmer glistens on the curve of his lower lip, and he licks it clean. You watch mesmerized and utterly overdrawn. His gaze is stripped of any pretense, it’s dark and appeased and entirely fixed on the way your face is breaking.

"That's it," he coos, watching your chest heave. "Scream for me, sweetheart. I'm not stopping until you do."

He dives back in, his tongue swirling deep inside you before curling back to hook against your clit, and suddenly there is no perspective on anything anymore, and the floors are walls and the walls are floors, and—

And then his phone begins vibrating against the mahogany nightstand. It’s a sharp and intrusive sound and it’s stripping the air of its heat.

Bucky doesn’t seem to care, though. He doesn’t so much as glance over at it. His gaze stays welded to yours, his pupils taking up the beautiful blue. His thumb continues trailing your heat, collecting your slick, and he turns to watch in amazement, as he licks a long stripe up your center, making you choke on your spit.

The vibration of his phone still ringing grates against the wood, loud enough to feel like a physical itch.

Bucky is a man who has built an empire on timing, yet he seems perfectly content to let the world outside the bedroom door spontaneously combust.

The phone dies.

He keeps sucking, you keep moaning.

Then, it begins again, more insistent this time. His phone is pulsing. It seems urgent.

You feel his jaw tighten against you. Feel the shift you’ve come to recognize but never quite know what to do with. The air around him thickens by a single degree. The temperature of him changes, not in heat but in authority. Somewhere beyond these walls, the world is knocking its head against his patience.

“Bucky,” you breathe, the word leaning on the dryness in your throat. Your chest is still heaving, your skin flushed a beautiful pink. You softly pull at his hair to make him look at you, a weak gesture that feels like trying to move a mountain. “You should get that.”

His eyes meet yours. There are galaxies in them and something darker orbiting behind them. He leans in and presses a slow, devastating kiss to the inside of your thigh, all calm and relaxed while the phone continues vibrating angrily.

“It can wait,” he decides, voice an octave lower and threaded with promise as he trails a line of punishingly soft kisses along your skin.

Another buzz, the sound now an impatient thrum that seems to vibrate the very legs of the bed. It feels like a summons, a reminder of the business that pays for the guards and the maids and the high ceilings.

He exhales through his nose and lets out a rumble of annoyance. His thumb strokes a calming line along your hip, as if reassuring you that his irritation belongs elsewhere. He looks like some wild animal being interrupted mid-meal.

“Bucky—,” you start, carefully, your hand sliding to cup his face, feeling the heat of his skin, but he clicks his tongue to interrupt you.

“My girl deserves to get off first,” he hums, not letting his lips off your skin, his stubble a deliberate, intoxicating scrape against your thigh.

And when his tongue drives home, flat and strong against that hyper-sensitized knot of nerves, it doesn’t take long for that jolting pleasure to cloud your vision and bleach the dark corners of his bedroom into a searing, blinding white.

Your spine arches and snaps and leaves you suspended between the silk sheets and the cold air, held down only by his weight.

The embarrassing sob you were trying to hide earlier finally tears free, but it isn’t a sob anymore. It’s a melodic wail that echoes off the shadows-drenched ceiling. It climbs high and rings out with a clarity that makes the idea of guards and business feel like a fever dream from another life.

Your body is trying to crush his fingers in a desperate pulse that feels like a heart beating where it shouldn't.

And Bucky drinks it all in. He keeps his head down, jaw locked against you, refusing to let the moment end. That rough graze of his stubble is brutal but it keeps you somewhat in the room. He is taking the time with the mess he made, leaning into the way you are trembling, his mouth ensuring that every last bit of your control is gone.

By the time your vision starts to clear at the edges, and the room starts to solidify back into reality, you feel hollowed out, as if he’d reached inside and pulled the very soul of you to the surface. You slump into the mattress, your limbs too heavy to even twitch, your lungs burning with the effort of remembering how to breathe.

When you begin to squirm in his hold, Bucky finally pulls back, his expression bluntly victorious. He is breathing hard, his lips stained, his eyes trained on the way your ribs are still hitching with those dying tremors. His hand tightens at your hip.

Then he rises over you in one fast movement, bracing himself above you with his weight carefully balanced. You don’t need any more physical proof that he wants you, considering how hard and ready you can feel him against your leg, with his control barely in check; and it makes your lungs seize up.

Wordlessly, he leans down to pull you into a slow kiss that goes so deep, your thoughts evaporate and your fingers tangle in his hair. He groans against your lips, breathing your name. You feel him twitch against you as he lets his hand slide back between your bodies—when the door rattles with a knock.

Bucky stills with his forehead on yours, eyes still closed, jaw a block of ice. “Boss?” a slightly hesitant voice comes through the door.

His nose presses into the crook of your neck. For a long second, he just breathes you in, a deep, possessive inhalation as if he is trying to pull in all of your scent to survive the coming interruption.

With a low curse that is more a growl than a word, he rolls onto his side and promptly pulls you with him, tucking you into his chest. His body angles slightly toward the door, building an instinctive shield. His arms remain draped over you, his left hand splayed protectively across your back.

“What,” he calls, voice suddenly stripped of warmth. There is a pause on the other side.

“Sorry, boss,” The voice is male. Sounding even more hesitant now. And definitely embarrassed. “But, uh— it’s important. You are needed.”

You want to let out a heavy sigh. But you’ve seen this coming, really.

Bucky closes his eyes briefly and there is something pinched around them. He’s not usually a short-tempered man, at least not with you, but right now he looks ready to snap at the door.

“I’m busy,” he replies flatly, and you believe his voice is only calm for your sake.

Another pause. The poor man outside is probably staring at the door waiting for it to shoot him.

“It’s Sam,” he explains carefully, seemingly afraid to say too much.

You know Sam. Or, you have heard Bucky mention Sam. Sam, the colleague. The one your boyfriend refers to with a mix of irritation and reluctant brotherhood. A pain in the ass, he told you with a half-smile. But loyal. Does good work. One of the few men he trusts to argue with him and live. You had laughed at the way he said it so seriously. He hadn't really laughed with you, but he kissed you stupid afterwards and so you no longer thought of it.

Bucky gives a long exhale.

“Give me five.”

“Yes, sir.”

Hurried footsteps retreat down the corridor.

And Bucky doesn’t make a single attempt to leave your side. He just peppers your neck with tiny kisses.

You try to turn to his face. “Bucky, you should go.”

His eyes meet yours, and the stoicism buckles immediately. Back is the softness.

“You come first,” he hums, and his thumb brushes your cheek. There is something apologetic in the gesture, though he hasn’t done anything wrong.

You smile faintly and let a slow pout form on your lips. “I don’t want to hold you back from work.”

“You’re not,” he reassures you softly, leaning down to kiss you with a lack of the urgency he should probably be feeling right now.

But then he’s shifting away, sitting up on the edge of the bed, and the loss of his heat is a stinging chill. The chandelier light spills over his naked back, over the breadth of his shoulders. Your eyes glide down the tiny pink scars on his left shoulder with a sinking feeling in your stomach—those scars are another mystery he hasn’t let you into yet. But all you want to do is kiss them and hope to make it better, even if just a little.

You watch the way he runs a hand through his hair, reassembling himself piece by piece. By the time he stands, he has edges. He always seems different when he’s no longer touching you.

He pulls on a pair of dark trousers and doesn’t bother with a shirt. The phone is in his hand now. He checks the screen, jaw grinding briefly before he glances back at you. And the hardness that stepped into his eyes softens again, dissolving the moment they meet your face. It’s almost ridiculous, how quickly it happens. Like watching a knife remember it was once a piece of silver meant for candlelight.

You’re still half-sunk into the bed, hair falling around your shoulders, limbs loose, and sheets wound around your naked body. Around you, it smells of cedar, expensive soap, and Bucky himself, which is somehow warmer than both.

“Stay here,” he says gently. “I’ll handle it.”

Handle it.

The words mean spreadsheets and contracts in your mind. Annoying colleagues. Late- night negotiations.

He walks back to his bed to press a tender kiss to your forehead.

You push yourself up slightly on your elbows, the blanket sliding down your side. And you definitely see the way his gaze drifts for an appreciative and unashamed moment before it returns to your eyes. There is a small smile tugging at his mouth, and it’s the one you always get to see when you’re the only audience.

“Make yourself at home while I’m gone, yeah?” he whispers, nodding toward the massive wardrobe along the far wall, keeping his attention on you. “If you get cold, grab a shirt of mine. Top shelf on the left.”

You smile at him, nodding softly.

His eyes move over you slowly, and there is something warmly adoring in them that makes your chest tighten in a strange, bright way. He reaches out to brush his fingers along your jaw. The touch is thorough, absentmindedly tender, soothing out something only he can see.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he adds, voice rougher now. Reluctant. “Didn’t plan on having to step out. Told Sam he better handle his own ass today. Should’ve known better, though.”

“You’re the boss, Bucky,” you ease lightly. “I assume dramatic interruptions are part of the brand.”

His mouth curves.

“Unfortunately.”

He kisses your forehead once more, lingering long enough to make your lashes flutter.

“I’ll make it up to you,” he murmurs sweetly. “Soon as I’m done with this.” His thumb traces your cheek. “I’m coming right back. Gonna give you my full attention.” His eyes darken slightly, voice dipping just enough to send a warm shiver through you. “Cuddle you properly. Maybe take things a little further.”

Your stomach does a small, excited flip. “Maybe?”you tease, leaning into his touch.

He presses his smirk against yours. “Definitely.”

With that, he pulls back and straightens, that sovereign steel slipping back over him piece by piece. It’s almost visible, the way he steps into whatever role the rest of his world knows him for. The man who answers phones about Sam and things that sound suspiciously more complicated than spreadsheets.

At the door, he glances back once more. Same softness, just for you. “Lock it behind me, doll.”

The door opens. His phone lifts to his ear.

His voice changes instantly as he steps into the hallway.

“Get Wilson on the line,” he demands, tone clipped. “Now.” And then the door shuts.

You’re left in the echo of him and his scent in the sheets, his warmth still imprinted on your skin.

You don’t get up immediately to lock the door. He can get just a little too protective sometimes, so you don’t deem it necessary to lock the door when he’s just out taking a call. And you’re sure his guards would be in much worse trouble if they were to enter and see you nakedly spread out in his bed.

So you flop back into the mattress—that certainly was expensive too, due to the way it feels—and stare at the ceiling for a moment.

Then you laugh, incredulously. A quiet little wheeze of disbelief escaping into the big room.

Because really. What on earth.

You roll onto your side, pulling the blanket with you, and glance around the bedroom again like maybe you hallucinated the last two hours. Or the last two months.

The place is obscene.

And not in a tacky-rich, or gold-fountain rich kind of way. This is the quiet kind of wealth. Everything is polished wood and deep colors and furniture that probably has a historical backstory longer than your résumé.

There’s a fireplace bigger than your entire first apartment. A chandelier that looks like it was handcrafted by depressed angels.

And somewhere downstairs, there are actual maids.

Maids.

And guards.

Actual human beings whose job description probably includes phrases like protect the property and stand menacingly near large gates.

Meanwhile, you used to eat instant noodles on a couch that leaned slightly to the left like it had given up on life.

And somehow—how the fuck—you have ended up in the bed of a man who owns more suits than you own pairs of socks. A man who is tall and broad and so absurdly handsome, who steps into those razor-sharp tailored suits as though they were invented solely for him. Who wears that self-confident authority in his voice that makes the people around him straighten without realizing why.

And yet, he was on his knees for you just moments ago.

The thought sends heat creeping up your neck again. But in a giddy way.

You bury your face briefly into the pillow with a muffled groan. Because honestly, how did you pull that.

A man like Bucky should logically be dating a diplomat. Or a CEO. Or some terrifyingly poised woman who drinks champagne for breakfast and owns fifteen languages.

Instead, he found you.

You.

Who once tripped over a grocery store display and apologized to the oranges. And yet he looks at you like you hung the moon with questionable hardware.

You grin into the pillow.

Also—objectively speaking—the man is incredible in bed. Like, it’s crazy.

Biting your lip and staring up at the ceiling, you wonder if the chandelier is as baffled by your luck as you are. It’s like winning the lottery without buying a ticket, and you’re silently pleading with the laws of probability to stay bent in your favor just a little while longer; at least until he realizes you’re a mere mortal and not the goddess he’s treating you as.

It’s weird that a man like him noticed you. Weird that he’s so sharp with the world but so gentle with you. Weird that he lives in this fortress of wealth and power and still tells you to steal his shirts if you’re getting cold.

Your eyes drift toward the wardrobe.

Top shelf on the left, he said.

You imagine one of his massive shirts swallowing you as a whole, and snort softly.

Yeah.

You definitely pulled a mob-boss-looking, suit-wearing, ridiculously attentive gentleman who apparently worships the ground you lie naked on.

Weird. Very weird. But you’re not complaining. You’re just mentally haggling with the universe, offering to never ask for another favor again if it just promises not to reclaim its prize or realize he’s a solid ten and you’re way out of his league.

He told you he runs a company.

You imagine glass walls and long tables and men in suits who nod too quickly while he stands in front of them all in his suit, looking all delicious and hot. You imagine paperwork, meetings, a name etched into metal on an office door. He never corrects you. He only smiles in that small way of his—enigmatic, a little asymmetrical, a little careful, as if the smile is something he built from spare parts and polished until it gleamed.

You’ve been dating for a short time. And considering the mystery he surrounds himself with, you guess it’s going to take a while until you truly get to know him. Until he truly starts telling you how his day has been and what he has been up to—and what taking a call means in his business.

But he kisses as though he’s been starving in a snowstorm. As though warmth is an endangered species and your mouth is the last sanctuary. His hands are large and soothing, and they never wander without purpose. He touches and handles you like the first blossom of a century-plant, something that has spent a hundred years preparing to bloom for a single day. And he looks at you as if you are that miracle. As if you are the only soft thing in a life built of stone.

And so, you tell yourself, you can wait for him to be ready to talk.

You don’t know what he does after midnight. You only know he sometimes steps onto the balcony to take calls. His voice changes there. It drops. He doesn’t smooth over his words and instead lets the corners stay pointy. You just never catch his words. The only thing you can do is admire the way the city lights flicker behind him like they’re afraid of him. Or in awe.

And when he comes back inside, he presses his forehead to yours as if he’s returning from war.

Contemplating, you lie there for a moment longer, staring at the ceiling. Then you sit up.

It’s not cold, the room is perfectly climate-controlled in that rich-people way where seasons are merely decorative suggestions outside the window; but you suddenly want one of his shirts.

Not for warmth, but for him, for the smell of him, for the proof that this is all actually happening and you are actually here with him somewhere out there in this huge mansion, waiting to get his mouth back on you. For the possibility that his detergent—whatever luxury forest-scented nonsense it probably is—might trick your brain into thinking he’s still right there.

You glance toward the wardrobe.

It’s enormous, who would have guessed. Cathedral enormous. Dark wood doors that probably cost more than your childhood bedroom set. It suggests that Bucky owns multiple versions of the same devastatingly expensive suit.

You slide out of bed and pad across the carpet, which is so soft it feels apologetic for touching your feet. Putting on your underwear for comfort, you make your way over to his wardrobe. The doors open without making a single sound.

You step inside and it feels like even the air is filtered for perfection. It’s a humbling difference to your own apartment, where the dresser functions less like furniture and more like a high-stakes game of Tetris, with your favorite sweaters perpetually losing the battle against a jammed bottom drawer, and where finding a matching pair of socks requires the luck of a seasoned treasure hunter.

There are rows of shirts, jackets, trousers. Everything spaced just enough apart to breathe. Everything immaculate. A faint scent of sandalwood and something clean and expensive drifts forward to greet you.

You tilt your head up.

The shirt shelf is ambitious.

You stand on your toes but you don’t reach anything. You reach higher, basically for nothing. Your fingers waggle uselessly in the air, far away from touching anything.

You sigh.

Because obviously, the man built like a six-foot-something war monument thinks a shelf near the ceiling is perfectly reasonable.

You walk out of the wardrobe and glance back toward the bed. Then toward the chair near the window.

His jacket is draped there. It looks like it belongs at the head of a mahogany table, brokering peace or declaring war with a single sharp lapel. And in between there’s the shirt he’s tossed aside as soon as you both entered his room, with an untidiness that feels like a glitch in his otherwise perfect Matrix.

It’s the shirt he didn’t bother to put back on when leaving you here. You grin.

Well.

That works too. Perfectly, even.

You wander over, the carpet not letting any sound free. The chair sits near the tall windows, moonlight cascading across the floor in long silver rectangles. It looks graceful somehow. His jacket catches the light along its seams, and you shiver at the thought of how elegant and powerful it makes him look.

You reach for it, intending to lift it aside and claim the bunched shirt.

But the moment you grab the jacket, something feels off. It’s heavy. Not normal-jacket heavy. Weighted. You frown faintly, adjusting your grip. You pick it up fully, wanting to fold it neatly, when something slips out of it.

There’s a short, dense thud against the floor. It makes you freeze.

The object lands on the dark carpet inches from your toe; a short, metallic punctuation mark in the silence. It drinks in the chandelier’s glow and spits it back out with a cold, silver arrogance. It ignites an unmistakable shimmer that makes the air in the room feel ten degrees colder.

Your brain takes a second to translate the shape.

It’s a gun.

You stare at it.

The word sits adamantly on the floor of your mind and turns the room into a crime scene before anything has even happened. It’s a sharp fracture in the timeline—there is the version of you from five seconds ago, and the version of you staring at a hunk of lethal metal.

This thing is real. Very real. Not movie-real. Not plastic-prop-real. More like heavy-metal-object-that-could-alter-the-entire-direction-of-a Tuesday-real.

Your knees grow weak and you crouch down so very slowly. Who knows, maybe sudden movements can already trigger it. You’ve never seen a real gun. You never expected you would, not like this, at least. This feels pretty surreal.

The jacket still hangs half off the chair behind you. The shirt you wanted is crumpled innocently beneath it, but you’re not grabbing it.

Your attention remains on the gun. You don’t touch it.

It’s not like your heart is racing noticeably, but there is a new tightness in your chest and it’s making you feel as though your thoughts all have quietly stood up at once.

Because. Right. Of course.

You know Bucky runs a company.

You know he’s wealthy enough to own a mansion that probably requires a map and a tour guide.

You know he has guards. Actual guards. You knew all that.

But with this gun sitting there on the carpet, it feels like looking through a new lens that snaps the blurry facts you know of this man into a slightly different focus.

If it’s frightening, you’re not sure, but it’s definitely clarifying.

You sit back on your heels for a moment, staring at it. He carried this in his jacket pocket. Casually. Just around. Like a wallet. Or keys.

Your mind tries to rewind through the past weeks. The way he watches exits. The midnight phone calls. The men who seem oddly respectful around him. The commanding note in his voice when he tells someone to do something.

You bite your lip, a hectic internal editor trying to bridge the gap between the little you know about the man and the metal you’ve found. You tell yourself not to panic, because panicking won’t give you any answers. And there’s no need to panic, because he’s just a man with power, a man who’s a boss and bosses tend to have people who don’t like them.

That’s no reason to use a gun on anyone, but it’s probably just a formality. A piece of insurance stored away like a fire extinguisher you hope to never use. Maybe it’s not meant for violence at all, just for peace of mind.

He’s protective. You’ve seen and felt it. Just last week, he was absolutely livid, after one of his guards stepped out of line with one of his maids, who’s this sweet old woman who had been with his family since his father’s time. He was in such a blind tailspin over it, and your soothing touch was the only thing that was able to pull him back to earth.

He would build a wall around everyone he cares about just to keep the wind from blowing too hard. Perhaps this gun is just part of that wall, a safety he keeps close so he never has to feel helpless. It doesn't have to mean he’s dangerous. It just means he’s prepared. It’s a precaution, a tool, a just in case that will likely collect dust until the end of time.

You try to settle the thought, but it feels like trying to pin a map against your chest in a storm; the harder you flatten your palms against the paper, the more wind tunnels through the gaps, ballooning the center and snatching the corners from your grip. If you manage to squash one section still, the air pockets behind the rest, turning the whole thing into a thrashing thing that fights to fold itself back up or fly away entirely. No matter what you do, no matter how much you lean into it, the wind will always be a second faster. The wind will always have the upper hand, hollowing out the space between your hands and the whole truth you are trying to read.

You just have to believe that the man who touches his girl so carefully is the same man who would only ever use that steel to keep the world at bay.

Your gaze lingers on it.

You don’t know much about guns. Your knowledge is mostly assembled from movies, news articles, and the vague understanding that they belong firmly in the category of things you should probably treat with respect. And it definitely belongs to a world you’ve never really stepped into before.

But apparently, Bucky lives there.

You glance toward the door he disappeared through. This is the guy who permitted you to steal his clothes, who pressed a kiss to your forehead with the softest lips. When he looks at you, it’s with that specific focus, that startled sort of wonder that always makes you feel so over-exposed, but also exponentially adored.

Your chest softens despite yourself. Still.

You eye the gun again, and one thing has become very clear in the last thirty seconds. You might be dating a man you know less about than you thought.

And that realization sits in the room with you now, waiting for you to act on it.

But you don’t know how. You simply keep staring. The chandelier light kisses its metal edges until they gleam faintly, indifferent to the fact that your brain is currently eroding into a new shape.

You swallow, and even that sounds strange in the imposing space, like it wandered too far from home.

Leaving this thing on the floor feels wrong.

And if Bucky comes back and sees it there... You don’t know why, but the thought makes your stomach tighten.

So you reach down, only now seeing that your hands are slightly wavering. Your fingers close around the grip, and the first thing you notice is the weight. It’s heavier than it looks, solid in a way that makes your palm immediately aware that this object was designed with very serious intentions.

You lift it slowly. Nothing happens, obviously. The world doesn’t explode. The chandelier doesn’t shatter. The mansion continues breathing its wealthy breath around you.

But holding it still feels like stepping one inch deeper into a room you didn’t know existed.

You turn it slightly, meaning only to orient it so you can slide it neatly back into the inside pocket of his jacket, but you spot an engraving, small letters carved into the dark handle.

JBB

Your brow furrows. You stare at them for a moment, tracing the edges with your eyes.

The metal around the letters looks softened. Not scratched exactly, but worn in the way objects get when they’ve lived in someone’s hand for a long time. Like a favorite pen. Or a well-loved watch.

If guns can look old, this one does. It’s not antique-old, but familiar-old.

You tilt your head. JBB. You try to assemble a name around the letters. The only name you know for the man currently pacing somewhere in this mansion making serious phone calls is Bucky.

Just Bucky.

You don’t know his last name, you realize suddenly, and you don’t like that.

You know his favorite whiskey. You know the exact shape of the scar on his shoulder. You know the way he presses his nose into your hair when he tries to calm himself down.

But his last name leaves a blank space in your mind. You glance down at the gun again.

JBB.

Maybe it belongs to someone else. Someone with a J. Jake? James? John? Jacob?

Maybe it’s a family thing. Maybe it belonged to his father. Maybe it’s one of those rich-man- heirloom objects that get passed down through generations alongside cufflinks and complicated legacies.

You exhale quietly.

That explanation sounds reasonable enough that you decide to borrow it for the moment.

Very carefully, and with explicit intent, you slide the gun back into the inside pocket of his jacket. The fabric settles around it like it knows exactly where it’s needed.

You smooth the lapel automatically.

There.

No evidence.

Your fingers linger on the jacket for a second longer than you want.

It still smells like him. Clean soap. Dried tobacco. Something stronger beneath it that you can’t put a name to but always recognize immediately as Bucky.

You step back, and suddenly the room feels different. Not threatening, but it does feel larger still.

Because now your brain is busy counting the things you don’t know.

You don’t know his last name.

You don’t really know what his company does.

You don’t know why men knock on his bedroom door looking nervous.

You don’t know why he carries a gun like it’s just another accessory.

You rub your arms lightly, because now there is a faint prickle of awareness crawling along your thoughts and it is spreading throughout your body.

You’ve been dating for six weeks. Is this long enough to demand answers? To justify interrogations? Gosh, you’re not sure. You’re not sure about a lot of things right now, really. You’ve been floating through the beginning part—the sweet, dizzy, honeymoon fog where the only facts that matter are the ones you feel.

But now there’s a small string of sunlight sliding through the fog. A string of curiosity. You turn back toward the bed where your clothes lie in a small, careless pile.

Maybe you’re overthinking this.

Maybe.

Still.

You pull your shirt over your head, the fabric rustling softly in the quiet room. Your jeans follow, and then your fingers reach automatically for the necklace resting on the nightstand.

The pearls catch the light when you lift them. Bucky gave it to you two weeks ago.

It’s delicate. Real pearls, because he just can. Everything about him seems to come with an expensive quality attached.

You remember the way he looked when he gave it to you. Almost shy, which was deeply unfair considering how the man is built.

Saw it and thought of you, he’d said. Think about you all the time, he’d added.

Which had melted approximately seventy percent of your internal structure. You fasten the necklace and touch it lightly now.

Gentleman.

Ridiculously good in bed.

Mysterious.

Possibly carrying engraved guns.

You sigh.

You feel a little guilty. Because what you’re about to do is technically snooping. And snooping is not great. Your mother would absolutely deliver a lecture about boundaries if she could see you right now.

You glance around the massive room again. The desk by the window. The bookshelves. The curated neatness of everything.

You bite your lip. You’re not looking for secrets. You’re just looking for context. A clue. A name.

Something that tells you who Bucky is when he isn’t kissing your forehead and telling you to raid his closet.

Your feet move before your conscience can finish filing complaints.

Your steps make no sound as you move across the carpet, wandering deeper into the room and scanning the shelves and surfaces with a caution that can’t suppress your intrigue.

You don’t need all the answers. Just one or two. So you start with the obvious places.

Drawers.

It feels less intrusive somehow; opening something that was clearly meant to be opened. You move slowly, like a guest in a museum after hours, careful fingers, quiet breath, a mild sense that the walls might be watching.

The first drawer slides out with a wooden noise and even that sounds rich. Inside, there are watches. Several of them, lined neatly in velvet compartments. Dark metal, silver, leather straps. You don’t know brands, but you know enough to guess that each one probably costs more than your car.

You close the drawer.

The next one holds cufflinks. Rows of them. Small polished things that look important and serious and entirely uninterested in your investigation.

And it only goes on this way. You open drawer after drawer, and there is nothing strange. Nothing suspicious. Just the belongings of a very wealthy man who liked things neat.

Your shoulders loosen a little. Maybe you overreacted. Maybe the gun is just a rich man's security thing. The guards downstairs carry them too, probably. It doesn’t automatically mean anything bad.

You open another drawer.

Paperwork. Boring looking things. A passport tucked neatly inside a leather sleeve. You hesitate for half a second before closing it again.

That one definitely feels like crossing a line.

You step away from the wardrobe and wander toward the nightstand instead.

The wood gleams darkly under the chandelier.

You pull open the top drawer.

More ordinary things. Wallets. Sunglasses. A small tray of rings.

Further back in the drawer, you find a small stack of Polaroids. You fish them out, because you recognize the first picture. It’s a picture of Bucky and you from a few weeks ago. You had found an old Polaroid camera and wanted to try it out, practically levering him into the frame while he grumbled about how he wasn’t photogenic which was total bullshit in your eyes. But he isn’t even looking at the camera in the photo. He is looking at you with a fond little half-smile.

Looking at a few others, you realize they are of you. All of them. One is a shot of your back as you walk toward a sunset, another is a blurred profile of you sleeping on his shoulder.

There is a warmth prickling at the back of your neck and you feel something slacken inside your stomach as you slowly lower the photos back where they were.

Nothing about all of this screams crime lord. Your nerves ease another notch.

You almost laugh at yourself. Your brain likes to get dramatic. Bucky is archiving your relationship, he is sweet and protective and tender and just—

As you are about to pull your hand out, your fingers brush against something cold and metallic near the back of the drawer.

You pause.

It’s partially hidden beneath a folded black cloth. Just the faint glint of a chain catching the light.

Curiosity taps gently on your shoulder.

You slide the cloth aside and notice the silver chain. It’s thin and tangled loosely like it’s been dropped there without much thought.

You hook your finger under it and lift. Something heavier at the end slips free. Two small metal plates fall against each other with a quiet clink.

Dog tags.

You blink.

That’s not strange, exactly. Lots of people keep sentimental things. Maybe Bucky served in the military. That would even make him hotter, to be real. But it does feel a little hurtful that he didn’t share this information with you.

You turn the tags over idly, expecting to see a name you don’t recognize. However, though, you do recognize the name that’s neatly spelled out on the metal plate. And it has the air in your lungs turn to stone, refusing to move a single inch.

James Buchanan Barnes.

Your stomach drops in such a harsh way, there is no ending to the fall. Your internal organs are unmoored and everything about you feels dizzy and weightless. It’s like stepping down a staircase that isn’t there. You’re still gripping the metal, but the connection between your brain and your hands has been cut, and now your fingers feel distant and wooden, filled with a needling sensation you know comes right before they start to shake.

And they do shake.

A thin tremor at first, then worse, until the tags begin to chatter against each other. Each sharp nick of the steel feels so biting and loud, broadcasting the exact moment you are losing it.

Your mind flips through memory like rifling a deck of cards too fast.

News headlines.

Conversations overheard in cafés.

Podcasts about organized crime.

New York’s most notorious mob boss.

The man whose name floats through the city like a ghost story told after midnight. James Buchanan Barnes.

JBB.

Heat rushes up the back of your neck while the rest of you goes ice-cold. It feels like standing in two climates at once—your skin clammy, your spine rigid, a cold sweat blooming between your shoulder blades.

Every breath you pull in is labored and metallic, coating your lungs in a film of disbelief that makes your chest ache. You can almost hear the gears of your reality grinding to a convulsive, screeching halt, stripping the teeth right off the life you thought you were living.

Your pulse is a furious SOS tapped out against the underside of your throat; a muddled, thrumming reminder that you are standing in the epicenter of a storm you didn't even know was brewing. You feel thin, translucent, like a sketch of a person that someone could erase with a single, hard look.

Your fingers tighten around the dog tags. No.

No no no.

Your brain scrambles to reject it. Because that’s outrageous.

That man—the one people call dangerous in all kinds of languages, the one whose operations stretch across half the city, the one who apparently runs things so carefully that no one has ever managed to pin a crime on him—

That man is a myth.

A shadow.

A name in newspapers. No photos. No confirmed identity.

Just whispers.

James Buchanan Barnes.

JBB

You stare at the letters again. You recall the way his initials were engraved in the gun.

Your mind scrambles for explanations—wrong tags, coincidence, someone else with the same name—but every attempt at reason breaks apart in your hands.

Bucky. James. Bucky. James.

James Bucky Barnes.

Your eyes drift slowly across the room.

The suits.

The mansion.

The guards.

The midnight phone calls.

The seriousness.

The gun.

Your hands are shaking tremendously. JBB.

James.

Buchanan.

Barnes.

Your mind repeats it over and over again. The math is suddenly very simple.

He kissed your forehead fifteen minutes ago. He told you to steal his shirt if you get cold. He gifted you present after present because he simply could. He spoke your name as if he had ingrained it on his tongue.

He is the most dangerous man in the city.

Something uncomfortably glaring and stinging climbs up the back of your neck, and it’s making you feel watched by a predator you once mistook for a protector.

You’ve heard the stories. Everyone has. Illegal shipments. Rival gangs disappearing overnight. Entire businesses quietly changing ownership after one meeting with Barnes.

And yet there is no evidence. Never evidence. Just the name. James Buchanan Barnes. The general public doesn’t know what he looks like. There are no confirmed photographs. Just rumors.

But you know exactly what he looks like. You know the way his hair falls into his eyes when he’s tired. You know the scars on his body, know his reactions to your lips on them. You know the exact sound he makes when you laugh unexpectedly.

You are standing in the bedroom of the most notorious mob boss in New York. Wearing the pearl necklace he gave you.

Sleeping in his bed.

Dating him.

For fucks sake, he’s been inside you. You came on the most wanted dick in this city.

The walls of his seemingly huge room, so pristine and elegant, now seem to turn from a sanctuary into a beautifully curated cage.

You have been falling for the most dangerous man in the entire city and until two minutes ago, you had absolutely no idea.

Your hand moves to put the dog tags back in their place, but it’s like you’ve switched to autopilot. Your fingers operate with a sense of detachment while your mind is still a mile behind, screaming.

You lower the chain back into the velvet-lined dark with a tremble you can’t shake. You should crush it in your fist, should throw it at the ground and stomp around on it, should spit on it for what this man did—to the world, to you—but all you can do is handle it with a carefulness that is usually reserved for unexploded ordnance.

The metal hits the bottom with a tiny clink. The sound is so small, yet it feels like a heavy iron gate slamming shut between who you were five minutes ago and who you are now.

You slide the drawer shut, the wood-on-wood glide sounding like a long, slow exhale of a secret that’s finally been caught. You do it with agonizing slowness, as if by moving quietly enough, you can trick the universe into rewinding the last sixty seconds, or rather the last months so you could have avoided stumbling into his strong but deceiving arms.

And immediately, your brain begins doing what brains do best when frightened—it rewrites the past with fresh ink.

Everything changes. Everything. You look around the bedroom again. But it’s not the same room anymore. It’s not a beautiful space where you spent evenings laughing and tangled in sheets with a man who handled you like he was scared to hurt you.

Now it’s a room belonging to James Buchanan Barnes. Mob boss. Ruler of the underworld. The man people whisper about like saying his name too loudly might summon him like the devil.

Your stomach is curled into a hard stone, your fingers still numb. And suddenly every memory of the last few weeks starts recoding itself.

You remember the first gift he gave you. Not the pearls. The flowers. Three dozen white lilies delivered to your apartment door a day after your first date.

You’d laughed at the absurdity of it, calling him to tell him that this is too much, way too much, but he had smirked over the phone, so soft and unabashed, only replying that you deserve it, that you deserve way more than that.

At the time it felt romantic. But now your mind shears the memory, leaving the colors bled and the angles wrong. You turn all the memories of him over in the light until the shadows fall differently, until they take on shapes that start to build a picture.

Maybe it wasn’t romance. Maybe it was a strategy. Because that’s what men like him do, right? They buy people. They build golden cages out of small, glittering gestures.

You rub your arms slowly.

Another memory surfaces. The restaurant. The one with the insane skyline view where the waiters treated him like visiting royalty.

You’d joked about it. Do you secretly own this place?

He’d smiled that slow, mysterious smile of his and simply offered you more wine. He had looked so pleased.

Tension coils behind your ribs, but your mind keeps going.

The necklace. The pearls. One month together and he gives you something that probably cost more than your entire wardrobe.

You had protested. He’d looked almost offended. He pouted at you. He looked so adorably soft, so hopeful you would take this gift from him, that you thought it to be sweet.

Maybe a little over-the-top.

But that was just Bucky, is what you thought. A little intense. A little larger than life.

However, now the thought hatches, its spindly legs prickling against your focus.

He wasn’t spoiling you, he was buying you. Buying your affection. Buying your trust. Buying your silence.

Heat floods your face. Shame webs across your heart in a dark lace of regret. You feel so embarrassed. It spreads across your whole chest and even stains the air around you.

Because you fell for it. You idiot fell for it.

Hook, line, and embarrassingly enthusiastic sinker.

You believed the soft way he looked at you. The way his voice dropped when he said your name. The way he kissed you like he had been wandering the desert and you were the first water he’d seen in years.

You believed the way he listened to you ramble about dumb things like your coworkers, your favorite movies, the stupid podcast you liked.

You believed the way he touched you. Gentle and devoted, and it all seemed so loving.

Your throat is tight, turned into parchment, the soft tissue shrinking and hardening until it feels ready to crack. Because all that might have been a performance. A simple performance to fool you.

Of course, he would know how to act. Of course, he would know how to charm someone. Men like that survive on manipulation.

But you don’t understand why it’s you. Why you of all people? You’re not wealthy. Not powerful. Not connected.

Which somehow makes it all the more humiliating because maybe that’s exactly why. You imagine the possibilities, and each one feels worse than the last.

Maybe he needed someone clean. Someone with no ties to his world. Someone who could unknowingly hold something for him. Transport something. Sign something. Test something.

Maybe you were never a girlfriend, but a tool. A pawn. A convenient, smiling civilian. Someone harmless enough that no one would suspect anything.

Your hand flies to your mouth to stifle a sound that hasn’t even formed, but you cannot lock out your mind, and a keener thought pushes through.

What if he didn’t need you for anything practical at all? What if you were just entertainment?

A normal girl to play house with for a few weeks. A soft distraction between grating business meetings and dangerous deals.

Your eyes and cheeks burn at the thought that somewhere behind those soft eyes and tender hands, he might have been laughing at how easily you melted. How quickly you trusted him.

You feel sick. Your stomach heaves in a frantic attempt to purge the very air you breathe. It drags liquid heat up from your gut to your searing cheeks.

Your gaze drifts to the chair by the window. His jacket still hangs there. Inside it, the gun rests quietly.

Your stomach flips again.

Because suddenly it feels impossible that the man who carried that gun tonight was the same man who tucked the blanket around you earlier, who swiped his tongue against your pussy this deliciously and stopped you from hiding your reactions.

It was simply a power play, and god, are you a stupid girl.

You hear his voice in your head again. Stay here. Lock the door.

A shiver runs down your spine. Because now the words sound different. There is none of that protective and caring cadence. All you hear is a command. Containment. Showing you he is the one with the power, he is the one dealing the cards.

Oh, god. What have you gotten yourself into. This is definitely the worst thing yet.

You know you have to get the hell out of here. High-tail it. Let your panic lend wings to your feet to carry you the fuck out of the devil’s quarters.

You absolutely cannot still be in this room when he comes back. Pretending you didn’t notice the gun was one thing. Pretending you didn’t discover who he actually is, is another thing entirely.

The lie would be too large. It would sit between you like a loaded weapon much deeper and more fatal than that damned gun.

Your pulse is a vibrating scream inside your throat, your chest, your whole body, because what happens when he sees that you know?

What does a man like James Buchanan Barnes do with loose ends?

Fear and dread pin your lungs against your ribs and make the hairs on your arms stand up.

You don’t want to find out. You grab your phone from the nightstand with shaking hands. Inside your mind, your thoughts are colliding and yelling at one another, memories reshaping themselves into something darker.

He was so worshipful. So attentive. So careful with you.

And it hurts. It hurts so fucking bad.

He really is the best actor you’ve ever met.

You glance once more around the room. The bed. The wardrobe. The luxury of everything.

Then you head for the door. Because whatever this was, whatever he was, you need to be gone before James Buchanan Barnes comes back.

There is that low, now seemingly threatening rattle vibrating through the wood of the door. Somewhere down the long dark of the hallway, a mess of voices spills out—too muffled to catch the words, just a low drone. Then there’s the sound of footsteps on the marble, over and over, like a pendulum, until it gets softened by the rugs.

It’s eerie how this place just functions. No clanking, no friction. Just the invisible, midnight grinding of a house that knows exactly how to keep itself running while everyone else is dead to the world.

Bucky's house.

No—your mind corrects strictly.

James Buchanan Barnes’s house.

You inhale slowly, steadying yourself, and turn the handle.

The door gives a tiny, smug click, and you step out slowly, looking around to see nobody.

Ahead, the hallway just stretches out forever, all that dark, expensive wood shimmering under these wall lamps that just stare at you, glowing like something waiting for its turn to speak.

It’s wide enough that you expect a massive echo, but the carpet is so thick it just eats your footsteps. It’s unsettling. The whole place feels like it’s sucked in its gut, just holding its breath, waiting to see if you’ll decide to jump through the floor-to-ceiling windows to your right in your desperation to leave this place.

The door closes behind you, and even though it doesn’t really make a sound, you flinch so hard, your little jump through the window plan might be accidental.

Your heart begins to pound harder now that you’ve left the safety—no, the illusion—of the bedroom.

Because this house feels much larger and colder out here. Maybe you should have taken the gun with you. But you don’t know how to use such a thing, because you’re a normal person, and normal people don’t carry those things around like an innocent handbag.

You take a few unsure steps and it feels like you’ve stepped backstage at a theater and suddenly realized the play you were enjoying might actually be a crime scene.

You know the way to the front door.

He walked you through the mansion when you first visited, his hand resting lightly at the small of your back, guiding you through endless rooms and hallways with an easy familiarity that felt charming at the time.

But you know better and realize he was just showing you the cage. But at least you were paying attention. Every turn, every hallway he bragged about is burned into your head. That charming tour just became the only map out of here.

Two hallways down. Past the staircase. Through the long gallery with the ample paintings.

Then the front entrance.

Simple.

Except for the fact that his mansion is apparently populated by a small army.

Maids. Guards. Staff who move through the house like quiet satellites orbiting the gravity of one man.

These were all signs you simply overlooked because he’s handsome. You bite the inside of your cheek out of frustration with yourself. How can one person be so fucking blind.

You start walking.

Your footsteps are soft, but your heartbeat is anything but.

A maid appears at the far end of the corridor just as you round the corner, and everything inside you locks up.

She pauses when she sees you, instantly throwing you a smile that genuinely looks pleasant. She recognizes you. You don’t recognize her. Your stomach turns and turns until it is knotted too tight to even be able to move.

“Miss,” she starts politely. “Aren’t you feeling well?”

You force a smile that you hope doesn’t look like it’s made entirely of nerves and the urge to run down this hall, disappearing out of sight.

“Hi,” you say, keeping your voice light, a little apologetic. “Sorry— I just... I think I need some fresh air. I have a bit of a headache.”

The lie comes out smoother than you expected. Maybe panic is a good acting coach.

The maid’s expression softens immediately. She even looks a little too concerned for you for whatever reason.

“Of course,” she says sweetly, and you actually feel bad for lying to her. Does she know who she’s working for? Does she know who you are supposed to be for the man who is her boss? Maybe you could ask her. Maybe she would shoot you for it, who knows. Maybe everyone in this godforsaken building owns a gun, ready to use it. “Would you like me to call the boss—”

“No,” you interrupt quickly, then soften the urgency with a small laugh. “No, it’s fine. He’s busy with work, right? I don’t want to bother him.”

You hate how natural the sentence sounds. How easily you can say work when you now know that word hides a thousand darker things.

The maid nods, but she does seem a little hesitant. “Of course.” Thankfully, she leaves it at that.

With the wish for you to feel better soon, and an awkward thank you from your side, you continue walking.

One corridor.

Then another.

Your mind keeps racing ahead of your body, building plans like emergency scaffolding.

It all suddenly looks so terrifyingly menacing. Especially in the dark. It feels so much like a trap. The lights are down and the shadows feel like they’re actually reaching for you. There’s this dreadful, suffocating weight pressing out from the walls, like the house itself is holding a grudge. Your skin is crawling, and the air feels too thick to actually get into your lungs. It’s stale, as though it’s been sitting in a basement for a hundred years, and now the building has finally stopped pretending to be a home and turned into a giant cave with only dead ends so you will never have a way out and will end up as a rotting corpse in some forgotten corner.

The dark walls feel like they are crowding your shoulders. Those deep red carpets are laid out just a little too perfectly, too insistent on keeping you in the center of the floor. Walking down those corridors feels like being threaded through a needle.

And it’s not that the place is ever actually quiet, it’s just that every sound here is on a leash. There is the clink of glass coming from somewhere deep in the gut of the mansion. The dry, dusty thud of footsteps on rugs that are probably more worth than your life in the eyes of the mob boss. Voices that stay low and thick, never quite hitting the walls. It’s too disciplined. It’s a silence that’s been trained to keep its mouth shut.

He probably won’t notice you slinking out of his home. However, what he will definitely notice, is that you will never see him again, or answer his texts or calls. So that will be a problem.

The man owns a gun, and whatever else he can kill people with. So you can’t go home, is what you think as you descend the wide staircase. When you get out of here, you can’t flee to your apartment.

Because he knows where you live. He picked you up there. Dropped you off there. Walked you to your door like the perfect gentleman.

You almost laugh at the bitter irony.

The most dangerous man in the city knows your address. He played the perfect gentleman just to find out where and how you live.

Which means going home would be like walking back into a trap you’ve just barely escaped.

But you know just who is badass enough to help you out of this situation. Natasha.

Natasha lives across town. Natasha answers calls at ungodly hours. Natasha once helped you move apartments at two in the morning with nothing but her wry commentary and a borrowed truck.

You could stay with her. For a few days, weeks, maybe even longer. You know she won’t mind. She’s just that kind of friend.

You could figure things out from there.

Your hand tightens slightly around your phone as you reach the bottom of the stairs.

You’ll text her once you’re outside.

Not before.

Because paranoia is part of your bloodstream now, and who knows who might glance at your screen, who might casually mention later that they saw you messaging someone.

So you keep walking until the entrance hall opens before you like the lobby of a five-star hotel. It’s extensive, with vast floors and tall ceilings and capacious doors at the far end like the exit to another world, a world you want so desperately to be a part of again.

You wipe your clammy hands on your thighs and try to mentally prepare yourself for this last step.

You cross the obsidian floor toward the doors with what you hope resembles casual determination.

Not too fast. Fast looks guilty. Not too slow. Slow looks hesitant.

You aim for something in between—the walk of a woman with a mild headache and absolutely no catastrophic revelations fluttering around inside her skull.

God, everything about the place seems so much darker now. The darkness even slinks upward into the walls, which are paneled in matte-finished ebony that drinks the light before it can reach the corners. There is no glow, not the one you imagined when you first walked in here, hand in hand with a man you thought you could fall so deeply for and would be safe with. But everything now feels iterative and cold and to feel safe means to leave and never return.

The guards notice you immediately.

Two of them stand beside the colossal front doors, tall shapes in dark suits, shoulders squared in that particular way men stand when their job description includes the possibility of violence. They’ve always been polite to you before. Quietly respectful. The way staff are supposed to be with someone important to the man who owns the house. You only now know the direction this importance takes.

They both straighten slightly when you approach.

“Ma’am,” the left one says with a deep voice that gives nothing away.

You offer another careful smile, layering it with just enough exhaustion to make your earlier excuse believable.

“I’m heading out,” you say, keeping your tone breezy, like this is the most normal thing in the world to do in the middle of the night after spending hours in their boss’s bed. “I have a headache, and don’t want to interrupt Bucky while he’s working.”

Your voice nearly stumbles over the name.

Bucky.

The harmless version.

The one that belongs to the man who kissed you like you mattered. Not the one attached to James Buchanan Barnes.

The guard on the left side of the door glances at the other one. It’s subtle, but you see it. A quick trade of communication.

Then he looks back at you.

“Boss aware you’re leaving, ma’am?”

The way he uses the word boss makes bile rise up your throat. You are actually getting a headache.

You force yourself to keep smiling.

“Oh, he’s busy,” you say lightly, waving a hand as if this entire situation is mildly inconvenient but otherwise harmless. “I would feel bad for bothering him while he’s working. And I could use some fresh air and a little rest. So I thought I would just head home.”

Neither guard moves. The doors remain closed.

You swallow tightly, and it feels like there’s a stone coming down your throat along with it, which makes your limbs feel heavier.

“I will call him,” the second guard offers, already reaching toward the small device clipped at his belt.

“No,” you blurt too quickly.

Both men look at you again, and your pulse tumbles when you feel a subtle shift sliding into place, into the invisible perimeter around this house, the machinery of control that keeps things exactly where James Buchanan Barnes wants them.

Your throat feels dry. Your voice tries to find a hiding place inside the hallway of your throat. You pull yourself together as best you can. “That’s really not necessary,” you add, softer this time, trying to patch over the crack you just made in your own story. “It’s just a headache. I don’t want him to be distracted by that. You can just let him know I left once he is done.”

The first guard studies you more closely now. He doesn’t seem suspicious exactly, but he does seem cautious.

And suddenly the hallway behind you feels very long. Too long. Because if they call him, and he walks in here while you’re standing at the door trying to escape his mansion—

Your thoughts spiral into vile possibilities faster than you can control them.

What does a mob boss do to a girl like you when he realizes she has discovered his identity? Certainly no good things.

Your heart pounds so loudly, it’s a single roar all around your skull. You feel hot, so hot, you could burst into flames.

The second guard lifts the radio slightly, eyes on you. “Sir—”

“Baby?”

The voice comes from behind you and it sounds so soft. Confused.

Your insides startle into a panic so bright, you turn blind for a second.

Your entire body freezes up.

Baby.

A freezing shiver breaks loose at the base of your skull and slides all the way down to your heels.

Baby.

The word traces the line of your back, making every hair stand up.

Baby.

You know you have to react in other ways than fear to your so-called boyfriend, so you turn around slowly, trying to unpin your strained expression.

He’s standing halfway across the hall.

Except, now he looks like a stranger.

While he was gone and taking that business phone call, he had changed into one of his perfectly tailored suits. The charcoal wool is stiff and sits snugly, and it would have ignited a heated flutter in your lower belly just an hour earlier, but now it just makes him look malevolent. He looks terrifying in his elegance. So symmetrical, your lungs are wheezing out of sheer fright.

The sweat on your skin, once warm from him, has now turned into a layer of ice. You look at him and think that no, this man doesn’t love you. All you have been to him is a soft room he stepped into to wash off the smell of whatever he does in that suit.

The business he talked about isn’t spreadsheets and meetings. It’s the way the two guards behind you have gone absolutely still, like dogs waiting for a whistle.

He looks dangerous. You have never associated Bucky with direct danger, only with protecting you from danger. But this is not a boyfriend’s posture, it’s a king’s. Even that softly confused frown he is giving you doesn’t make him seem less threatening. It’s just the look of a man who owns everything he sees and knows what to do with it.

Bucky.

Except now your brain whispers the other name.

James.

Every inch of that expensive tailoring screams that he could have you erased before his morning coffee, and he wouldn’t even get a crease in his trousers.

While you were falling in love, he was just managing a distraction.

Your heart is breaking all over again.

“What are you doing down here?” His voice sounds the same as always, and yet it doesn’t.

The guards immediately straighten although he is talking to you, though you wish he wouldn’t.

“Sir,” one of them starts, but Bucky lifts a hand slightly without even looking at them, silencing whatever explanation they were about to offer.

His eyes are on you. Only you. Concern tightens his face almost immediately.

There is a cold needle threading through your nerves. You feel like a deer that has been eating out of a hunter’s hand, only just now noticing the rifle leaning against the tree.

“I—” Your voice nearly betrays you, cracking halfway through the first syllable. Act. You have to act. You drag in a breath and force your shoulders to loosen, shoving your face into something resembling mild embarrassment rather than existential terror. “I wasn’t feeling well,” you lie, carefully smoothing your tone. “I didn’t want to interrupt you. It seemed pretty important.” You look toward the door, turning your body slightly with it in a gesture of longing. “So I planned on just heading home.”

His brows only pull further together, his expression turning deeper, and it doesn’t make this better at all. “You’re the only important thing, sweetheart. You know that.” His voice is low, but how does he manage to make it sound this gentle? Even soft.

Oh god, he’s coming closer. Of course, he’s coming closer, he’s your boyfriend, pretending to be your boyfriend, pretending to be worried, because his girl allegedly has a headache and wants to leave when he promised earlier to continue pleasing her in bed and asked her to stay and lock the door behind him because he doesn’t expect her to leave in the middle of the night.

But that doesn’t make it any easier for you to handle, doesn’t make your body react less in the horrifying way that this scary man is moving toward you, and he doesn’t know you know what kind of scary he is.

You feel your body fight against itself. You want to swirl around, run, bolt, fly through the door outside into the night, never to be seen again. Or at least not by him and his people. But you can’t. You have to stay, you have to remain planted to the floor. Even taking one step back would be a fatal mistake.

And suddenly he’s right there with all his tallness and built, and he still looks warm, but so much more intimidating.

You feel your insides shrink into themselves, your heart slipping into a corner somewhere deep.

The sheer scale of him in that suit makes your stomach drop. He is not a man, he is an entire system of brutality hidden behind a charming smile and gold cufflinks.

You shiver at the fact that your boyfriend could end a life with a nod of his head, and then come home and press his face into your neck as if his hands were clean.

“You’re not feeling well?” His voice drops into a frequency that is meant to be gentle and soothing, but for you, it just sounds like the rumble of an engine. The furrow in his brow grows shadows on his forehead. His eyes shift between yours so fast and piercing, with such a concentrated focus, scanning for the source of your pain as if he could kill it for you.

His hand comes up instinctively, the same way it always does when he’s worried about you, or when he’s not. It’s just normal for him to touch you. But watching his hand move toward you this time makes your back stiffen and a ring of alarm sounds out in your skull, shrill and poignant.

His fingers brush your cheek.

Your skin crawls of its own accord, and you flinch. You force your reaction to be small, but you can’t suppress it entirely. Your brain blanks, and your heart strikes high.

His hand stills, and so does your heart as it feels like.

Bucky notices everything. You guess it comes in handy with being the most wanted crime boss in the city.

His eyes sharpen slightly, and his concern turns more piercing. He looks at his hand still hovering awkwardly, then at you. His eyes are distraught, hinting at something deeper that just broke in two. And he looks so deeply puzzled.

“Hey,” he lets out, and it sounds a little raspy. You scramble.

“I’m sorry,” you breathe quickly, forcing a small laugh that sounds thin even to your own ears. “I’m just a little dizzy, I think.”

He studies you for a long moment.

The guards are silent now and you feel them watching from behind your back.

The house feels too quiet, too attentive, too alert.

James’ hand lowers slowly, though his gaze doesn’t leave your face.

“You’re pale,” he acknowledges, his voice grainy. He sounds like he is holding his breath.

You shrug weakly. “Yeah, well. Not my best look.”

He’s not smiling, and you start sweating. How did you never notice just how scary this man looks.

He’s thinking. You can see it. Pieces moving behind that stormy gaze. Your heart hammers harder.

Please don’t see it.

Please don’t see that you know.

He exhales slowly, then reaches for your hand, and he doesn’t do it possessively, nor roughly, just tenderly closing his fingers around yours.

“Come with me,” he says quietly, and it could sound like a plea if he weren’t the man that he is.

Your skin is a furnace. You might explode. You force a shaky breath, praying he doesn’t hear the way your heart is trying to kick its way out of your ribs.

“Bucky, I really just—”

“I know,” he cuts in softly, but there is something thick and hunted in the way he talks. “Just a minute.”

He looms over you with his whole presence and those intensely fevered eyes and he sucks the oxygen clean out of your lungs.

He nods toward the hallway behind him.

“My office is right there. We’ll sit down for a second, make sure you’re okay. And if you think I’d let you go home alone with a headache you can think again, doll.”

Doll.

God, you really have been stupid. Doll.

This is not a sweet endearment. This is literal. You are a thing made of porcelain that he is scared of dropping—or since a man like him isn’t scared of anything—you’re a thing he realized he can break.

Your pulse spikes.

Office.

Private.

Closed door.

Every alarm bell in your body begins ringing at once.

In his office, the rules of the outside world—the rules where you are safe—don’t apply. It’s where the blood gets mopped up.

But the guards are watching. The exit is behind them.

They aren’t moving a muscle and stand there like gargoyles, guarding your only hope for escape.

And Bucky—James—is standing right in front of you, his thumb brushing lightly across your knuckles.

“You’re shaking,” he murmurs, concern weaving through his quiet tone.

Well, you’re shaking because you can feel the callouses on his hands, the strength in his grip that suggests he could snap your wrist without his expression changing. He knows you are vibrating with nerves, but he has misdiagnosed the fever.

You force yourself to breathe. To smile. To pretend. Just like he has all these weeks. Just like he does now.

“Just the headache,” you whisper, and it’s tasting like bile.

He studies you for another long second, and for a moment you think he might see the truth. You think the mask is going to be ripped away right here in the hallway.

Then he squeezes your hand gently. “Come on, sweetheart.”

He turns you away from the door that would bring you to safety, moving his hand to the small of your back, and it is the gentlest thing in the world. But that somehow makes it so harrowing, because there is nothing rough in the gesture, nothing that could be called force by anyone watching, nothing but warmth and assurance, leading you into the heart of his house with the grace of a protector, and yet your whole body reads it like a sentence being handed down.

You are now thoroughly trapped, you realize while swallowing down the rising tide of bile. It feels like a master painter adding the final, darkening stroke to a portrait you can no longer step out of.

But there is nothing you can do. You let him steer you away from the door because what else are you supposed to do? Rip away, run, scream? That seems impossible in a house that breathes his name through every vent and doorway. A house where even the air seems employed by him.

The mansion appears to lengthen as you walk through it, as if corridors are being pulled like taffy just to spite you, just to show you how laughably far the front door already is, how absurd it was to think you could simply walk out with a polite excuse and a swallowed scream in your throat, hoping nobody heard it rattling behind your teeth, pretending you were still a girl who had a choice in where she slept tonight.

You try to pay attention. You try to mark the route the way people do in movies when they’re kidnapped or hunted or trying not to fall off the edge of the earth—left at the long console with the black granite top, right at the staggering painting in the gilded frame, straight past the alcove with the antique lamp and the white flowers that smell expensive and funereal at once.

But panic is a vandal and it is paralyzing and it comes in and smashes every useful thought with a chair.

Your heart is beating too hard, your blood too loud, your mind too busy manufacturing horrors to do something practical like remember turns. Foyer, hall, archway, staircase, another hall. No—was it staircase first? Was the office past the library, or past that room with the dark green walls?

Oh god, this is horrible. You're really starting to feel lost and this might be a catastrophic blow to your faith.

You try to pin each detail to the inside of your skull, but they slide off slick as fish, and every second spent trying to memorize the geography of this place only makes you more conscious of the fact that you are being walked farther and farther from the only exit you knew.

Why would he take you this far? The question lets sweat collect at the base of your neck. Why not the room just off the main hall? Why not one of the closer offices? Why not let you leave if you are only dizzy, only pale, only under the weather the way you claimed?

Does he suspect something? Has he already seen it, the wrongness in your face, the recoil you were too slow to hide, the way your voice came out laced too tight? And worse than that, more awful than suspicion because it drips with intention—was there always going to be a moment like this? Had he always been walking you here in one way or another, from the first date, from the first gift, from the first time he looked at you as if you were worth the chase?

Maybe this is what men like him do. Maybe he had a plan long before you ever had a clue. Maybe there has never been a single unarranged second between you, and you were just too lovesick and dazzled to notice the rails under your feet.

His hand stays at your back the entire time, broad and warm, but it makes you want to shove him away from you. When you hesitate, the pressure spikes just enough to remind you which way the door isn't. He is leading you forward and it would have felt gentle, but it doesn’t. No longer.

His thumb-strokes across your back don’t feel comforting at all and more like he is smoothing out a wrinkle in his own sleeve or the way he might polish a piece of silver he has decided to keep.

You suppress a chilling shiver he surely would have felt.

When you glance at him, because some abhorrent part of you still does, still wants to; you find concern in his face and it nearly brings you to the floor. You can’t glimpse any coldness, no strategic thinking whatsoever. At least not the kind you expected to see. His eyes aren’t narrowed and sharpened with discovery, there is no clipped impatience, no telltale crack in the mask.

He looks at you the way he has always looked at you when something seemed off, with his little frown and that determination, as if your problems are things he would like to drag outside and beat to death with his bare hands.

His gaze moves over your face with the same intimate concentration that once made your stomach warm for all the right reasons. It does not help. It makes everything worse.

Because if this is performance, then he is monstrous at it. If this is an act, he’s lived in the skin of it for a lifetime.

A lie shouldn’t feel this solid, shouldn’t have a thumb that knows exactly where your tension hides.

If he is acting, then he deserves a stage and an audience and perhaps a crown.

You can barely stand it, this collision between what you know and what he appears to be. A man can’t look at you like that and still be the most feared name in the city. Except apparently he can. Apparently, men can be two things at once. Apparently, the universe is vulgar enough to make both true.

You pass a maid coming the other way—a small, neat woman in a crisp uniform. She is carrying folded lines in her arms, and Bucky acknowledges her with nothing more than a curt nod, and she responds with a warm little smile aimed at you and the faintest dip of her head—something halfway between greeting and curtsey, so practiced it is almost invisible, but not invisible enough, not to you, not now.

It makes your breath hitch, how he doesn’t swell with importance, or doesn’t put on a show of his control.

He’s so comfortable in his power that he doesn't even need to show it off; he just steers you onward, knowing nobody will do a single thing to stop him.

And your stomach lurches so suddenly it feels as if your bones have missed a step. Because there it is. There, in one small exchange, is the whole persona of him. He is not loud or cartoony with his power, he just has it. It’s real. It doesn’t need to announce itself because everyone in its radius already knows where to bend.

The maid’s smile is kind, almost affectionate, and that somehow shames you more, because it suggests this has been obvious to everyone but you.

They all know what he is. The guards know. The staff knows. The men at the gate, the drivers, the strangers in tailored suits who always nod to him with instant stillness in their spines—they all know.

And you, meanwhile, had been floating around this house in your pretty little ignorance, accepting tea on silver trays, accepting jewelry in velvet boxes, accepting his mouth and his hands and his delicious attention as if you had simply stumbled into the arms of an intense, rich man with old-fashioned manners and a dangerous face completely by accident.

You would like to face palm yourself, but this is a bad moment.

Natasha will definitely do it for you once you get out of here and manage to escape to her apartment.

You had looked at the signs and called them charm. You had looked at vigilance and called it romance. You had looked at fear arranged into etiquette and thought that wow, he really runs this company proficiently.

The embarrassment of it blooms hot under your skin, nearly as painful as the fear. You have been blind. Worse—willingly blind. Blind not by accident but by appetite, by wanting. Love, or whatever this early ferocious thing is, has wrapped a hand-woven scarf around your eyes and led you smiling into a cathedral built from warning signs and decorated with red flags.

And the humiliating part, the part that makes you feel like you could peel yourself out of your own skin from sheer mortification, is that you had even congratulated yourself for being so unbothered by his world.

Look at you, cool girl extraordinaire, dating the beautiful, mysterious executive in his deluxe mansion, pretending not to notice the guards and the driver and the way everyone waited half a beat too long for his approval before moving.

You had thought you were being mature. Sophisticated. Unruffled. Meanwhile, you were essentially a decorative houseplant with a pulse, sitting in the sun of his attention and calling it insight. It would almost be funny if it weren’t your life currently doing a slow and terrible cartwheel off a cliff.

How could you have ever believed that a guy like him would be interested in that naive, silly girl that you are.

Honestly, if you survive this ordeal, you will end up in some corner of your small, meager apartment, bawling your eyes out, and keep living that unlucky life of yours.

He glances at you again as you walk on that burgundy red carpet deeper into the hole that is another hallway, and his hand presses a little more firmly between your shoulder blades. It’s protective rather than possessive to anyone looking in from the outside, but the gesture sends another flare of panic through you anyway.

You wonder if he can feel the fear on you, if it comes off your skin. You wonder if men like him are trained by experience to smell a lie the way dogs smell storms. You wonder whether he is leading you to comfort or containment. Every room you pass seems too opulent to be real with those chandeliers like frozen explosions, rugs plush enough to kill the sound of literally anything, the dark wood twinkling creepily under low gold light, paintings in heavy frames, looming over everything, looking down their painted noses at anyone not born into the frame.

The place no longer looks luxurious so much as fortified. You see the thickness of doors now. The depth of corridors. The strategic sightlines. The subtle placement of people. This house is not merely beautiful. It is defensible. It is a kingdom in disguise.

And you had been letting yourself be loved in it. You stupid girl had let him come way, way too close to you.

But it’s what makes every step hurt more than it should. Because despite everything, despite the gun and the initials and the name on the tags and the avalanche of terror crushing common sense into powder, there is still some small perfidious corner of you that keeps stumbling over the memory of how gentle he was, how attentive, how he watched your face as if your feelings were weather and he meant to learn every season.

You hate that part of yourself right now, and that it even exists in the first place after everything you found out about the man and what knowing him entails.

You want cleaner fear, simpler fear, fear without ache in it. But your fear is contaminated by affection. By memory. By the wrenching possibility that whatever else he is, whatever blood has dried invisibly on his hands, the softness he’s shown you may have been real. And if that is real, then the rest is not easier to understand. It is harder. Infinitely harder. It means the monster did not wear a mask. It means the monster kissed your forehead and tucked blankets around your legs and remembered how you take your coffee. But your brain can’t follow all of that.

Another turn. Another corridor. Another room you cannot catalogue fast enough.

You try again to memorize the path, because panic may be a vandal but desperation is stubborn.

The wall here is paneled more deeply. There is a bronze wolf on a pedestal. A narrow window at the end of the hall. A runner rug patterned in deep red, almost the color of old cherries, almost the color of dried blood if your mind is in the mood to be cruel, which it surely is.

Your thoughts keep darting ahead of you and slam themselves against every worst-case future they can find. If he knows you know, what does that mean? If he does not know you know, what then? Which is safer? Is there a safer version of this at all?

You imagine phones taken gently from your hand. Doors locked with apologetic clicks. Promises made in that low warm voice while your life narrows to the width of his will.

The terrible thing is that none of your imaginings need to be loud to be horrifying. A man like him does not need spectacles. He has infrastructure.

By the time he slows in front of a set of double doors farther inside the mansion than you have ever been allowed, or invited, to go; your nerves are so frayed they feel almost luminous, every sound oppressive, every movement enlarged.

He looks down at you, his face still threaded with worry, and sweeps his hand from your back to your elbow in a gesture so careful it would be beautiful in any other universe. In this one it only makes your chest tighten until breathing feels like work. He leans slightly closer, and his voice drops, intimate as a hand at your throat, though there is nothing harsh in it.

“What’re you thinking about, baby,” he asks quietly, searching your face.

Well, you’re thinking about the front door.

It’s where you left your mind.

Or maybe it was lost in his room already. Maybe it stayed with the gun on his carpet.

And the other, the more rational part of your mind, the one that told you this couldn’t have been true anyway, because you are you and he is him, lingers in every news story you ever half listened to.

You are inside the tormenting, glittering realization that you have not just fallen for a dangerous man, but for the dangerous man, and that all the softness you took as sanctuary may have only been the most exquisite blindfold ever tied.

“Nothing, Bucky,” you reply weakly, trying to ease, but your voice is shaking just that tiny bit, and judging by the uncomfortable twist of his mouth, he caught it.

You’re too lost in your stupidity that you’re hardly present when he opens his wooden office door and ushers you inside, again with the most tender movements.

The office is warmer than the hall, quieter too, and it makes goosebumps rise on your arms and the hairs stand tall at the back of your neck because this room is built to keep any sound inside and secrets fat and sleeping in the walls. Everywhere you look there is dark wood and low amber light and books lined up in stern, handsome rows as if knowledge itself has been drafted into his service.

You feel the world shrink from cathedral to chamber, from public performance to something confined, more dangerous, more indiscreet, because now there are no guards, no maids, no witnesses to help keep either of you inside your assigned role.

There is only him, only you, only that soft snick of the door as he shuts it behind him; and that small, tidy sound feels like it’s happening inside your own chest. You watch his hand leave the brass knob, and the logic in your head just gives up. There’s only a hysterical, messy scramble of thoughts, all of them howling at once and all of them useless.

He turns back to you immediately, all his attention gathering around you with that familiar chilling completeness, and before you can decide whether to stand very still or bolt like a startled animal with nowhere sensible to run, he is guiding you toward the couch near the fireplace with one hand steady at your waist and the other brushing over your arm, then your back again. He’s never forcing or gripping hard, but he’s just not letting go of you and it makes you want to jump against the wall in hopes it’ll crack and you’ll land on the other side because his touch is making you more and more nervous.

He treats you as if he thinks you might faint at any second.

It is infuriating, that gentleness. It feels like a kind of torture that’s impossible to fight because your skin has a longer memory than your head. Your body still knows him first as safety. It still recognizes the heat of his palm and the strength of him, the way he moves as though you’re the center of the room.

And now every instinct is splitting at the seams. All you want to do is run, you want him away from you, you want to be far gone from all of this, you want to scream and scream some more, but the other half of you is remembering how carefully he tucked a blanket over your legs last week when you fell asleep during a movie or the way he has checked you for bruises after literally making love to you with that distressed frown upon his face, scared he’s been too rough with you.

The collision makes you dizzy enough that, absurdly, he may not be wrong. You might actually faint. Just from the sheer vertigo of finding out that the man who kissed you so devotedly has a name the whole city says with a tremble in their voices.

“Sit down for me,” he coaxes, and his voice is low, soft, carrying none of the steel you used to hear when he dealt with his men, and that contrast nearly makes your skin crawl.

You lower yourself onto the couch because your knees are not reliable enough to argue with him. The room seems to have acquired a faint sway, because the blood in your veins feels thin and feverish, and he stays right there, close enough that his thigh nearly brushes yours before he drops into a crouch in front of you.

The sight of this dangerous man folding all that height and breadth down to your level, gaze lifted to your face with plain concern would have melted you an hour ago.

But all it does now is frighten you some more. It feels too intimate, too earnest, too much like care, and care from a man like him is no simple thing. It is not a ribbon. It is a chain in softer clothing.

You swallow hard and that alone almost makes you flinch.

His eyes move over you with increasing worry, taking inventory in little silent increments. Your face is pale, you feel the damp shine of stress at your temples, you can’t keep your fingers still in your lap, and you can’t quite tame the uneven hitch in your breath.

He reaches up and lays the back of his hand against your forehead, then your cheek, his brows knitting tighter, and his mouth presses into a serious line. “You’re sweating,” he murmurs, more to himself than to you, as if he would like to issue orders to your body until it starts behaving properly.

His thumb grazes the curve of your jaw, feather-light, and you have to stop yourself from jerking away too sharply. You have to refrain yourself from slapping his hand away.

He notices even the version of restraint. You guessed, he does. A man like him has to. A man like him would. But it does worsen your situation.

A chill spreads along the base of your neck.

His eyes sharpen, not with suspicion exactly, but with apprehension deepening into something more searching, more troubled. “Talk to me, baby,” he pleads, softer still. “Did something happen? Did I do something?”

You stare at him.

For a moment the question does not make sense, your mind too busy running in circles with sirens in its hair, but you notice the shadow in his face, the hunch, the way his gaze jumps to your mouth, your throat, your posture curled too tight, and it seems bizarre because he honestly looks as though he might dread he pushed you too far, touched you too much, misread your body, took a liberty you weren’t ready for.

The absurdity of that nearly splits your head open because earlier when he—god, when he had his criminal tongue on your pussy—he acted so attentive, he seemed genuinely careful and devastatingly patient, and yet now, knowing what you know, even that lightness now hardens into a new breed of atrocity.

Because if this is him being careful, if this is him holding himself in check, then what does rough look like in a man built the way he is, in a man whose name can make grown men go quiet? What shape does cruelty take when it belongs to someone with this much power and this little need to raise his voice?

“No,” you answer too fast, the word skidding out of you. “No, you didn’t— nothing like that.”

Well, he did do something. A lot, really. Things that would put him in a cell never to be let out.

But he didn’t do anything to you yet. Yet. He might, if you don’t get your shit together.

His shoulders loosen by a fraction, but not enough. Not nearly enough. He still looks wound up. He still looks a little perturbed.

“Are you sure?” he asks, and there is something sincere in his voice, it is disorienting. “Because, honey, you can tell me if I was too much. If I missed something. If I—” He stops, swallows, and the hand at your cheek gentles further, as if he is trying to make himself seem safer. Funny. “I need to know. Need to know if there was ever a moment when you didn’t feel good.”

Something is dipping in the air around you, and everything feels distorted. Your head is hazy and a complete maze, because how is he even doing it this well?

You pull back then, small at first, because having his hands on you for longer will surely drive you insane. You don’t shove him off, or smack his hand away, you simply move out of his palms enough to break the line of his touch, but even that has him looking at you more closely.

You gather your hands together in your lap so he won’t see them tremble and shake your head with a smile that feels stapled on, brittle and thin, and one wrong breath away from snapping in half. “I’m okay,” you say, aiming for sheepish, for embarrassed, for normal. “I just need some sleep, I think. That’s all. It’s probably stupid. I’m probably just a little exhausted and overreacting.”

He doesn’t buy it.

You can tell immediately, and you hate that you can tell, but you notice how his whole face changes in that subtle way his face does when he has decided something is amiss and he is not going to stop until he gets to the bottom of it.

He shifts closer, forearms braced loosely on his thighs, his attention absolute. “Then sleep here,” he deadpans. As if this is simply the answer to all the problems in the world. “You don’t need to go anywhere tonight. 'Specially when you’re not feeling well.”

Your stomach contracts into a hard, cold knot, and it feels like there’s a displacement in your chest. It’s the sensation of a staircase ending one step too soon and you didn’t notice so now you’re hitting air instead of floor with a heart-shaking jolt. It is jarring. It is petrifying, because it means you’re not getting out of here that easily. You might not be getting out of here at all if he continues to look at you like that.

Sleep here.

Stay here.

In his house. In his reach. In the center of the web.

Your pulse stutters so hard it hurts.

“I should go home,” you try, and even to your own ears it sounds small, unconvincing, more instinct than argument.

His frown deepens, utterly baffled by your insistence in the face of what he clearly sees as a solvable problem. “Why?” he asks quietly, and his voice sound a tad hoarse. “If you feel bad, why would I let you leave?”

Your lungs can’t seem to catch any air although it’s all around you.

Why would I let you

He didn’t say why would you leave, no he said why would I let you.

Good god, you really have been a stupid girl. The signs were all in front of you, weren’t they? They were literally speaking to you.

He’s talking in a tender tone, making his voice all soft and gentle, even soothing and so concerned, but that’s just the outside. You never paid attention to what lay underneath, hidden deep inside, because the outside was pretty and alluring enough. And maybe you are imagining it now, the gravelly implications in his tone, maybe your body’s just trying to see and hear things that aren’t there, but perhaps it truly has been there all the time and you were too wrapped in him to notice it.

You stand up quickly.

And you shouldn’t have done that because he will think what the hell you’re doing now, but your body decided and now your body is doing it.

The room sways, your vision going soft at the edges for one humiliating second, and his hands are on you—one at your elbow, one at your waist, and there is no shaking them off.

You flinch despite yourself and he stills as if you have struck him. You know he doesn’t understand your reactions, how could he.

“Hey,” he coos, his voice lowering even further, and there is definitely something thick in his voice. “Easy.”

“I’m fine,” you insist, too breathless, too papery, trying to peel his hands off you without making it look like peeling, which is impossible, because every move feels too fast or too urgent, every instinct either too frightened or too telling. “Really, Bucky, I’m just tired. I’m probably being ridiculous.”

His gaze searches yours with such intensity it feels almost physical. “You’re trying to get away from me.”

The words are quiet, and although there is no anger in them, no threat at all, it has your mouth go dry.

“No,” you answer, and it is not a good lie. “No, Bucky. Of course not. My head’s just really hurting.”

Something in him clicks into a higher gear—not a lack of trust or anything like that, but a kind of piercing, automated focus. Something in his eyes snaps into high definition. All that soft, vague concern is gone, replaced by an attention so bright and infiltrating it feels like being pinned to a board under a microscope.

Carefully, he makes you sit back down on the couch and lands right beside you. You feel the heat of him pressing into your side, though he does give you a bit of space.

His hand comes to your upper arm, stroking once, and you hate your own pulse for noticing how familiar it feels despite it having lost its appeal. “Look at me,” he presses, and it almost sounds like an order. His voice seems serious enough to make you shiver in fear.

You look at him because you have to and refusing would be louder than screaming.

His eyes are so damn blue in this weirdly dim light, clear and intent and lined with such deep worry. He’s definitely denser, his concern losing its fluff, but not its patience. There still is no trace of coldness, no roughness, nothing that is overly intimidating despite the man he is.

Just that same irksome softness, that same look like your distress is something he wants to fix with both hands, with all of himself if necessary.

It rattles you more than if he had come in hard and sharp and monstrous. A monster would be easier. A monster would let your fear stand up straight. But this man looking at you like your pain pains him is a labyrinth with no clean exits.

And it feels foreboding. It has you more on edge. It’s the way the woods go quiet right before something heavy steps out of the brush; a sudden, absolute alignment of intent.

Maybe he knows you know and now he’s waiting for the right moment to pounce. You do your best to keep your fright behind your eyes.

“You can sleep here tonight,” he offers again, gentler now, and it seems as though he believes repetition might soothe you into agreement. “I’ll stay with you. Or I won’t, if you want space. I’ll get you water, food, whatever you need. But I’m not sending you home like this.”

Not sending.

Again that wordless, soft-toned authority.

Again that sense that his care and his control are fused so tightly together they share a bloodstream.

You are running out of room inside your own face. Running out of expressions that can pass for normal. Running out of ways to keep the panic from drawing its blade.

So you do the only thing you can think of, the stupidest thing, the most desperate thing—you lean in and kiss him.

It’s short and small and only meant to reassure, to smooth over, to redirect. Your lips meet his and every cell in your body revolts.

And it’s not at all because he kisses badly, god no. Even startled, even worried, he receives you with immediate tenderness, one hand lifting to cradle your jaw, his mouth warm and careful and heartbreakingly familiar but also so, so foreign, a cold shiver seizes your back.

It is what makes nausea roll through you so suddenly you nearly choke on it. Because this is James Buchanan Barnes.

This is the name on the dog tags, the name on the news, the name people lower their voices around as if it might hear them and turn its head.

This is the most feared man in the city and his mouth is still the same mouth that kissed the corner of your smile with one of his own.

Your stomach turns so sharply you have to concentrate not to pull away in disgust too soon, not to betray yourself with the wrong kind of urgency.

You kiss him once, twice, tasting dread under the memory of want, and every instinct in you screams that you are pressing your lips to a loaded weapon and pretending it is a rose.

When you ease back, you make yourself smile.

It feels gargantuan, the effort of it.

“I’m okay,” you whisper, like that explains anything, like that proves you are only tired and not terrified, only overwhelmed and not trying to survive. “I promise. I can go home like this.”

His thumb brushes under your eye so lightly, and you run your tongue over your lip, trying to get that uncomfortable tingling to go away.

But he still looks unconvinced.

More than unconvinced, actually. Plagued. As if the kiss reassured him of your affection but not your state, and now that mismatch is bothering him in ways he can’t make sense of.

His gaze lingers on your face, then your mouth, then your hands clenched too tightly in your lap. He takes one of them and turns it gently palm-up, his fingers closing around yours. You can feel how much bigger his hand is. You can feel how easily it encloses.

And all at once the room feels narrow as a throat, the walls leaning in, the lamplight too gold, the air too warm, and you are sitting inches from a man who could ruin your life before breakfast and is looking at you like the only thing he wants in this world is to make you feel safe.

“What’s going on, doll?” His voice could even be pleading, just a little bit. It’s definitely croaky. “I— I get the feeling—”

“I told you, Bucky. It’s just a headache.” He sighs to that, but all you can think about is how completely his hand closes over the bones of your own. How easy it would be for those fingers to tighten from comfort into command, from tenderness into something unarguable.

His other palm is at your arm, and your body does this awful arithmetic without your permission, subtracting your strength from his and arriving, every single time, at the same answer—none.

There is none. Not enough. Not nearly enough.

You notice things you never let yourself notice before because before they were part of romance, of safety, of the warm relief of being cared for by someone larger and more grounded than you.

Now those same details come back rearranged into something atrocious. The width of his shoulders. The thickness of his thighs where they bracket the edge of the couch. The controlled way he moves, never wasted, never sloppy, suggesting he has long ago become intimate with force and no longer needs to flaunt it.

Even the gentleness feels frightening because it is so deliberate. You can feel, in every cautious touch, that he is handling you lightly not because he must, but because he chooses to. And choice is a nightmarish thing when done by a man like him. Choice means there are other versions of him. Choice means there are rooms in him you have never seen. Choice means the tenderness is not the whole house, only one lit window.

You sit very still because being still feels safer than moving, and panic has made your limbs feel both too heavy and too ready to misfire. While he studies your face with that immensely worried crease between his brows, your thoughts keep slipping sideways into grotesque little visions of what would happen if he decided to stop being soft.

Not even dramatic visions. That would almost be easier. Nothing so loud as being thrown or shouted at. Your fear is smarter than that now. It imagines quieter things. A wrist caught before you can pull away. A door closed with no visible hurry. Your name said in that low voice while every route out of the room gently, politely disappears.

You hate yourself for thinking it, hate the way your pulse kicks harder with each new image, hate most of all that his touch remains careful through all of it, remains incessantly kind, so that your fear begins to feel almost counterfeit in the face of what he is actually doing, and then the next thought corrects you suddenly—no, not counterfeit. Instinct. Instinct finally dragging itself awake after weeks of sleeping with its face turned to his chest.

He must notice something fresh pass through you, some new tremor or tightening, because his jaw flexes and then he reaches into his pocket for his phone.

He is glancing at the screen and some shutter drops behind his eyes. It doesn’t slam, it just falls shut, as simple as that. Just sliding into place as neatly as a blade returning to its sheath.

He lifts the phone, says a name you don’t catch because your ears are too loud with your heartbeat, and when the person on the other end answers, his voice changes so completely that a chill runs over your skin.

“Bring cold towels to my office. And painkillers. Water too.” That is all.

Simple words. Ordinary words.

But the voice that carries them is stripped clean of softness, and that is what makes your blood curdle. There is no gentle edge worn smooth for your benefit. It is a voice pared down to function, to expectation, to command. Not loud, not theatrical, not cruel in any obvious way, it is just cold the way a simple black stone is cold. Cold the way a locked gate is cold.

There is no room in it for hesitation, no room in it for mishearing, no suggestion that obedience is a favor rather than the natural order of things. Whoever is on the other end responds immediately, and he ends the call without another word, already moving to set the phone aside, already turning back toward you, and your whole body has gone thin with dread because all you can think, stupidly, helplessly, is this is how he speaks when he is not pretending to be gentle.

And if this is his ordinary command voice, then what would he sound like if he knew? If he looked at you and saw recognition staring back, saw the name James Buchanan Barnes fully formed in your eyes, saw that you had found the gun and the initials and the tags and had welded them all together into the truth? Would his voice sharpen? Flatten further?

Would he say your name with that same smooth authority and turn it into a thing that could pin you in place?

The thought is a beaded sweat of ice trailing down the ladder of your back.

You try not to react. You fail a little. He sees the shiver, he sees, because he is James Buchanan Barnes for goodness sake, and immediately his focus softens again as he leans a fraction closer, anguish returning to his face as if the colder version of him never existed at all.

The door catches your eye over his shoulder.

It is simply there. Closed, but not locked, at least not that you can see. Dark wood, brass handle, a square of possibility in a room rapidly losing oxygen.

And once you look at it, you cannot stop.

Your gaze keeps darting back like something hooked. You begin to map the distance with desperate measurements.

If you stood up now—no, not stood, launched—if you shoved him hard enough to buy yourself one puzzled second, maybe two, could you make it? Out the office, into the hall, left or right—God, which one had you come from?—and then what? Down one corridor, past another, through that impassable warren of pragmatic but pristine floors and expensive silence and armed loyalty, praying that your body would remember what your mind failed to memorize?

You picture it anyway. You can’t help it. You picture yourself bolting, slipping on gleaming floors, turning wrong and wrong again, heart exploding in your throat while the mansion multiplies around you like a bad dream, each hallway birthing three more, each staircase leading not to freedom but to another floor full of his money and his people and his reach.

Still, the image won’t leave you. It grows instead, takes on velocity. You imagine the first breath of motion, the clean scary choice of it. The couch under you unweighting. The door handle cold in your palm. The sudden crash of everything becoming honest.

You don’t have a lot of choices here. So maybe fate would take pity on you. Maybe panic would become a compass. Maybe your body would remember a route your mind cannot hold. Maybe the front hall would be merciful and simply appear in front of you, all that dark wood and those massive doors and the guards too startled to stop you before you ripped yourself out into the night. It is preposterous. It is probably impossible. It becomes, nevertheless, the brightest thought in the room. Bright enough to burn.

You are too poised on the edge of movement now, too taut, every nerve drawn tight as wire.

“Baby,” Bucky starts, a little alarmed, and he shifts closer again, one hand lifting instinctively, probably to touch your face, your shoulder, your wrist, some place he thinks he can soothe.

But the sight of that hand coming toward you almost does it. Almost tips you over from imagining escape into choosing it. You can feel your muscles gathering without permission, your body preparing itself in secret, a rabbit under the hawk’s shadow. Run, run, run. For one crazed second you are already halfway gone in your mind—up off the couch, around the table, through the door, don’t think, just move, just run, run, run—

And then his fingers brush your arm, so lightly, so soft, but it breaks something inside you because you want his sweet touch, you want him to hold you, to soothe you, to love you, but you don’t want it to be James Buchanan Barnes, you want it to be Bucky, but he’s no longer Bucky, he won’t ever be anymore, and so you simply react.

You jerk, shoving his hand away before you can stop yourself, not enough to really hurt, but enough that the gesture hangs in the air between you like a shattered glass note.

Your breath is now gone entirely.

There are a few beats where simply nothing happens.

Then his hand drops back.

You stare at him, your own hand hovering stupidly in midair as if all you have to do is snip your finger to turn back the time.

And Bucky—James—just looks at you. For a small moment, he simply looks startled, like a deer in the headlights of your rejection. He looks so tremendously confused, his face totally unglued, but then his eyes shift gears, shift into alarm, shift into a concern so much deeper than before. It seems as if your recoil has unhinged him. As if it has frightened him for an entirely different reason than the one clawing its way through your chest. As if it has confirmed something he’s only lived in a nightmare before.

His features warp into something resembling desperation, his mouth hanging open, his eyes wide and asking, and it is nauseating to watch—the way he’s already cobbling together a version of reality where he isn’t the monster you’re trying to run from.

He is misinterpreting your panic and it makes you sick.

He isn't thinking She knows what I am. His mind is sprinting in the exact opposite direction to protect itself.

He thinks the headache is actually a migraine that has you reacting strangely, or it’s a panic attack, or some hidden trauma he didn’t know about, and he is already frantically building a scenario where he gets to fix it. His mouth stays slightly open, his breath hitching as if he’s about to choke on his own breath. He looks around the empty office with this desperate, wild squint, his eyes darting to the corners of the room as if he expects to find a physical monster standing there—something he can actually put a bullet in to make you stop shaking.

“Alright,” he lets out, and his voice is completely broken, a rough, dry scrape that sounds like it is tearing his throat.

He doesn’t lunge for you or do something big. Instead, he actually hitches his weight backward, trying to make himself smaller, which is harrowing because he is still twice your size and wearing a suit that could be sprinkled with blood in under an hour. His hands stay out in front of him, palms up, fingers twitching with this jittery, helpless energy. He is looking at you with this forlorn begging in his widened eyes, practically pleading with them for you to blame it on the lights, or the noise, or anything else in the world—because the alternative is that he is the thing making you look at him like he’s an executioner.

You might be running out of time to pretend.

“I’m sorry, Bucky, I— I’m so sorry, I don’t—” You don’t even know what explanation you are going to give him now, only that you are suddenly full of the clumsy need to fill the room with words before the room fills with something worse, and so your mouth opens on instinct, on panic, on the miserable little scraps of sanity still fluttering inside you. You hear yourself stammer out some thin, transparent nonsense about feeling strange, about maybe being overwhelmed, about maybe needing air, maybe needing to go home, maybe nothing, because every excuse sounds flimsy the second it leaves you, and every sentence makes your spirit mulch and dissolve into a gray slurry that won’t hold a shape.

And Bucky is still so close and still so beautiful and still so racked with his brows pinched into a severe, pained knot. His eyes are full of shadows, and this is all so bad.

His softness somehow makes all of this worse, not better, because if he were cruel already, if he were cold already, if he gave you even one clean villain’s grin, one sharp look, one thread of honest menace, maybe your fear would have somewhere proper to sit.

But he only examines your features as though it truly physically aches him to see you like this, as though your panic has reached inside him and laid a dirty hand around his heart.

“Don’t apologize, sweetheart,” he starts, and he says it so quietly, with so much care, still, but also with a mounting unease that is just about to reach its peak. “I just wanna know what’s going on. Talk to me, baby. Please. I—” he breaks off with a sigh, his jaw grinding. “If something’s wrong, if something’s going on, then I gotta know.”

You swallow hard in hopes that anything might help soothe the sting behind your eyes. You don’t believe him, not fully anymore, but some humiliating, hopelessly romantic part of you still recognizes the cadence of the man who kissed your forehead this morning, the man who tucked a strand of hair behind your ear with the most tender hands, the man who remembered how you take your tea and which side you prefer to sleep on and the fact that you hate when socks twist inside your shoes.

It is unimaginable, it is desolating how tenderness can survive in the same body as terror, how your heart can continue making a fool of itself even while your mind is setting the whole house on fire.

“Bucky, really, I’m just...” Your voice hitches, the words sticking like thistles in your throat. You look down at his hands and they are so huge and capable, currently flexing with an empty urge to hold you. You know those hands have held weapons. You know they’ve ended lives and carried blood. But right now they are trembling because you won’t let them touch you.

You can feel yourself growing sharper and shakier by the second, every nerve in you pulled too tight, every breath arriving shallow and unhelpful, and still he keeps speaking to you in that quiet and gentle tone, asking whether it was something earlier, whether he pushed too far, whether he missed something, where exactly it hurts. You can’t tell him it’s your heart and not your head that is currently in shambles.

The concern in him seems real. That is the terrible part. It seems real enough to bruise. You shake your head too quickly. You try to smile and feel it crack before it even fully forms. You say you are just tired. You say you do not know. You say you are fine with the kind of desperate brightness you would use when standing on the edge of a roof insisting you are only admiring the view.

His gaze drops to the space you are slowly clearing between you, and his expression hardens. Gears are grinding behind his eyes and suddenly he looks like the man in the hallway, filled with command and so fucking terrifying, your pulse spikes to unhealthy numbers. He doesn’t look at you, he turns his head to look in the direction of the closed door, his posture squared.

“Did someone say something to you?” He asks, his tone dropping into a low, scraping register that makes the hairs on your arms stand up. “In the hall? Before I came out?”

You blink at him in disbelief. Does he think someone threatened you? Does he think one of his own men, or some interloper in his kingdom, stepped out of line with you? The fact that that would cause such an intense reaction in him makes you want to be catapulted straight out of here because this is genuinely just getting all too much. He seems about ready to tear his own house down to find the monster that scared you, completely unaware that he is the one wearing the monster’s skin.

You are about to open your mouth to improvise your way to freedom, when there is a brisk knock on the oak door and it makes your entire body jerk.

Bucky turns toward the noise, but not before you catch the brief, hot flare of irritation that darkens his features. He rises with all his coiled grace and contained force, and for half a second you just stare at his back, seeing even that differently now. He really is a tall man. He is immense. Broad. Space seems to make room for him as he steps to the door. God, what the hell did you walk yourself into. The only thought that gives you a tiny bit of ease is that there surely have to be other girls out there who would have fallen for it all, looking at him.

He cracks the door open. A man stands in the corridor holding a tray balanced with a folded stack of damp, cold towels, a bottle of water, and a blister pack of painkillers. And it’s weird how this would have struck you as absurdly thoughtful just hours before but now it feels sinister. It is purely ominous. It is comfort orchestrated by absolute authority; a display of care that only exists because of total, unquestioning submission.

Bucky, or James, or the most wanted mob boss of all time; thanks him, quickly, absently, not unkind but distracted, his thoughts still hooked to you so visibly that even the man at the door registers the tension.

And that man glances inside just enough to catch sight of you on the couch, sitting there sweating, pale, rigid as a hunted thing.

A manic urge strikes you to scream for help. You want to yell at this stranger to run, to call the precinct, or to simply throw you over his shoulder and get you the hell out of this building. But the impulse dies in your throat. It would be entirely useless. Every single person under this roof operates on his frequency. This man wouldn't take a single order from you even if it would be more of a plea than anything else. All of these people in this damn building listen to his every word. He wouldn’t do a thing to help you.

And before you can even let go of the fantasy, the man immediately drops his eyes again and leaves, because everyone in this house seems trained in the art of not seeing too much.

But you see too much now. That is the problem. That is the irreversible thing.

Because while Bucky’s back is turned, while he takes the tray and shuts the door with his shoulder and crosses toward the sideboard, your gaze begins to snag on the office around you with new eyes, and suddenly nothing is only furniture anymore.

Nothing is only decoration. All the wood in here is dark and expensive, perhaps even that is getting paid to stay silent, and there are details you would once have filed away as masculine and stylish.

But now everything is imposing. Everything reads as evidence.

Like that locked cabinet that is too reinforced to hold unimportant paperwork. There is a map pinned behind glass with inked markings that look less like commerce and more like a tactical grid. A stack of files sits bound with a suspicious kind of neatness. Then there is a heavy antique letter opener glinting on the desk like a civilized version of a threat.

Even the art on the walls seems changed, the frames too severe, the subjects too stern, everything in here curated by a man who does not simply possess things but controls them. He dictates outcomes. He governs people. His office is a single spider web woven from all this darkened wood and his suits, and you are the only thing inside it that is still vibrating, sending signals straight to the center where he stands, and it is making your skin grow cold in patches.

He is opening the water bottle for you.

That tiny, stupid gesture nearly does it—the torturous way he makes this all so normal and so intimate when he says, “Here, baby,” without turning yet, as if this is still salvageable, as if you are merely unwell and he is merely worried and the world has not already split clean down the middle.

Something primitive detonates inside you, and perhaps if it were a conscious thought or a decision or just some other thing in a civilized sense, maybe you wouldn’t do what you are doing, but your body is revolting before your mind can dress the fear in language, and you’re up.

Oh god, you’re up.

You’re off the couch, you’re on your feet, and now there’s no going back, now there’s no sitting down because now you sprang up and now you will run. You will run because the suddenness of your own movement has chosen the path for you.

Without looking back, without another word, your feet move you to the door and they move so fast, the room is moving with you, your vision is filled with streaks. Your hand fumbles blindly before finding the door handle, wrenching it open, and then you are sprinting.

“You love me, you say. You love me, you say. You love me, you say. Then why are you shaking?”

- Richard Siken

A/n: I know this is basically one single scene and I truly don’t know how I managed to make it this long. I always add unnecessary details and emotional spirals wherever possible but I worry that I sit in the emotions for too long sometimes.

So please feel free to let me know if the emotional introspection and all those feelings got to be a little too much at any point because I know I tend to ramble and take a while getting to the point in my writing and it’s getting a little frustrating. Hearing what you guys think would be really helpful 🫶🏻

And if you enjoy my writing and would like to support me, please feel free to consider my ko-fi