Milan stopped moving as if the world itself had been paused by Selene's words.
"I… love you," she had said, voice trembling and yet stubborn. "And I want to marry you."
For a stretched, fragile second nothing moved. Even the small sounds—the kettle's whisper, the distant street—seemed to bow to the weight of what she'd spoken.
He looked at her slowly. Gold and silver threaded through his irises flickered like a candle caught in a draft. "You said… you… love me," he repeated, voice soft and broken in a way Selene had never heard before. It carried hurt that wasn't hers to heal. "And you want to marry me?"
Selene's face flushed as if the sun had suddenly risen behind her skin. Her hands rubbed at her knees in a useless, embarrassed rhythm. "Ye—yes. I'm in love with you." Her words were small, earnest, the kind that came from the raw center of something young and fierce.
He let out a breath that might have been a laugh once, if it had been kinder. "So this is first-sight love?"
"Yes—obviously—" she began, then bit the rest back.
"Or—" Milan's voice changed; it became sharper, wounded. "Particularly after… seeing my face, not me."
The sentence cut deeper than she imagined. In that hush, something in Milan's posture went thin and brittle. The warmth that usually softened him dissipated, leaving a hollow outline. Her heart dropped. A tremor ran through her hands. Tears wanted to come. She felt something she couldn't name — pity or guilt, perhaps both — because his eyes had gone lonely and distant in a way she recognized from nightmares.
For years, Milan had hidden his face from the world. Women who had once glimpsed his beauty had treated him as nothing more than a fantasy to be possessed, not a person to be understood. Only once before… one woman had proposed to him without ever seeing his face. That memory, buried and raw, tore open again like a fresh wound.
And now Selene—this girl he had just begun to feel something unfamiliar for—stood before him, confessing love with eyes full of sincerity… yet he could not shake the cruel doubt clawing at him.
He watched her as if seeing her through a thin veil. "You… said you were in love," he whispered again, as if testing the syllables. "You want to marry me. After seeing my face."
"No—no, Milan!" She pushed, frantic. "I prepared to marry you when my father handed me to you. I wanted to go slow. I wanted you to be the one to propose. I never—" Tears choked her voice. "I never meant to hurt you. I never thought only seeing you would mean that."
Her words tumbled out, faster and rawer: "Maybe I was high and careless before—my father spoilt me, I thought I would never marry. But when father said he'd give me to someone he trusted more than himself, I thought no one would ever be worthy. Then he found you. I thought… I thought maybe you were better than everyone. I didn't mean—"
She choked on the confession and all the shaking inside it. Her palms fluttered, her fingers fiddled with her skirt as if to anchor herself.
Milan's face folded. The glow of benevolence dimmed from him. For the first time she traced pity in his gaze and something like a blade hidden there. He swallowed, voice small and cold at once. "After seeing my face, not me." The words were a chisel. His hands twitched. "Most women who see me—they just see something to own. They don't see a person."
Selene faltered. "I—" She tried to shape an answer, but the feelings came faster than thought. Her breath hitched. "No, I don't want to be like that. I don't want to be only about your appearance. I'm not that kind of woman."
She spoke too fast, too loud, then voice cracked. "Maybe I don't know myself. Maybe I thought myself high before—I thought I was aloof, I thought I had no need for anyone—then I saw your face and I felt… I felt this rush of jealousy, of uncertainty, a fear someone would steal you away. I don't know what's happening to me. I feel like you're mine, no one should see you, touch you or anything except me, I am not being dominant I just feel scared, I feel someone would snatch you,
I just want to make place in your heart. I saw in your eyes something different—when others look at me, they try to eat my body with their eyes, but you—when you looked at me, you didn't devour me with your gaze. You looked like you avoided my body only seeing my eyes. That's different. That's why I'm… confused, maybe wrong—but I felt that I must say it, or someone else will snatch you away—"
Her words fell apart into sobs. She clutched at nothing and everything, hands scrabbling toward something that could anchor her shaking soul.
Milan's face changed in a way Selene hadn't seen before. First bewilderment, then something like shame, then a rupture of some deeper thing. He moved before his thought could finish arriving: he sat beside her, arms coming around her as if they were both instinct and decision. Selene's body experienced the embrace like the sudden finding of shore in a storm. For an instant she was stunned, breathing him in, the smell and warmth of him steadying her trembling.
She tightened against him, fingers raking at his shirt until she felt the fabric bunch beneath her grip. then she buried her face against his chest. Tears spilled; she could not stop them. "I don't know why I'm crying," she sobbed into his chest. "I don't want to lose you. Someone will snatch you away from me. They definitely will. I can't—" Her voice broke. She trembled with the wildness of fear she had never let herself feel before.
He wrapped his arms tighter, a low sound of something like a promise rumbling from deep inside. "Shh. Breathe. No one's going to take me. I'm here. I'm here for you." His hand pressed against her back in a slow, calming rhythm, measured and sure.
She hiccoughed out, the shaking breath he ordered becoming steadier little by little. "Do you think I'm creepy? Do you think I'm only for the face? Do you think I lust after your appearance?" she asked, small and frantic, words tumbling. "No, I don't. I just—I… can't say. I feel that if I let you go for even a moment, you'll be gone. You'll disappear from my life."
Her admission trembled like a confession at an altar. Then, exhausted from the intensity, she fainted — not dramatically, but like a match burning out from too much flame — collapsing into his arms as sleep and release took her.
Milan's fingers tightened by reflex, then loosened, then tightened again. He had never understood the shape of a feeling like this toward a living person. He who had carried millions of Era's memory and wisdom had imagined a thousand kinds of emotion, but never this frantic, terraced love that smelled of fear and of possession.
They sat like that—Selene limp and trusting in his arms, Milan rigid with a confusion he could not name—until, without them noticing, both drifted into a quiet doze on the sofa. The room settled around them. Even the light seemed softer, as if the air itself was struggling to decide whether to intrude.
Milan blinked awake first, and his face betrayed a color he had not shown in years. He'd always worn composure like armor; now his cheeks carried a shy burn. His golden-silver eyes widened and then flared with a light that was not merely physical. Threads of silver wove through the gold; a dark-golden shimmer pulsed and wrapped the two of them like a thin cloak of quietly humming energy.
Time tugged weirdly at the edges: the tick of the clock slowed, a distant horn stretched longer. The aura that flared was small but undeniable; it moved like breath over their joined forms, a hush that felt like something ancient stirring and measuring.
Milan stared at the unconscious curve of Selene's face. A whisper of hope — and of dread — passed through him. "So this… might be the cause of our feelings," he said aloud, to the empty room, to himself, to the thin glow that lingered.
The shimmer receded and the room returned to ordinary light. A question sat heavy on his tongue: if the bond was born from this then what did it mean? I know reason of my affection towards her, but she didn't, she just love me or just because of this, The thought hollowed him with a fearful tenderness.
Selene's eyelashes trembled. Her eyes fluttered open. For a beat, before the world could catch up, her pupils caught a flicker of gold—brief as lightning and gone. She blinked, confusion clearing her face like fog,