Sleep was a foreign country I was rarely granted a visa to enter. When it came, it was a shallow, fitful thing, perpetually on the verge of being revoked. My body was in our bed my bed, the one that had become ours but my mind was always elsewhere. It was in the boardroom, dissecting a rival's financials. It was in the warehouse, the phantom report of a silenced pistol echoing in my bones. It was tangled in the scent of Vanilla Strawberry, a scent I inhaled like a dying woman seeking salvation.
That night, salvation had a different flavor. It was the memory of Althea's weight against me on the couch, her head in my lap as she explained the concept of 'shipping' to a bewildered Sushi, insisting that we, as a couple, had 'canon endgame energy.' It was the feel of her fingers, sticky from the strawberry shortcake I'd brought home, laced through mine. It was the sound of her laughter, a melody that had replaced the screaming silence of this house for two years. I had clung to those sensations, wrapping them around me like a shield against the darkness I'd immersed myself in earlier. For a few precious hours, I had almost believed I was the woman she saw me as: her Haven. Her protector. Her slightly stuffy, tie-wearing Alpha who just needed to be taught how to live.
The illusion was shattered by a single, sharp bark.
My eyes snapped open in the absolute darkness. The digital clock on the nightstand glowed 3:17 AM. The space beside me was empty. The sheets were cool.
Sushi. He didn't bark without reason. Not at this hour.
A cold dread, more paralyzing than any corporate takeover, seized my heart in a vise. Don't tell me…
I was out of bed in an instant, my bare feet silent on the cold floor. The Grape Old Wine of my scent spiked with a sharp, acrid note of pure panic. "Althea?" I whispered into the gloom, my voice hoarse.
No answer.
I moved through the hallway, a ghost in my own home. The kitchen was dark and empty, the remnants of our cake-filled evening a sweet mockery. The living room was a landscape of shadows, devoid of her form. Her music room was silent, the grand piano a hulking beast in the moonlight. Her bedroom was untouched.
Fuck. Don't tell me she's sleepwalking again.
The thought was a ice pick to my sternum. It had been months. The amnesia, the brain injury, the new medications… I had prayed, to any god that would listen, that it had reset this particular horror. I should have known better. The ghosts that haunted Althea Vale were not so easily exorcised by something as trivial as a car crash. They were etched into her soul, and her soul, it seemed, was remembering its scars.
My movements became frantic, efficient. I went to a panel in my walk-in closet, hidden behind a row of identical suits. A biometric scanner glowed softly. I pressed my thumb to it. A soft click, and a small, refrigerated compartment slid open. Inside were several pre-loaded syringes, the liquid within clear and innocuous-looking. My personal stash. My insurance policy against the past.
I took one, the cool glass of the syringe a familiar, hated weight in my palm. This was the reality she didn't remember. This was the price of keeping her safe from herself.
I followed the sound of Sushi's frantic barking, which was now coming from the direction of the greenhouse. My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic, trapped bird. Each step felt like wading through cement. The French doors to the greenhouse were standing open, a gaping maw into the humid, plant-thick air.
And there she was.
The sight was a physical blow, so agonizing it stole the air from my lungs.
Althea was standing in the middle of the lavender patch, the plants she had tenderly nurtured for weeks. But she wasn't nurturing them now. She was wielding a heavy garden shovel like a weapon, her body coiled with a feral, destructive energy. The air was thick with the crushed, sweet scent of lavender, a funeral shroud for her own labor. Her nightgown was soiled, her hair a wild tangle around a face contorted in a grief so raw it was barely human.
"Mom…" she sobbed, her voice a broken, childlike thing that clawed at my soul. "I know you liked lavenders, Mom. I remember. Wait for me… I'll be with you soon. I'm coming."
No. No, no, no.
The world tilted on its axis. This wasn't the amnesiac Althea. This wasn't my goofy, Gen-Z songbird who talked to ferns. This was the ghost I had tried to bury. This was the Tyrant. The singer whose music was a symphony of heartbreak, the woman whose grief over the car accident that killed her entire family was a bottomless chasm that had once swallowed her whole. This was the Althea who had stood on a rooftop in the rain, her eyes empty, before I dragged her back. This was the woman who had looked at me with such profound loathing that I felt it like a physical burn.
Her memories are back. The thought was a death sentence. Or was this just the sleepwalking? A nocturnal haunting by the demons her conscious mind had forgotten? It didn't matter. The result was the same. The real Althea was here, and she was trying to leave me. Again.
I should have increased her sedations. The thought was immediate, toxic, and utterly mine. Control. It always came back to control. I couldn't control the stock market with absolute certainty, but I could, by God, control the chemical composition of my wife's brain to keep her from shattering.
I moved forward, my steps deliberately soft, the syringe concealed in my hand. The gravel crunched under my feet. "Althea," I said, my voice a low, forced calm, a stark contrast to the storm raging inside me. "Althea, it's me."
She stopped, the shovel dropping to her side with a dull thud. She turned her head slowly, and her eyes found mine.
Fuck.
It was the stare. Blank. Soulless. The vibrant, expressive amber I had lost myself in just hours before was gone, replaced by a flat, cold hatred that I knew intimately. It was the look she'd given me the day she'd served me the divorce papers. The look she'd given me when I'd found her on the roof. It was the stare of the woman who believed I was the architect of all her misery.
"Oh. Haven." Her voice was a whip-crack, devoid of any warmth, any of the playful affection that had become my oxygen. "You useless thing. What are you doing here? Leave me alone." She took a step back, raising the shovel slightly. "Don't you dare come closer. Or else."
Every word was a shard of glass shoved into my heart. Useless thing. She had no idea. No idea the empires I'd toppled, the men I'd broken, the blood I'd spilled, all for her. All to create a world safe enough for her to be this vulnerable, this broken, in.
"Althea, you need to calm down," I said, still advancing, my tone placating, a lion tamer facing a feral beast. "I'm here to help you."
A bitter, broken laugh escaped her, a sound that belonged in a graveyard. "Help me? Fuck you. I don't need your help. You're one of the people who took my family from me!"
The old, familiar accusation. It never got easier to hear. "I wasn't involved!" The protest was automatic, desperate. "You saw the reports, the investigations! I was in Tokyo when it happened! I wasn't there!"
"You weren't," she snarled, her body trembling with a rage so potent it vibrated in the air. "But your family was. Your name. The Hartwells. The Blackwoods. You're all a nest of vipers. I was so fucking close to figuring it all out, connecting the dots, but fuck… it's always a dead end. Always!"
Her knees buckled, and she sank into the ravaged lavender, the fight draining out of her, replaced by an overwhelming despair. She buried her face in her muddy hands, her shoulders shaking with silent, wracking sobs. "They're gone. They're all gone."
This was my chance. The moment of vulnerability. My heart was a torn, bleeding thing in my chest, but my mind was cold, calculating. This was a crisis. And I was engineered to manage crises.
I moved closer, kneeling in the dirt before her, the syringe ready in my hand. "Althea…"
Her head snapped up. The despair in her eyes was instantly incinerated by a fresh wave of fury. With a speed that belied her grief, she launched herself at me.
The impact knocked the air from my lungs. I fell backward, my head connecting with the soft earth, the syringe flying from my hand and skittering somewhere into the darkness. And then she was on top of me, her hands closing around my throat.
Her strength was shocking. It was the strength of madness, of grief, of a cornered animal. Her knees pinned my arms, her face inches from mine, her eyes burning with a feverish, unhinged light.
"It's your fault, Haven!" she screamed, spittle flying from her lips, landing on my face. "It's all your fault! If I'd never married you! If I'd never gotten involved with your cursed family! They'd still be alive! You did this! YOU!"
The world began to gray at the edges. Spots danced before my eyes. Her thumbs pressed into my windpipe, cutting off the air, the sound, the light. And in that suffocating darkness, a part of me… agreed with her. A part of me welcomed the punishment. Because I had failed. I had failed to protect her family. I had failed to protect her from this pain. And my solution, my only solution, was to drug her, to manipulate her, to cage the magnificent, wounded bird she was so she wouldn't fly into the glass.
My fingers scrabbled in the dirt, searching, desperate. My vision was tunneling. The syringe. Where is it?
My fingertips brushed against cool, smooth glass. I closed my hand around it, my grip feeble.
"Althea…" I choked out, the word a ragged, torn thing. "My… love…"
Her grip faltered for a fraction of a second. A flicker of something confusion? in the depths of her hatred. It was all the opening I needed.
With the last of my strength, I brought my arm up and plunged the needle into the side of her neck, my thumb depressing the plunger.
The effect was near-instantaneous. The wild fire in her eyes guttered out. The terrifying pressure on my throat vanished. Her body went limp, slumping forward like a marionette with its strings cut. She collapsed on top of me, a dead weight, her head lolling against my shoulder.
For a long moment, I just lay there, gasping for air, her unconscious form heavy on my chest. The scent of crushed lavender and her Vanilla Strawberry hair was a nauseating perfume. I could feel the frantic beat of her heart against my own, a slowing drumbeat of the storm that had just passed. I wrapped my arms around her, holding her close, my own body trembling with adrenaline and a soul-deep exhaustion.
Sushi was whining, nudging her with his nose, confused and frightened.
"It's okay, Sushi," I managed, my voice a raw scrape. I shifted, carefully rolling her off me and gathering her into my arms. She was so light. So fragile. The Tyrant was gone, leaving only the broken vessel. "Your mom just had an attack. Come on. Follow us to the bedroom."
He did, his tail tucked between his legs, a silent, furry shadow as I carried my wife out of the ravaged garden and back into the house. I laid her gently in our bed, wiping the mud and tears from her face with a damp cloth, erasing the evidence of her torment. I changed her soiled nightgown for a clean one, my movements clinical, detached. I was a curator, restoring a priceless, damaged artifact.
When she was clean, tucked under the covers, looking for all the world like she was merely in a deep sleep, I picked up my phone.
The first call was to a number that didn't exist in any public directory. "Cleanup. The greenhouse. Make it spotless. No traces. I want it to look exactly as it did yesterday." I didn't wait for a reply. I hung up. The Blackwood team was efficient. By morning, the lavender would be replanted, the soil raked, the shovel returned to its shed. It would be as if the Tyrant had never walked there.
The second call was to Mrs. Li. She answered on the first ring, her voice alert. She was used to these calls.
"We need to increase the dosage in the morning tea and prepare afternoon tea too," I said, my voice flat, devoid of emotion. "The current level is… insufficient."
"Understood, Mrs. Hartwell."
I ended the call and dropped the phone onto the bedside table. The silence of the room was deafening. I sank into the armchair I had occupied the night before, the one where I'd watched her sleep after her collapse from finding the divorce papers. I put my head in my hands, my fingers digging into my scalp as if I could physically tear the headache, the guilt, the fear, from my mind.
This is my life. This was the endless, cyclical hell I had chosen. A gilded cage of my own making. I played the part of the devoted wife by day, and by night, I was her warden, her chemist, her silent, obsessive guardian. I fought off the ghosts of her past with syringes and secrets, all while praying the woman I loved would never remember enough to truly hate me for it.
I lifted my head and stared at the sleeping, sedated form of my wife. The moonlight caressed her face, smoothing away the lines of anguish, making her look peaceful. Innocent.
My beautiful Tyrant, I thought, the words a painful, worshipful prayer in the quiet of my mind. Please don't come back. Stay my songbird. Stay this version of you who looks at me like I hang the moon, and not like I am the one who blotted it out of her sky. I will burn the world to cinders, I will drown myself in blood, I will play this monstrous role for eternity, if it means I get to keep you.
The thought was selfish. It was toxic. It was the very foundation of my obsession. I didn't just love Althea. I possessed her. And I would destroy any part of her even the parts that were fundamentally her to maintain that possession.
As dawn began to bleed at the edges of the curtains, I remained in that chair, a silent sentinel. Watching. Waiting. My Grape Old Wine scent, now heavy with despair and a desperate, cloying love, filled the room, a protective, suffocating shroud around the sleeping woman who held my shattered soul in her unknowing hands.