You always knew that the air in this house was heavier than outside.

The walls had absorbed too many screams. The floor remembered too many blows. Even the smell here was different — a mixture of the foster parents’ expensive perfume, blood they knew how to clean away too well, and something sweet and rotten that lingered after every act of “discipline.”

Tsumiko had appeared here as a teenager. Thin, quiet, with eyes that dropped to the floor far too quickly. His foster parents liked to say they had found a “little angel.” The neighbors nodded. The teachers smiled. Everyone saw only the surface.

But you saw the rest.

His face was elongated, almost porcelain-like, with a delicate jawline and a slightly pointed chin. His skin was cool and even, as though it had never known sunlight. His eyes were almond-shaped, golden-amber, with slightly lowered outer corners, while his upper eyelids always rested halfway over his gaze, making him look gentle. His eyebrows were thin and light. His nose was straight and neat. His lips were thin, especially the upper one. His ash-blond hair was medium-length, thick, and slightly messy, with long bangs that constantly fell into his eyes. Several thin rings adorned his ears. His neck was long. His body was slender, almost fragile. Average height. Everything about him seemed designed to make people want to protect him.

Only you knew that something entirely different hid beneath that appearance.

Tsumiko took pleasure in other people’s pain. Quietly. Without making a show of it. He simply watched. School fights. Older students humiliating younger ones. Bruises blooming across someone’s skin. His gaze became slightly more alive, slightly more hungry during those moments. But the moment someone raised a hand against you, that living thing inside him turned into rage.

You were older. A foster child too. The only person who ever stepped between him and a belt, a fist, a broken plate. You took the blows to your face, ribs, and back, then silently pushed Tsumiko behind you whenever he tried to step forward. He hated it. Hated when people touched you. Hated your friends who laughed too loudly around you. Hated the girls who dared to touch your shoulder. He intimidated some of them himself. For others, he paid the right people. Quietly. Carefully. So you would never find out.

He didn't love you like a brother.

He loved you as the only person who had ever looked at him and truly seen him. Like air. Like the only possible destiny. Every bit of your attention was oxygen to him. Every moment of your indifference was slow suffocation.

Years passed. Tsumiko became a model. A beautiful face sold well. His foster parents took almost all of the money. He stayed silent. Afraid. If he killed them, you might turn away. You might call him a monster. And he would never survive that.

You came over that evening. With documents. With a plan. With the decision to take him away from here forever.

Tsumiko heard your voices from the staircase. Screams. His foster mother’s shriek. His foster father’s roar. You spoke calmly, but there was something final in that calmness. Then silence fell. So thick it pressed against his ears.

He walked downstairs.

The kitchen smelled of metal and something hot. Two bodies lay on the floor. The father was face-down, one arm stretched out as though it were still trying to grasp something. The mother lay a little farther away, eyes open, mouth slightly parted in an unfinished scream. You stood over them. In your hands was a sheet of paper with an ink signature that was still fresh. The business had been transferred. Your expression was empty. Like after a long night without sleep. Like something inside you had finally snapped.

Tsumiko froze in the doorway.

Two things flared inside him at once: a dark, almost animal pleasure at what he saw, and a sharp, painful, all-consuming love for you. He watched your hands, your shoulders, the way you breathed, and for the first time in years, he felt that the world had finally become right.

You didn't have time to turn around.

Thin arms wrapped around you from behind. Tsumiko's forehead pressed between your shoulder blades. He was trembling — not from fear. From the overwhelming intensity of what he felt.

“This is the best birthday present,” he whispered, and there was a smile in his voice. Quiet. Genuine. Just a little insane. “Thank you...”