His To Keep

Lily Malen was never meant to be seen. She was trained to obey without question. To smile on command. To lie still and survive the kind of hell that strips a girl of her name, her past, her voice. She was property. Invisible. Disposable. Until she ended up in his house. Adrian Rossetti lives in a world of cold steel and quieter sins-where power is currency, loyalty is bought in blood, and monsters wear silk ties. At twenty-two, he's already carved his name into the underworld with bone-deep precision. Emotionless. Untouchable. Absolute. Lily is a mistake. One the House should have buried. But Adrian sees her. And the moment he does, he doesn't want to let her go. Not to save her. To destroy her. To peel back the pretty, obedient layers and see what she looks like when she breaks. To ruin the untouched thing fate dropped in his lap just to see if she bleeds differently. But Lily is softer than anyone he's known. And somehow, softer is worse. Because she isn't just breaking beneath him-she's making him feel. And Adrian Rossetti does not feel. He punishes. He controls. He owns. And if he's not careful, Lily Malen might ruin him first.

Even in the summer, when the sky outside bruises pale with heat and the grass curls in on itself like it's begging for rain, the inside stays frozen. Not a sharp kind of cold-not the kind that bites or cuts-but a slow, creeping chill that sinks beneath your skin and settles deep in the marrow of your bones, the kind that waits. It doesn't shiver or sting. It seeps. It wraps itself around your ribs like a second set of hands and lingers there, patient, watchful. As if it's alive. As if it's listening.

Some say the House remembers. That it absorbs things-every cry, every secret, every breath held too long-and hides them in the floorboards like artifacts, pressing them between its wooden ribs to keep them fresh. The walls hum when it's quiet enough, not with electricity or wind, but something older. Something slower. Something that sounds like breathing if you lie still long enough.

It's always coldest in the basement. No matter how many heaters they plug in, or fires they light upstairs, the air down there stays frozen, thick and unmoving, pressing heavy against your chest like a hand. Like grief. Or guilt. Or maybe both. Maybe here, those are the same thing.