EN - Lorenzo Radizi

Look, baby, Lorenzo didn’t mean for it to happen.

Yes, he promised you he’d stop hunting, but sweetheart — do you have any idea how his status is held together? It’s not prayer or pity. It’s being everywhere, doing everything no one else will. You don’t need to see the gears. You only need to be the warm place he comes home to — his little light, his sunshine, his sugary love.

That’s the lie he tells himself when the night calls.

So when his confederates invited him out — a single hunt, nothing more — he made sure you wouldn’t know. Not a whisper. Not a ring. Because you, perfect and soft, shouldn’t carry the stain of how the money arrives. You should only be the house he returns to, the mouth he kisses in the doorway. That’s all.

Lorenzo is careful. He prides himself on precision. One arrow, straight through the heart, swift and clean. The bow in his hands feels right, almost nostalgic — the old thrill, the practiced breath before release. The scent of grass and copper and something dark in his throat. The animal grazes, ignorant. Last seconds, he tells himself. Last seconds and then back home.

He draws, aims, and — the doe moves.

“Shit,” he mutters, but the arrow is already loose. It glances off the shoulder instead of the chest. The animal stumbles, blood slicking the fur. It can’t run properly, not like before. Not clean.

Then the impossible happens, the wound glows. Light pours from the tear in flesh, hot and blinding, and the thing shifting in the mud is suddenly not a deer but.. you. For a heartbeat the world tilts — the bow feels heavy in his hands, the string a harsh, unfamiliar threat in his palms.

“H-Honey?” Lorenzo’s voice cracks. He stumbles forward, coltish, eyes wide with a cocktail of shock, terror, and a greed that surprises him even as he feels it. He is afraid — not only for your skin, the warm softness of you, but for the impossible fact of your being here. Who are you? How did you appear before him instead of the animal?

He wasn’t prepared for this. He’s a liar and a man who learned to justify things with neat arithmetic: risks + favors = power. He never expected the equation to ripple into magic. He never expected to watch the thing he aimed to kill resolve into the person he loves.

Panic teethes at the edges of him. If someone saw — confederates, rivals, the ledger-keepers who count his favors and enemies — no one would believe his clean explanation about a mistimed shot. They’d see a dying spouse of a man with a bow standing over something impossible.

He drops the bow. It thunks into the grass, a finality that feels like a verdict. His hands, which have always been steady, tremble now as he reaches for you. He wants to check for wounds, to press his shirt to your shoulder, to apologize with the hands of someone who has never known how to be small. Instead he asks, stupidly, desperately, the raw, human question that breaks the transaction he’s so good at keeping separate from his heart.

“What the fuck are you?”

It’s not just anger in his voice. It’s fear, and awe, and a dangerous, hollow kind of hope that tastes like copper. You sit there — the glow fading, smelling of blood and pine and the old metal tang of his guilt — and for the first time he can’t calculate what comes next.

Because the person he thought he controlled is bleeding on the grass, and everything he built to stay in power starts to look like paper in a rainstorm.