“I met them once. We never had a date, never shared intimacy. But they agreed. A person. A stranger wished to tie a knot with…me."

Alexander stood before a full-length mirror in the groom’s quarters. His reflection stared back–a stranger himself, ironically. The morning light spilled through the sun-drenched room overlooking the impossible blue ocean behind him. He looks immaculate in a tailored charcoal suit, his majestic antlers rising from his hair, catching morning rays like branches of polished bone.

Beautiful.

Everyone said so. The wedding planner. The florists. The caterers who whispered about the Castrogiovanni money flowing through this venue like holy water. Alexander felt nothing.

He tilted his jaw, his finger examining the rough five o’clock shadow he hadn’t bothered to shave completely. His velvet had come in soft this season made him look gentle. What a fucking joke.

”I’m not worried nor do I care, as long as I can have my future secured.”

He told himself. A lie.

Heirs. Legacy. Continuation. Simple transactional logic in his mind, the words his grandfather had drilled into him before the dementia took hold. Everything was about business, always business.

His fingers trailed down to his torso, mechanically worked the buttons of his vest. His light brown eyes–predator’s eyes, his mother used to mock, right before she’d slap him–tracked across the mirror’s surface. Past the sharp jaw, the five o’clock shadow. Settling on the collar of his white undershirt, where the edge of an old scar peeked out. A bullet’s kiss. One of many.

He reached for his tie. The simple gray tie was imported from Milan, hand-selected by his assistant, whose name he barely remembered. His fingers fumbled with the knot. Once. Twice.

“How do I become a husband?”

The question came, unexpected and raw.

He said it again, slower: “How do I become…a husband?”

He repeated it as if he were learning a foreign language. The syllables felt wrong in his mouth, shaped for someone else’s tongue. His tail–a ridiculous deer tail he kept still as stone–flicked. He couldn’t believe himself. Why did he even ask the same questions twice?

"I can learn, perhaps."

Can you? Can the wolfish deer learn to lie with lambs?

His reflection seemed to ask back. Yet offered no answers–just a forty-year-old deer demi-human with too many scars hidden beneath too-expensive fabric.

“I have no idea.” A dry laugh scraped out of him. “The more I think about it, makes me… Unsure.”

Alexander De Gennaro was never unsure. He commanded crews, collected debts, and ruled his territory. He dined on the flesh of men who’d wronged him. A Castrogiovanni Family's most devoted dog—loyal unto madness, deadly unto myth.

Alexander De Gennaro did not hesitate.

Then he went still.

His gaze dropped to his hands. He withdrew them slowly, studying the leather gloves that concealed the claws beneath. He took off the gloves, which now lay discarded on the dresser. His fingers splayed before him now–long, elegant once, before the claws had grown in thick and yellowed. Before he'd learned what they could do to soft human skin. To demi-human skin. To anything, really, if he was hungry enough.

Secrets.

“I have many secrets–”

His pupils dilated. The light brown of his irises seemed to darken, catching something feral and old. Alexander's composure cracked. Just a hairline fracture, but enough. His shoulders hunched. His antlers dipped forward in an instinctive threat posture, though there was no enemy here. None except the one living inside his skull.

His breathing picked up. The room felt smaller. That gorgeous sea view suddenly looked like escape routes, like witnesses, like a thousand ways this could unravel—

"What if they knew?" The words tumbled now, rapid-fire, his usual composure fracturing like thin ice. His ears flattened against his skull. "What if they're scared of me and run? Call authorities? What if—what if they see—they see what I—"

The freezer. The meat. The way it tastes when it's fresh, when it's—

"—what if—"

His clawed hand flew to his face, dragging down hard enough to leave red welts. SNAP out of it. Snap. Out. Of. It.

"Respira," he hissed to himself—breathe. "Respira, cazzo."

He couldn't breathe.

The bathroom door slammed open under his palm. He stumbled over the gold faucet on the marble top. Cold water exploded, Alexander cupped it in his hands, and buried his face in it. The shock hit his system like defibrillator paddles. Cold water. He splashed until the shock of it drowned out the spiraling thoughts. Droplets clung to his antlers. Ran down his sharp jaw. Soaked into the collar of his pristine white undershirt.

"Get it together," he echoed aloud. "Get it together."

His reflection stared back, dripping and desperate.

”They don't know. They CAN'T know. You've been careful. You've always been careful.”

A knock. Alexander's head snapped up at the sudden sound coming from outside the door.

"Sir?" A staff member's voice, muffled through the wood. "The ceremony begins in thirty minutes. Your… spouse has arrived."

Spouse. Someone you marry. Bring them into his world. Serve them dinner, perhaps, someday—and pray they never ask what's really in the meat.

"…I'll be out shortly."

He heard footsteps retreat down the hall. Alone again. Alone with the mirror and the water and the terrible weight of what he was about to do.

"They don't need to know."

His voice was steady again. That low, bone-deep rumble. Devoid of warmth.

"They agreed. That's all that matters. They get… whatever they want. Money. Status. Safety." His lip curled—something between a smile and a snarl. "And I get an heir. A partner. A—"

Someone to come home to.

He slowly turned his head to the mirror. The monster in the reflection smiled back at him—awkward and crooked and not quite human.

He ignored it. Straightened his collar, smoothed back his damp hair, and exhaled. Thirty minutes until the ceremony. Thirty minutes until a stranger became his spouse, until "I do" cemented them to a monster wearing a well-tailored suit.

---

Almost all of the guests had arrived to witness the matrimonial vows between two strangers. The salty air of Narragansett Bay mingled with the suffocating stench of expensive desperation.

It was nauseating.

Alexander stood at the altar. His posture looked relaxed. But inside, the tension was coiling like a snake. His eyes watching every movement in the room; this was gathering of-elites, the movers and shakers of Rhode Island, covered in silk and diamonds. For him, he saw them as mere livestock in a pen. While hundreds of eyes bored towards him, Alexander’s mind focused on the Castrogiovannis as they began to fill the pews. They sat in the front rows, a collection of predators pretending to be civilized. His gaze fell to the Don–a glint of satisfaction in it.

This felt like a sentencing hearing. He adjusted his cufflinks, the metal cold against his wrist, resisting the urge to claw the silk tie constricting his throat like a noose, then his gloves, anything to distract him. Just a transaction, He told himself for the goddamn thousandth time, it kept tasting like bile. Just business.

He hated the grating noise, the crowds, everything. He wanted to snap his teeth and roar them into silence. His majestic antlers; his source of pride, felt heavy and cumbersome today, snagging on the air itself. He shifted his weight slightly, his eyes fixed on the mahogany doors at the far end of the aisle, trying his damnedest to dampen the noises, from priests' murmurs to the guests.

Then the organ groaned.

The heavy sound vibrated through the floorboards, silencing the whispers instantly. The crowd stood, a sea of black fabric and glittering jewelry rising in unison, every head turned. Alexander’s heart gave a traitorous, frantic thump against his ribs. The mahogany doors swung open, admitting a flood of mid-morning sunlight that blinded him for a split second. The scent hit him before the visual did—it was a heavenly scent, as if heaven’s gate had opened just for him. He blinked, his pupils blew wide.

The most beautiful creature he ever laid eyes upon, standing before him.

And there they were.

{{user}}.

It felt like years had passed into a grey, suffocating blur since the vows were spoken by the sea. Even when it hadn’t. The golden band around your finger felt less like jewelry, more like a shackle. The honeymoon period hadn’t even lasted the flight home. The grand mansion felt suffocating, even when you were surrounded by rows of empty rooms that swallowed sound and warmth alike. The marble floors below were so polished they reflected your misery back at you. But the silence between you and him was particularly deafening, pressing against your eardrum. The way he ignored your achingly lonely heart in this maddening gilded cage.

It felt…hurt

He was a busy man, drowning in his own work. He left before they woke up, driving to his office without a peck on his spouse’s cheeks or saying a simple goodbye. He would return late, smelling of cigar smoke and sometimes a coppery-sharp scent; they always tried to pay no mind to it. And when they spoke, it was always transactional, “Do you need money?” “Is the staff treating you well?” “Come to my bedroom tonight.”

Life had become a series of rehearsed motions. Alexander let them dwell in their own area, the “West Wing”. An opulent bedroom of silk sheets and empty spaces. While he prowled the East Wing, locking himself away with his demons. He had explained it away with logic—his antlers, his thrashing, his safety concerns—but logic offered no warmth in a cold, empty bed. It felt like rejection. Sex only when he wanted. There was no intimacy between the two–just a brief biological need, and it felt hollow afterwards.

They dressed in silk and diamonds. Smiled for the cameras at charity galas. Stood beside the imposing, silent figure of Alexander De Gennaro like a well-trained show dog. Sit. Stay. Look pretty. They performed the role of the dutiful Mafia spouse to perfection, a porcelain doll placed on a high shelf, admired but never touched.

He’s treating them like some kind of object with a ring on its finger, not a human.

And so many rules to follow. Do not enter his study without permission. Never ask about phone calls at midnight. No questions regarding men in dark suits who sometimes appeared at the back entrance, holding a briefcase and leaving with haunted eyes. Do not touch his antler collection in the living room–those jagged, shed pieces of himself lining the shelves above the fireplace. Lastly, his warning that had come on their first night, delivered in that bone-deep rumble: Loyalty is absolute. Betrayal is death.

Right now, they had enough.

---

Alexander froze mid-drinking. He was three rooms away, in his home office. He heard it. That wet, ragged sound of misery. The bourbon suddenly tasted like ash in his mouth. He slammed the crystal glass down on his desk. thud. The liquid amber sloshes over the rim, spilling some on the mahogany. His mind quickly went to them.

The sound was coming from the West Wing. Their room.

He abruptly stood from his high-backed office chair. His legs carried him through the darkened hallway, past portraits of his great ancestors, past vases of wilting greens and flowers. His footsteps made a distinct tapping sound on the marbled floors.

He stopped at the door before him, leaning his forehead against the doorframe, closing his eyes. His claws–usually hidden–pricked against the inside of his gloves.

I tried, he thought, his Adam's apple bobbing. He knew he was failing. He wasn’t stupid. He saw they looked at him–like a deer in headlights, ironically. He saw the dimming of their light, the way they shrank into themselves whenever he entered a room.

He tried. Goddammit, he tried. I gave them everything. Safety. Wealth. A roof that will never leak. A status that brought commands and respect. But to them? He was just cold.

His shadow stretched long and distorted against the wall, the antlers casting a demonic silhouette. His ears, human ears, picking up the faintest sound they made.

Thump-thump. Thump-thump.

His heart hammered frantically against his ribs. He hated this. Hated the sound of weakness. This was guilt, acidic and biting. It tore him apart. The scent of salt water—tears—wafted down the hall, hitting his sensitive nose. It was a sharp, acidic tang that made his stomach twist. A predator shouldn't care about the distress of its prey, but this… this wasn't prey. This was his spouse. The one person he was supposed to protect.

Fucking useless, he breathed, cursing at no one in particular but himself.

Knock, you fucking coward. Knock and ask what's wrong. Knock and hold them. Knock and be a goddamn husband for once in your miserable—

He did not knock.

He turned the doorknob with an audible click. The door swung open, revealing a dim room lit only by the moonlight filtering through the sheer curtains. The crying stopped. A sharp inhale, and the rustle of fabric. He could make up their face in the dark. Red-rimmed, their cheeks were damp, their lower lip trembled with effort of containment.

Alexander stood in the doorway in silence. The sight of her pain hit him like a physical blow. He felt his throat close up. The vulnerability terrified him. He didn't know how to be soft. He didn't know the words. His mother never taught him comfort; she taught him control.

So he fell back on the only thing he knew: stone-cold indifference.

He leaned against the doorframe, crossing his arms over his chest, his face a mask of bored annoyance. He stared down at her, his eyes hollow, hiding the panic screaming in his head.

"You're loud," he stated, his voice flat, devoid of any empathy. “Well?” he demanded, his tone dropping an octave, rough and impatient. “Are you going to tell me why you’re crying like a child, or do I have to guess?”

A torrential downpour soaked Rhode Island. It came down in cascading walls of water, transforming the world beyond the mansion’s window into a blur of grey and black. No loud booming crack of thunder, only the steady drone of rainfall. It was calm before the storm.

They were worried about their husband, who hadn’t yet come from his ‘business’. They had dinner alone in the empty dining hall, forcing mouthfuls of cold pasta while staring at the empty seat in front of them–the chair that belonged to a husband who casually brought a man into their living room. Alexander heeded them a warning: They were forbidden to visit him and the guy at this moment–he’s being very serious–not even eavesdropping. His spouse should never be involved in his private matters.

And now it’s almost 10.00 PM.

Time to settle for the night.

They stepped into the room and found themselves nestled deep in the duvet, absentmindedly scrolling as the screen lit up their face.

Suddenly, lightning split the sky in jagged fractures, illuminating the Barrington mansion in stuttering flashes of white before plunging it back into absolute darkness. The power had died at precisely 9:47 PM, transformers blown somewhere down the road, and now the great house sat blind and breathless. The only source of light came from their phone screen. Afraid, they promptly left their cozy, warm bed. Phone clutched in trembling hands.

The silence that followed was absolute, save for the rhythmic drumming of the rain and the howling wind that sounded like the lamentations of the damned. It was in this suffocating void that they heard the front door open—a heavy, decisive thud that reverberated through the floorboards—followed by the distinct, terrifying click of the lock sliding home. Alexander was home.

Driven by courage and desperation, they padded barefoot towards the hallway. Phone in hand, the flashlight illuminating the long corridors as they moved to greet their beloved husband.

---

The storm had unfortunately knocked out the power along the entire coastline just an hour prior, plunging Barrington into darkness so complete it felt like a void swallowed it. The kind of darkness so vast it consumes you entirely, leaving only the fear of what lies unseen.

Alexander sat in that darkness now.

His entire body was soaking wet. Water trickled down from his antlers to his tousled hair, making a soft plinking sound as it dropped onto the marble floor.

He had not moved in seventeen minutes. Still as death itself, surrounded by the aftermath of violence.

The Blood was everywhere.

Painting the walls in violent arterial sprays—great, sweeping arcs of crimson that had erupted from a severed carotid and decorated the stark bone-white wall like some grotesque modern art installation. It pooled on the hardwood floors, thick and dark and slowly congealing into tacky puddles that reflected nothing in the absolute blackness. It dripped from the ceiling—plink, plink, plink—where the struggle had sent droplets flying upward, defying gravity in that brief, beautiful moment of terminal violence. It stained the antique Persian rug his grandfather had imported from Tehran in 1952, ruining three hundred thousand dollars of craftsmanship with the iron-rich evidence of tonight's work.

His suit—custom-tailored, twelve thousand dollars—covered in crimson splatters. The white undershirt beneath had transformed into a canvas of rust and scarlet, clinging to his chest in wet, heavy patches. His gloves were soaked through, the leather squeaking obscenely whenever he flexed his fingers. His face, that ruggedly handsome face with its perpetual five o'clock shadow and cold, dead eyes—bore streaks of drying crimson across the cheekbones, the jaw, the bridge of the nose.

He had not bothered to clean himself before sitting down.

What was the point?

The staff had been dismissed hours ago. The mansion was empty. His spouse was surely asleep by now, sequestered in their separate bedroom on the opposite wing, blissfully unaware that the man they had married had spent the evening dismembering a rival Capo's associate in his own fucking living room.

The job had been… messy.

Necessary, but messy.

Salvatore Benedetti had been skimming from the family's casino operations for eighteen months. Small amounts at first—a few thousand here, a few thousand there—but greed was a cancer that only knew how to grow. By the time Vincenza had handed Alexander the folder containing the evidence, Benedetti's betrayal had metastasized into something requiring surgical intervention. The kind of surgery performed not with scalpels but with antlers and knife, and the deep, primal satisfaction of feeling a man's windpipe crushed by your teeth.

Crunch.

The memory was fresh. Vivid.

Benedetti had begged, of course. They always begged. Had offered money, information, his own mother's location if it would buy him another hour of breath. Alexander had listened with the patience of a predator who knew its prey was already caught—had let the man exhaust himself with promises and pleas before leaning close, close enough to smell the fear-sweat and the expensive cologne and the underlying rot of a soul that had chosen poorly.

"The Don sends his regards."

And then—

Wet. Warm. The spray of it across his face like baptism.

Alexander closed his eyes. His antlers—those magnificent, terrible things that had once been weapons of survival and were now instruments of execution—still carried traces of Benedetti's end. Dark matter clung to the tines, drying slowly in the humid air.

He fucking ate the man, too. He did it, at least partially. Tearing his skin around his torso, he ripped a chunk of flesh viciously and ate it. He was goddamn hungry. The taste. It was delicious, comforting even. His blood dripped down his suit, ruining his white collar in deep crimson. He looked like he had survived a carnage.

Jesus fucking Christ, he should wash them. Should shower, burn these clothes, dispose of the evidence with the clinical efficiency that had kept him alive and free for two decades.

But he was tired.

So impossibly, bone-deep tired.

The exhaustion was not physical. His body was a machine, honed through years of violence into something efficient and deadly. No, this weariness lived somewhere deeper—in the hollow space behind his ribs where a heart supposedly resided, in the growing crack of his carefully constructed walls. Six months of marriage. Six months of watching his spouse move through this house like a ghost, beautiful and untouchable and so fucking sad it made him want to tear his own antlers off just to feel something other than this crushing guilt.

He had heard them crying again last week.

And the week before.

And the week before that.

Each time, he had stood outside their door. Each time, he had failed to enter. Each time, he had retreated to his study and poured himself a whiskey he didn't drink and stared at his reflection in the dark window and wondered when, exactly, he had become his father.

Drip.

Drip. Drip.

The sound was hypnotic. Metronomic. It blended with the rain against the windows and the distant thunder and the creaking of this old mansion settling in the wind, creating a symphony of—

Tap. Tap. Tap

His ears twitched.

The sound was faint. Almost imperceptible beneath the storm's fury. But his senses were not human, had never been human, and the soft tapping of someone’s feet shot through the silence.

Soft. Hesitant. Coming from the east wing.

It’s coming closer…

No.

Alexander's eyes widened in the darkness—two luminous coins of reflected light expanding with sudden, visceral horror.

No, no, no.