Warning; This chapter might later contain obsessive love and feelings, tendencies and actions.

**

The digital clock on the wall shifted from 2:17 to 2:18. A minute, stolen from time itself, spent entirely in the sanctuary of her breath.

A soft sound escaped her lips—not a word, but a sigh of deep sleep. Her head turned slightly on the cushion, her face now angled more directly toward mine. Her lips were parted. The warmth of her exhalation ghosted directly over my mouth.

A shudder ran through me, so profound it felt like the universe adjusting its axis.

Closer.

The thought was not my own. It was a command from a place deeper than instinct. My body obeyed without question. I shifted infinitesimally forward, reducing the gap between us from inches to a hair's breadth. Now, with each soft breath she took, I could feel the faintest disturbance of air against my own lips.

It was a kiss in its most elemental form.

A pre-kiss.

A promise written in vapor and heat.

My eyes traced the line of her jaw, down the elegant column of her neck, to where the silk of her pajama top lay open just enough to reveal the delicate hollow of her throat. I could see the flutter of her pulse there. A tiny, frantic bird beating against the cage of her skin.

My bird. My pulse to monitor, to protect, to own.

The obsessive need to touch became a physical ache. But not to wake her. Never to wake her. The purity of her sleep was sacred. My hand, which had been resting on my own knee, lifted with glacial slowness. I didn't reach for her cheek. That was too direct, too crude for this ritual.

Instead, my fingers crept onto the cushion, over the fine linen, until the very tips brushed against the stray strands of her hair that fanned out around her head. I didn't stroke it. I just let my skin make contact with hers, through the veil of her hair. It was like touching a shadow, a whisper of a touch, but the connection it forged was electric.

It was a circuit completed. Her life force, steady and sleeping, flowing into me. My obsessive devotion, silent and watchful, flowing back.

A car passed on the distant road, moon supplying the lights sweeping through the window like a searchlight for my forbidden obsession for my mother. For a single, heart-stopping second, the light illuminated her face. Her eyelashes, long and dark, cast tiny shadows on her cheeks. In that fleeting moment, she looked like a princess under a spell.

And I was the beast, not waiting for true love's kiss to break the curse, but consuming the curse itself, making it a part of my soul. My love for her wasn't a cure. It was a condition. A beautiful, terminal condition.

I laid my head back down, my lips so close to hers that they tingled with the proximity. I closed my eyes again, not to sleep, but to feel more intensely. In the darkness behind my eyelids, the world narrowed to two things: the soft sound of her breathing, and the phantom sensation of her pulse against my lips.

This was my worship. This was my fixation. And I would stay there, on the cold floor, until the sun rose, if that's what it took to satiate the relentless, beautiful hunger that was my love for her.

***

The intention was to stay. To remain the sentinel in the quiet cathedral of her rest. Every cell in his body was tuned to her frequency—the whisper of her breath, the scent of her skin, the soft heat radiating from her form.

This vigil was not a duty; it was a craving, an obsessive need to pour his entire being into the act of guarding her peace.

He fought the heaviness in his own eyelids. Sleep was a vulnerability he could rarely afford, a state where the systems within him churned with chaotic potential.

But here, with her, the very things that usually kept him alert—the hum of ARIA in his ears, the subtle thrum of the Taboo and Dark Seduction Systems—seemed to lower their volume, soothed by the simple, profound rhythm of her existence.

His head rested on the cushion beside hers, his body anchored to the floor. His gaze, which had been fixed on the delicate flutter of her pulse, began to soften at the edges. The sharp, hyper-focused details of her face—the single strand of hair across her cheek, the faint line beside her mouth—blurred into a single, beautiful impression.

The obsessive thoughts began to slow, their sharp edges smoothed away not by force, but by a creeping, gentle tide. The mantra of protect, watch, love started to loop, each iteration softer than the last, until the words themselves lost their meaning and became just a feeling. A warm, heavy feeling that started in his chest and spread outwards, weighing down his limbs.

His breathing, without his conscious notice, began to sync with hers. Inhale. Exhale. A shared rhythm. The last thing he was aware of was the sound of her breath, not as a separate phenomenon, but as part of his own. It was the most natural thing in the world to follow that sound, to let it pull him down into the depths it came from.

There was no moment of decision. No final, stubborn thought. The fight simply ended without a whimper. The tension that held his body rigid seeped away into the quiet floor. His head settled more fully against the cushion.

Sleep didn't take him; it enveloped him. It was a silent, swift victory. One moment, he was the watchful god, intent on defying his own needs.

The next, he was gone, fallen into a depth of slumber he never allowed himself, drawn under by the very peace he was trying to protect. His last conscious sensation was not a thought, but a final, phantom feeling of her breath on his skin—a lullaby he had no defense against.

For the first time in a long time, Peter slept. And he slept deeply, curled on the floor at his mother's side, more vulnerable and more at peace than he had ever been.

But Linda stirred awake, and unlike him, she had no will to hold back anymore. She wanted her son.

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