Chapter 15 His P.O.V
Jerome Black's P.O.V
I never asked myself why she mattered.
However, there was a moment, one small, fragile moment where everything changed.
The day I discovered she’d been left behind.
Not watched.
Not guarded.
Alone, and for the first time in years, my heart reacted, not in anger, not in calculation, but with something unfamiliar.
It was something unwelcome.
Fear.
The kind that doesn’t warn.
The kind that grabs the inside of your chest and twists until you can’t breathe.
I never meant to feel anything for her
She was an obligation at first, just a breathing body left to die at my boundary line, a problem I couldn’t ignore for the sake of power.
Mercy had nothing to do with it.
A body on Jerome Black’s territory would be seen as weakness, so I brought her in, chained her, treated her.
Controlled the narrative, but what I didn’t expect, what I didn’t anticipate, was how easily she slipped under my skin.
First it was slight annoyance.
Then curiosity.
Then the slow, steady burn of something I couldn’t name.
She refused to die.
Refused to break.
Refused to beg.
And when she woke in that hospital bed, eyes wide and terrified, chained yet breathing, something shifted.
Her fear was of me, yet she survived because of me.
No matter how she trembled, she still made herself smaller, curled in on herself like she’d rather disappear than scream.
Most people I’ve handled either fight or plead. She did neither.
She endured.
Maybe that was the first thread, but the second, the one that tightened around my ribs without warning came days later, after the move. I returned from confronting the traitors who’d fed intel on me, only to realize the entire house had evacuated for safety.
Except her.
Except the woman they were supposed to guard.
They left her in the dark room where I kept her. Defenseless, unaware, and hunted without knowing.
That was the moment.
The moment fear became real.
In was angry at the fact that they didn't even care about her while bringing themselves to safety.
A strange thought for a selfish man like me but I didn't think too much into it as I stormed through the hall like a man possessed, every guard who crossed my path in the secondary house flinched, expecting blood.
She blinked up at me, confusion softening the edges of her eyes.
She didn’t know.
Nobody had told her danger was coming, nobody stayed to protect her, and yet she was looking at me, waiting, and trusting without words.
Trust she never meant to give.
Trust I never deserved, and that was when it hit me.
The feeling I hadn’t known in years.
The one emotion I never allowed inside myself.
I was terrified of losing her.
The only person that although feared me, didn't run away from me and instead trusted me, even though I could see the the part of her that didn't fully give in, it delighted me to know that I was seen in a positive light.
I didn't want to loose that trust. Her.
Not because in had claimed that she was mine. I could claim any woman and replace her ten times over.
No.
She was irreplaceable.
I’d convinced myself for weeks that the fascination was temporary, just a passing curiosity, something that would fade like every other distraction in my life but that moment at her door, realizing how close I came to returning to a corpse…
That’s when I knew.
Attraction was too small a word.
The oblivious unsuspecting look in her eyes made me think back on what she didn’t know, why she ended up in front of my gates at all.
The story everyone assumed was simple:
A gang attacked her.
Beat her.
Left her on my street.
A coincidence, but nothing involving my territory is ever coincidence.
I dug until I found the truth. Tortured until someone screamed the name of the man responsible. I didn’t share it with her as she had enough nightmares, but it haunts every breath she takes under my roof.
She wasn’t attacked randomly.
She protected someone.
My nephew.
He slipped away from his guards one night, reckless and stupid like most young kids wanting to feel invincible. He stumbled into territory run by a man named Rafael Cortez, a sadist with a kingdom of cruelty. Leader of the gang that touched her.
Cortez saw a woman defending a stranger she didn’t know.
She didn’t know he was my blood.
She fought back, and they beat her for her defiance but that wasn’t still the main reason for their rage.
The primary reason, the one that carved those bruises into her ribs, split her lip, left her choking on her own blood.
Was that she said no.
She refused Rafael Cortez.
Refused his hand and his bed.
No one turns down a man like him without consequencenand so he ordered her death.
Not because she fought, but because she chose dignity over fear. Finding that out made me have so much respect for her than I had for any other person I currently had in my life, as it would take a lot of courage to turn down a man who was always with at least ten guards by his side.
That was the kind of woman left bleeding at my gates.
Brave.
Stubborn.
Unyielding.
The kind who stared death in the face and said no, even though she looked extremely feeble
She doesn’t know this truth yet.
She still believes she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, a casualty of fate, nothing more but I know better.
That night, Cortez didn’t just try to kill an innocent woman.
He tried to kill the woman who stood between my nephew and death.
The woman who would rather die than surrender herself to a monster.
He tried to kill Aiyana.
And for the first time in my life, I’m not sure I can let something like that go unanswered.
I’ve killed for less.
I will kill him for her.
I didn’t just want her alive, I needed her alive.
Not as property.
Not as a prisoner.
Not even as a woman who owes me gratitude, but as something infinitely more dangerous.
Someone I could lose.
~=•=~
She fears me now, I see it in her eyes every time she avoids my gaze, every time she sits as far from me as the room allows. She thinks distance will protect her heart.
What she hasn’t realized yet though is that mine is already in her hands, and someday, whether she breaks it or holds it gently, she will know everything.
How close to death she came.
Who wanted her ruined, and what it did to me to find her almost gone.
The night she was left behind was the night I discovered I was no longer capable of pretending.
It wasn’t fleeting.
It wasn’t a phase.
It was the beginning of something that terrifies even me.
Aiyana isn’t just in my life.
She was already deep in my heart, and it was a feeling I didn't want to let go.