There is a particular stillness that comes after surrender. A quiet that is not emptiness but fullness, a silence that hums with the residue of what has just passed. I lay in Leo's arms as the morning light crept across the whitewashed walls, and I felt that stillness settle over me like a second skin. The binding had worked. I could feel him inside me, not just the ache between my legs or the lingering taste of him on my tongue, but something deeper. A presence. A tether. A quiet certainty that I was no longer alone in the cathedral of my own body.

But there was something else stirring beneath the stillness. Something that had been waiting in the shadows of my heart since long before I ever knelt for Leo. A confession I had never made. Not to Simon.Not to Klaus during those long, silent dinners in the clean apartment. Not even to myself, fully. It was the darkest thing I carried, the secret I had buried so deep I had almost convinced myself it did not exist. But confessions have a way of rising. They are like bodies in a lake. Eventually, they float to the surface.