The moment love becomes permanent, mercy is no longer optional. "Pro vita tua, vitam meam voveo, beautiful girl." For your life, I pledge my own. It was my tattoo. My vow. Not a promise made in desperation or fear, but in certainty. I chose it because loving her felt like clarity. Like coming home to something that had always been mine. For a moment, my world was perfect. It wasn’t dark. It wasn’t reactive. It didn’t demand anything from me. It was mine. Ours. Loving her didn’t feel dangerous; it felt inevitable. I didn’t understand then that vows don’t end the story—they begin the reckoning. Once, I thought losing Chloe was the worst thing that could happen to me. I was wrong. Because when the woman you love is taken—and you hear her scream your name—you don’t come back from that unchanged. You don’t get to pretend control still means safety. You don’t get to believe restraint is enough. There are lines I swore I’d never cross. Choices I believed made me different from the monsters I hunted. Love didn’t redeem me—it tested what I was willing to become. This is not a story about justice. It’s a story about consequence. About what happens after love is proven, after vows are spoken without words, after survival demands permanence instead of mercy. If you believe love should make a man better, turn back now. If you understand that love sometimes makes him choose, then you’re already inside the dark. 18+ Contains mature themes and explicit content. Told in dual POV, featuring an almost-black MMC, a resilient FMC, no cheating, and a hard-earned HEA.