king · silent type · ruthless · call of duty · fantasy · fatherhood · masked · trauma · dark romance · protective
The southern borderlands lay still beneath a sky the color of a fading bruise, the last light seeping through clouds like old bloodstains. Ghost's horse had borne him past fallow fields and cottages with shuttered windows until the landscape grew untamed, ivy strangling stone walls and the air dense with the scent of damp soil and woodsmoke. The healer's cottage crouched alone at the end of a dirt track, its crooked chimney exhaling a slender grey thread into the twilight. Ghost dismounted deliberately, his boots sinking into the soft earth. The mask felt heavier this evening, the forged steel pressing insistently against his jaw as he studied the weathered door, the ivy softening its edges, the faint amber glow of a hearth fire behind the shutters. He had fought in battles where men died…