Daylight
The first thing Galaxy became aware of was his breathing.
Slow. Steady. Barely audible above the silence of the early morning. She didn’t open her eyes immediately. She lay still and listened to it the way she used to listen to rain against her childhood window — not thinking about it, just letting it exist around her, letting it tell her that everything outside was still in its right place.
She was safe.
She knew she was safe before she even remembered why she had needed to be.
Then the memories came.
Not all at once. They never came all at once. They arrived in fragments the way broken glass catches light — a sound, a sensation, a flash of something she wasn’t ready to look at directly. The locked door. The cold air in the archive. The moment her voice cracked when she screamed and the walls swallowed the sound and gave it back to her empty.
Her hands tightened in the sheets.
She opened her eyes.
The room was pale with early light. The curtains filtered the morning into something soft and grey and gentle. She lay in her bed in the Drax estate and she was wearing clean clothes and her skin smelled faintly of the cool cloth he had pressed against her arms and her hands and her collarbone while she sat on the edge of the mattress and tried not to fall apart entirely.
You never apologize for surviving.
Galaxy turned her head.
Vincent was in the armchair beside the bed.
He hadn’t left.
His sleeves were still rolled to his elbows. His shirt was wrinkled in ways she had never seen on him before. One hand rested on the armrest, those bruised knuckles from the archive door still visible in the pale light. His head was tilted slightly against the back of the chair and his eyes were closed and his face was — quiet. That was the only word for it. All the hard lines that usually defined him had softened. The severity he wore so naturally had slipped away somewhere during the night and what remained was something she didn’t have a name for.
He looked like a man who had finally stopped fighting.
She watched him.
She watched the slow rise and fall of his chest. The shadows beneath his eyes that told her he hadn’t actually slept. Not really. He had sat in that chair all night and guarded a sleep that wasn’t his and she didn’t know what to do with that information. She didn’t know where to put it inside herself without it changing everything.
It was already changing everything.
A cold cup of coffee sat on the nightstand — poured sometime in the dark, she imagined, and then forgotten because he hadn’t been able to look away from her long enough to drink it.
Her chest ached.
Not from the bruises. From something deeper. Something that had been locked away for so long she had forgotten it existed until this man — this cold, impossible, terrifying man — sat in a chair all night just to make sure she kept breathing.
She blinked and felt wetness on her lashes and realized she was crying.
She pressed her hand over her mouth to keep the sound inside.
Vincent’s eyes opened.
No gradual return to awareness. No slow blink. One moment he was still and the next his gaze was on her, dark and immediate and completely alert. He saw the tears instantly. She watched something shift behind his eyes — something raw and urgent and almost pained — but he didn’t move toward her. He didn’t reach out. He simply looked at her with an expression she had never seen on his face before.
Like watching her cry was breaking something inside him.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
His jaw tightened.
“No.”
“I didn’t mean to wake you—”
“Galaxy.” His voice was rough. Hoarse from exhaustion and something else she couldn’t name. “You never apologize. Not to me. Not for this.”
She shook her head and the tears kept coming and she hated herself for it. She hated that she was falling apart in front of him. She hated that she couldn’t control her own body. She hated that she felt weak and broken and small when she had spent her entire life refusing to be any of those things.
“I don’t—” Her voice cracked. “I don’t want to be a burden.”
The word landed between them like a stone.
Vincent went very still.
For a long moment he didn’t speak. He just looked at her with those dark unreadable eyes and she could see him processing the word, turning it over, examining it from every angle the way he examined everything.
Then he stood.
He didn’t ask permission. He didn’t hesitate. He crossed the small distance between the chair and the bed and sat down on the edge of the mattress beside her. Close enough that she could feel the warmth radiating from his body. Close enough that when he reached out and took her hand, his fingers folding around hers with a gentleness that seemed impossible for hands that had broken down a door twelve hours ago, she felt the touch in every nerve ending she possessed.
“Look at me.”
She couldn’t.
“Galaxy. Look at me.”
She raised her eyes to his.
His expression was fierce. Not angry. Not cold. Fierce in a way that had nothing to do with violence and everything to do with conviction.
“You are not a burden.” Each word was deliberate. Weighted. “You will never be a burden. Not to this house. Not to the staff. Not to me.” His grip on her hand tightened almost imperceptibly. “Do you understand?”
She wanted to believe him.
She wanted to believe him so badly it felt like a physical ache in her chest.
“I don’t know how to do this,” she admitted. Her voice was barely a whisper. “I don’t know how to need someone. I’ve never—” She stopped. Swallowed. “I’ve been alone for so long. I don’t know how to let someone take care of me without feeling like I’m failing.”
Vincent was quiet for a moment.
Then he did something that surprised her more than anything else he had done since she arrived at this estate.
He reached up and brushed the tears from her cheek with his thumb.
The touch was featherlight. Careful. Like she was something precious that might shatter if he pressed too hard. And when he spoke, his voice was softer than she had ever heard it.
“Then let me show you.”
He didn’t make a production of it.
That was the thing Galaxy noticed first. Vincent didn’t announce that he was taking care of her. He didn’t ask if she needed help. He didn’t hover or fuss or make her feel like an invalid who couldn’t function on her own.
He simply made things easier.
When she went to take a shower, she found that someone had already laid out fresh towels and a clean change of clothes. Her favorite soap — the lavender one she had mentioned to Maren weeks ago in passing conversation — was sitting on the bathroom counter beside a cup of tea that was still warm.
When she struggled to button her blouse because her fingers wouldn’t stop trembling, she heard a quiet knock on the bathroom door. She opened it to find Vincent standing in the hallway, his expression carefully neutral.
“May I?”
She nodded.
He stepped inside and buttoned her blouse without a word. His fingers moved efficiently, never lingering, never making her feel exposed or helpless. When he finished, he simply stepped back and returned to the hallway as though nothing had happened.
When she came downstairs and found that she couldn’t stomach the idea of sitting in the formal dining room, breakfast appeared on a tray in the library instead. Her favorite corner. Her favorite chair. A plate of food arranged in small portions that didn’t overwhelm her and a pot of tea instead of coffee because somehow he had noticed that she reached for tea when she was upset.
He noticed everything.
He always had.
But now he was using that attention differently. Not to control. Not to monitor. Just to anticipate the things she needed before she had to ask for them.
So she never had to feel like a burden.
Galaxy was curled up in the library armchair, a book open in her lap that she hadn’t actually read a single page of, when Maren appeared in the doorway.
“You have a visitor, dear.”
Galaxy looked up. “A visitor?”
“Mr. Cole. Ethan Cole.” Maren’s expression was warm. “He’s quite worried about you. He’s been standing at the front gate for twenty minutes trying to convince Mr. Nero to let him in.”
Galaxy’s heart clenched.
Ethan.
Of course Ethan had come. He had been there that night. He had seen her face when she realized the archive door was locked. He had been the one to run and find Vincent when he heard her screaming through the walls.
“I—” She hesitated. “Did Vincent say it was okay?”
Something flickered across Maren’s face. Something knowing and soft.
“Mr. Drax gave the approval himself.”
She found Ethan in the front foyer.
He looked terrible. His hair was uncombed and there were dark circles under his eyes and he was wearing a wrinkled t-shirt that looked like he had slept in it. The moment he saw her, his entire face crumpled with relief.
“Galaxy.”
She didn’t know who moved first.
One second they were standing on opposite sides of the foyer and the next Ethan’s arms were around her and he was holding her so tightly she could barely breathe and she was crying again, crying into his shoulder while he stroked her hair and whispered that he was sorry, he was so sorry, he should have gone with her to the archives, he should have known something was wrong, he should have—
“Stop,” she said into his chest. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“I should have been faster. I should have—”
“You found Vincent.” She pulled back and looked up at him. “You found him and you told him where I was and he came. That’s what matters.”
Ethan’s jaw was tight. His eyes were wet.
“I heard you screaming through the door.” His voice broke. “I couldn’t get it open. I tried. I tried so hard and it wouldn’t—” He stopped. Breathed. “I’ve never been so scared in my life.”
Galaxy took his hands in hers.
“I’m okay. I’m here. I’m okay.”
He looked at her for a long moment. Then his gaze dropped to the bruise on her jaw and his expression darkened.
“I’m going to kill him. Halloway. I’m going to find him and I’m going to—”
“Vincent already handled it.”
Ethan blinked. “What?”
“I don’t know the details.” Galaxy shook her head slowly. “But I know that whatever Vincent did, Halloway will never hurt anyone again.”
Something shifted in Ethan’s expression. A reluctant understanding. A grudging respect for the man he had spent months teasing her about.
“The Greek God came through,” he said quietly.
Galaxy almost laughed. Almost.
“Yeah,” she whispered. “He did.”
They sat in the garden for hours.
Maren brought them tea and sandwiches and a blanket when the afternoon breeze turned cool. Ethan told her terrible jokes and showed her videos of his roommate’s cat falling off furniture and did absolutely everything in his power to make her smile.
It worked.
Slowly, gradually, painfully — it worked.
By the time the sun began to set, Galaxy had laughed three times. Not big laughs. Not the carefree laughter that used to come so easily. But real ones. Small and fragile and precious.
She didn’t know that Vincent was watching from the window of his study.
She didn’t see the way his hands gripped the edge of his desk as he watched Ethan make her smile. The way his jaw tightened every time Ethan touched her arm or leaned close to whisper something in her ear. The way jealousy burned in his chest like acid, corrosive and consuming and impossible to ignore.
She didn’t know that Nero had asked him twice if he wanted Ethan removed from the property.
She didn’t know that Vincent had said no.
Both times.
Because watching Galaxy cry that morning had cracked something open inside him that he didn’t know how to close. Because he had seen her face when she said the word burden and he had understood in that moment that she had spent her entire life believing she wasn’t allowed to need anyone.
And if Ethan Cole could make her smile — if this loud, clumsy, irritatingly handsome medical student could pull her back from the edge of the darkness that was threatening to swallow her — then Vincent would stand at his window and watch and say nothing.
He would let the jealousy burn.
He would let it consume him from the inside out.
Because her smile mattered more than his pride.
Her smile mattered more than anything.
Later that evening, after Ethan had finally left and the estate had settled into its familiar quiet, Galaxy found Vincent in the hallway outside her room.
He was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest, his expression unreadable.
“Thank you,” she said softly.
He raised an eyebrow.
“For letting him visit.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “I know that wasn’t easy for you.”
Something flickered in his eyes. There and gone.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Galaxy almost smiled.
“You’re a terrible liar, Vincent Drax.”
She stepped past him toward her bedroom door. But before she went inside, she paused and turned back to look at him.
He was still watching her.
He was always watching her.
“You asked me to let you show me,” she said quietly. “How to let someone take care of me. How to need someone without feeling like I’m failing.”
Vincent didn’t move. Didn’t speak.
“I think—” She swallowed. “I think you already started.”
She disappeared into her room before he could respond.
Vincent stood in the hallway for a long time after the door closed.
His chest felt strange. Too full. Like something was pressing against his ribs from the inside, trying to crack them open.
He didn’t have a name for it.
But for the first time in his life, he didn’t want it to stop.
That night Galaxy opened her journal.
Mom,
He stayed all night. He sat in a chair beside my bed and he didn’t sleep and when I woke up crying he held my hand and told me I wasn’t a burden. He said those words like they were the most important thing he had ever said. Like he needed me to believe them more than he needed to breathe.
And then Ethan came and Vincent let him in. Even though I know it killed him to watch us together. Even though I saw the way his hands were shaking when I came back inside.
He put my smile before his pride, Mom.
I don’t know what to do with that.
I don’t know what to do with him.
But I think I’m starting to understand why my heart beats differently when he’s in the room.
I think I’m starting to understand a lot of things.
