Part I – Lagos, 2031 Chapter Two: The Night the Collar Became a Choice

We didn’t stop running for thirty-six hours straight.

Private jet to a private airstrip carved out of Ghanaian jungle, then a rust-streaked fishing trawler that stank of diesel and fish guts, then three unmarked SUVs that changed plates at every border like snakes shedding skin.

He paid for everything in bricks of cash and silence.

I didn’t ask where the money came from.

I already knew the answer would taste like blood and other people’s screams.

On the third night the ocean turned black glass and the island appeared.

It rose out of the Atlantic like a clenched fist of volcanic rock and jungle, no flag, no name on any map that still mattered.

One dock lit by a single red bulb. One helicopter pad hidden under camouflage netting. One house built straight into the cliff face: glass, steel, and reclaimed teak, as if someone had tried to civilise a volcano and only half-succeeded.

He carried me off the boat because my feet were shredded from running barefoot across three countries and two continents.

Inside smelled of cedar, wet stone, and distant lightning.

He set me down in the foyer on cool tile and finally let go of my hand.

For the first time since the auction house, we were alone without sirens, without guns, without the world trying to kill us or sell us or both.

I looked at him, really looked.

The boy from the lighthouse was still there, but he had learned how to wear darkness like it was tailored for him.

New scars mapped his knuckles and throat.

There were hollows under his eyes deep enough to drown in.

His curls were longer, threaded with premature silver that caught the low light like frost.

He looked thirty-five going on a thousand, like a man who had won every war he ever fought and lost every single peace.

“You’re safe here,” he said, voice rough from disuse.

I laughed. The sound cracked in my throat like thin ice.

“Safe is a children’s story, Aleksandr. We stopped believing in those a long time ago.”

He flinched as if I’d struck him.

I walked past him into the great room that opened straight onto the ocean.

Floor-to-ceiling windows showed nothing but night and stars and the moon slicing the water into bleeding silver.

On the low teak coffee table sat a black velvet box and, beside it, one perfect pomegranate, already split along one seam, a thin line of red juice crawling across the wood like a wound that had decided to speak.

I knew what was in the box before my fingers touched it.

I opened it anyway.

White gold collar, thin as a breath, no lock, no clasp, no keyhole.

Just a perfect circle designed to close only when the wearer chose to slide the hidden magnetic seam together.

Next to it, a small card in his handwriting (the same handwriting that once carved our names into lighthouse wood):

I won’t put this on you.

I won’t keep you.

The boat leaves at dawn every single day.

Say the word and you’re gone—new name, new continent, enough money to vanish forever.

If you stay, you wear this only when you want.

Only if you want.

It means whatever we decide it means.

It will never be a cage.

—A.

I turned to face him.

He hadn’t moved from the doorway.

Hands hanging loose at his sides, fists opening and closing like he was fighting himself not to reach for me.

“And if I stay?” I asked.

His jaw flexed. A muscle jumped in his cheek.

“Then the choice is still yours every morning. The collar means stop. It means mine. It means home. It means whatever the hell we need it to mean on any given day. But it only ever means something if you put it on yourself.”

I picked up the collar.

It was warm from the island heat, lighter than sin.

I walked to him slowly, deliberately, until we were close enough that I could feel the heat coming off his skin.

He didn’t breathe.

I lifted the circle of white gold to his throat first.

His eyes went wide (storm-grey and suddenly seventeen again, standing on a balcony tasting salt and cheap wine and forever).

“No,” I said softly. “If anyone wears this tonight, it’s you.”

The sound that left his throat was half-sob, half-prayer.

I reached up and fastened the collar around his neck.

The magnetic seam closed with a whisper-click that sounded louder than gunfire.

He dropped to his knees on the teak floor, hands gripping my hips hard enough to bruise, forehead pressed to my stomach like I was the only altar he had left.

“Eden,” he whispered, and my name broke in half on his tongue.

I threaded my fingers through his hair (still the same curls I used to tug when we argued about whose turn it was to refill the kerosene lamp).

“Still no regrets?” I asked, echoing the question he would one day ask me in a valley full of wildflowers and children’s laughter.

He looked up. His eyes were wet.

“Never,” he said. “Not once. Not in thirty-three years of looking for you. Not in every auction I burned down when I was too late. Not now.”

I pulled him to his feet and kissed him until we were both shaking.

It tasted like monsoon rain in Lagos and lighthouse summers and every year we lost and every year we were about to steal back.

Later, when the moon had bled itself pale and the house was nothing but wind and waves and the low hum of generators far below, I took the collar off his neck.

He watched me, barely breathing.

I opened the circle again.

Then I lifted it to my own throat and closed it.

The click was softer this time.

Final.

His hands hovered, afraid to touch.

I took his right hand and placed it over the warm metal at my collarbone.

“Still not a cage,” I said.

His fingers trembled against my pulse.

“Never,” he promised, voice raw. “I swear on every star we named that summer.”

He kissed the place where metal met skin, slow, reverent, like he was sealing a treaty between empires that had been at war for decades.

We didn’t sleep.

We learned each other again in the dark (slow, careful, sometimes brutal), like people handling something that had already been shattered once and somehow glued back together wrong and perfect all at once.

He mapped every new scar on my body with his mouth and told me the story of every new scar on his with shaking fingers.

We cried more than we laughed, but we laughed too (quiet, broken laughs that tasted like forgiveness).

When dawn came, pink and gold and indifferent, the boat left the dock without me.

The collar stayed.

Not because he commanded it.

Because I decided what it meant.

And somewhere between the storm inside us and the sunrise outside, the word we swore we would never need finally found its true meaning.

Pomegranate.

It didn’t mean stop.

It meant stay.

It meant I choose you, again, every morning, even when the world burns.

It meant the monsters just signed a peace treaty written in white gold and stubborn hope.

And for the first time in thirty-three years, we slept (curled together on the teak floor with the ocean singing underneath us and the pomegranate bleeding sweetly on the table like a heart that had decided to keep beating).