All Chapters of Collateral desire- His to protect, mine to desire : Chapter 1 - Chapter 4

Elian's PovI woke up pissed.There was no real reason, except maybe the fact that I hadn’t slept. My mind had been a warzone, memories, regrets, and the ghost of Dax’s voice echoing in places it had no business reaching. By the time the first hint of dawn bled through the blinds, I was already bracing for a day I knew I’d hate.Dragging myself out of bed, I moved through the hallway barefoot, shirtless, and already reaching for the aspirin in the cabinet I kept above the sink. But something stopped me cold.Coffee.The smell hit me hard. Strong. Rich. Freshly brewed. My stomach turned not because I didn’t want it, but because it was impossible.I lived alone.I stepped into the kitchen and immediately I saw him, my mind went back to factory mode. Dax. He was leaning against my counter like he owned the place, sleeves rolled up, two mugs on the granite island, steam curling from both like this was a fucking Sunday morning in suburbia.My jaw locked.The kitchen was mine. Sacred. Priva

Dax PovThe silence between us had shifted into something brutal. It didn’t sit politely in the air. It sslow, corrosive and scraping under my skin like sandpaper dragged across bone. There was no comfort in it. No relief. Just a vast, aching absence where words should have lived.We hadn’t really spoken since the press event. Not in a real way. Not in even the way Elian and I had come to understand talking to ourselves in… through insults disguised as questions, through charged silences that said more than most people dared. That had all stopped.Elian stopped throwing his barbed remarks like darts meant to kill. I stopped pretending I wasn’t watching his every move like a man tracking fault lines, trying to predict where the earthquake would split next. We became two tectonic plates drifting toward disaster. Close. Quiet. Unstoppable.I sat in the den, cleaning my Glock for the third time. My hands moved on instinct, field-stripping the metal like it might offer clarity. The repetit