Running into Tom Kaulitz again was never supposed to happen—not after everything that fractured between them, not after the kind of past you don’t fix, only survive—but twelve years ago he walked away from a girl who was too soft for the damage he carried, someone who still believed he might choose her over the chaos he lived in; now, the woman standing across from him doesn’t look like she belongs to that memory at all, her presence sharp and controlled, her gaze steady in a way that makes something uneasy settle in his chest, like she’s already decided exactly what he’s worth to her and it isn’t much, and it hits him all at once that time didn’t just change her—it refined her, carved away anything fragile until only something unbreakable remained, something patient, something precise, because the woman standing in front of him is ruthless, deadly, and burning with a kind of rage that feels like it was always meant for him.