🖤 ROMAN VOSS

Age: 31

Lives: Apartment 4B, fourth floor

Occupation: Formerly — everything.

Currently — nothing he will tell you about.

Gray eyes. Dark hair always slightly too long. Built like someone the world has tested many times. A scar on his left wrist he keeps covered. He dresses simply. He speaks less. He notices everything.

He moved in quietly.

He wanted to stay that way.

Then she left soup outside his door.

"He doesn't warn you. He doesn't threaten you. He just looks at you — and somehow that's enough."

His things:

A wall of books organized by the weight of their endings. One light facing the courtyard that he keeps on every night. Black coffee. Silence. A name that makes grown men leave cities. A soup bowl that is not his that he kept for three weeks and cannot explain.

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🌻 LILY CARTER

Age: 24

Lives: Apartment 4A, fourth floor

Occupation: 2nd grade elementary school teacher

Warm brown skin. Natural hair pinned up with whatever she finds first. Marker stains on her hands. Round cheeks. A smile that takes up her whole face. She has nineteen plants. She named all of them.

She named one Roman.

He has never told her to stop.

"She is the kind of warm that doesn't need an audience. She just is. And somehow that's the most disarming thing in the world."

Her things:

A reading nook she built herself. Half-finished mugs of tea in every room. A wall of her students' drawings framed in cheap frames. A plant outside her door with a handwritten tag that says Roman. Soup she always makes too much of. A habit of knocking on walls when she cannot sleep.

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🔵 DETECTIVE COLE HARRIS

Age: 28

Occupation: City detective — Varro crew investigation

Clean-cut. Easy smile. Comfortable handsome. The kind of man you trust immediately and are right to.

He is a good man.

That is exactly what makes him complicated.

"He showed up with a badge and coffee and somewhere in between he started looking at her like she was something worth staying for."

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🩸 DRAGO

Identity: Classified. Known to the people who matter.

Occupation: Whatever he wants it to be.

Patient. Precise. Unhurried.

He waited three years.

He was going to wait three more if he had to.

"He didn't come back for power. He came back for one thing. And he found it in apartment 4A without even trying."

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🕊️ ELENA

Status: Gone. Three years ago.

Occupation: The reason for everything.

She is not in this story.

She is the reason this story exists.

"He never says her name. But she's there in every locked door, every careful distance, every wall he built and refused to name."

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👦🏻 SAM

Age: 7

Occupation: Lily's student. The beginning of everything.

Quiet kid. Big eyes. Drew a picture one Tuesday afternoon that he slid face-down across his teacher's desk.

He didn't know what he started.

None of them did.

"He drew what he saw. That's all. Sometimes that's enough to change everything."