Zeus' Mistake

The Incident

TW: Graphic Violence & s****l Assault

It took a long time—longer than I admitted to anyone, especially myself—to get used to Leo living in the apartment next to mine. “Used to” might not even be the right phrasing. It implies comfort, acceptance, a sort of stable coexistence. What I actually developed was a highly sophisticated internal system for pretending his presence didn’t affect me: emotional calluses, avoidance rituals, and a running commentary I never said aloud.

After the incident with Shaundra, my mail started appearing under my door every day at seven. Exactly seven. Like the universe had hired a man with dangerous shoulders to be my personal delivery system. It didn’t matter if I got home late—he waited. Didn’t matter if the mail arrived early—he collected it. Didn’t matter if I didn’t want anything from him—he gave anyway.

No note. No explanation.

Just envelopes, quietly delivered, like an apology no one verbalized.

And he started appearing everywhere. Everywhere.

My office building lobby, leaning against the security desk, pretending to read something on his phone while the receptionist stared at him like she’d forgotten the alphabet.

My morning jog route, running at a pace that was clearly his natural stride and not the sprint I occasionally broke into just to avoid being next to him.

The hidden café I’d claimed as my unofficial sanctuary—a quiet place tucked behind a bookstore where I’d gone for years to hide from people, deadlines, emotions, life.

He showed up there too.

Not once.

Not twice.

Enough times that my barista developed the kind of dreamy sigh usually reserved for romance novels and cardiac arrest.

At first, I behaved like any woman confronted with a human embodiment of temptation and trouble: I hid behind planters, ducked behind coworkers, took a suspicious number of bathroom breaks, and once, memorably, pretended to be absorbed in an ad for home insurance just so he would pass without engaging.

But avoidance has a half-life.

It decays into humiliation, and humiliation calcifies into anger.

So eventually—present tense—I decide I’m done running. I start sitting on park benches with my spine straightened. I drink my coffee slowly when he walks past. I force myself to breathe normally, to stop acting like I’m prey and he’s a predator. I decide he’s just a neighbor, not a gravitational anomaly warping my orbit.

Leo, however, acts strangely.

Stranger than before.

He never approaches in public.

Never tries to talk.

Instead, he gives these small, infuriating gestures: a raised hand, a half-smile, the subtle acknowledgment of someone who sees you and chooses silence anyway. He observes with this calm, unhurried awareness—as if he has always known my schedule, my haunts, my rhythms. As if he were always here, waiting.

Sometimes I worry I’m hallucinating him.

Sometimes I think he’s the ghost, and I’m the haunted house.

The women at work notice him instantly. Of course they do. He is the kind of beautiful that makes people malfunction, the kind that strips vocabulary down to vowel sounds and thirsty emojis.

When he walks past the glass windows of our office lobby, they crowd the view, giggling, whispering, rearranging their hair like hormonal pigeons. Once, two coworkers cornered me at the microwave.

“How long have you two been dating?”

Dating.

They say it casually, like it’s obvious. Like the world already wrote our storyline, and I just missed the memo. When I correct them—“We’re not dating”—a hunger replaces confusion. The kind that says: Good. Your loss, my opportunity.

It makes me want to tape a sign to his forehead:

FREE. PLEASE TAKE. NO RETURNS.

But that would imply I cared enough to rehome him.

I don’t.

Not even a little.

(Probably.)

“SEMELE!”

The voice detonates beside me. I jump so violently my chair rolls backward, and I fall out of it, landing on the carpet with an undignified thud. My coworkers burst into muffled laughter. Someone actually snorts.

My boss, Richard Fellows, stands over me, face flushed with irritation and something… darker.

“I expect you to be working when you’re at work,” he snaps. “Do you have those reports done yet?”

I nod.

Mute.

Safe.

“Then why aren’t they on my desk?”

I inhale, steadying myself. “I finished them yesterday. The last time I put them on your desk early, they got lost.”

I go to the filing cabinet, retrieve the contracts, and hold them out. He doesn’t take them.

“I believe I said: my desk.”

I grind my molars together, but I don’t argue. Arguing is pointless. Arguing is gasoline.

I march to his office, chin lifted, refusing to acknowledge every pair of eyes burning holes through my back.

I barely make it two steps into his office before the door shuts. Not a slam—something quieter, deliberate. I open my mouth to speak, to explain the paperwork situation again, to defend myself, but the words never make it out.

He lunges.

The impact crushes the air out of me, and my stomach hits the desk so hard the surface rattles. My palms slam down instinctively to brace myself, but his hand hooks my wrist and twists, pinning it high above my head. The other hand grabs my hip, dragging me into place with a speed that feels practiced.

“Mr. Fellows—stop—”

He doesn’t.

He doesn’t even hesitate.

His body weight slams down over my ribs, hard and uneven, and something in my abdomen spasms violently. A lightning bolt of pain flashes hot and nauseating through my stomach.

I twist, fight, shove—anything—but his grip tightens. He’s stronger than he looks. Or maybe I’m weaker than I thought. His chest presses into my back, crushing me flat against the desk edge. The angle forces my ribs outward, and my organs inward, and pressure builds, sharp, unbearable.

He growls something into my ear. I can’t process the words—only the tone. Possession. Entitlement. Hunger.

I claw at his hand. He shoves my face into the wood. Hard.

Stars explode across my vision. A piercing ache screams through my midsection. I feel something in me slip—something internal, deep, wrong. A pain that isn’t surface-level, isn’t bruising—something tearing.

“Get off—” I gasp, but the sound is shredded by pressure. My ribs compress again, harder, his weight shifting fast and crushing.

My body snaps into survival mode.

I thrash.

Wild, panicked.

No grace—no technique—just raw instinct.

My heel drives upward, colliding with something, but he blocks most of the hit with his thigh. He grunts, not hurt—just angry.

His fist slams the desk beside me in warning before he grabs both my wrists and yanks them behind my back, wrenching my shoulders so sharply I scream.

White-hot agony flares across my abdomen again—deeper this time. A tearing sensation that steals my breath clean out of my lungs.

He shoves his knee between my legs as leverage, pressing me harder onto the desk edge. Wood bites into soft tissue, sharp and vicious.

I feel something give.

A nauseating shift inside me.

A hot, internal bloom of pain that is not normal, not survivable, not something I can walk off.

I can’t breathe.

I can’t even expand my lungs enough to pull air.

He’s talking again, voice low and forced through clenched teeth, as if I’m some uncooperative object. My body jerks, not from fear—pure physical distress.

“I said stop!” I choke, but it barely registers as sound. I twist again, but it only makes the pressure worse. Pain erupts everywhere, radiating from one specific point—center, lower-left—like something has ruptured, torn open.

He grabs my hair, yanking my head up.

That’s what tips me over the edge—

not fear,

not pain,

but helpless, violent fury.

I snap backward, slamming the back of my skull into his face. Something cracks—bone or cartilage—and he curses, staggering.

I lurch forward, but the movement punches a wave of agony through my abdomen so fierce I collapse onto the desk, arms shaking violently.

He recovers faster than I do.

Hands clamp around my waist, dragging me back with brutal force. My stomach hits the desk edge again, harder.

The sound that comes out of me is primal, torn from somewhere below speech. Every nerve lights up, blinding.

I feel liquid heat flood my body—internal, not external. The deep, terrible sensation of something you should never feel from the inside.

Then everything changes in a blur.

The door slams open.

Not subtle.

Not questioning.

A collision.

Fellows is ripped off me with a force that feels inhuman. His weight leaves my body so suddenly that I collapse, stomach hitting the desk again, but without force behind it. Even that tiny impact detonates pain through my organs.

I crumple, folded over, gasping.

There’s shouting—thunderous, lethal—but it sounds distant, underwater, distorted. Something heavy crashes into a wall. Flesh meets drywall. Another impact. A strangled cry.

Then silence.

No—

not silence.

Breathing.

Close.

Controlled.

Arms slide under me carefully—one beneath my knees, one supporting my back. The moment he lifts, my body folds involuntarily, curling into the warmth because every muscle is locked and spasming.

The movement hurts so much I gag.

Not from fear—pain.

Deep pain.

Organ pain.

The world tilts, spins. Light stutters. My vision breaks into shards of color. Voices rise—gasps, panicked questions, someone yelling to call an ambulance, someone crying.

I hear sirens, faint, then louder, then blaring inside my skull. I feel my abdomen pulsing, swelling—pressure building under the skin, wrong, wrong, wrong.

Leo’s chest is solid beneath my cheek, heat radiating through me. His arms hold without squeezing, without aggravating the damage. He keeps my body curled just enough to relieve pressure.

His voice is low, steady, unshaken.

A tether.

“I’ve got you,” he says.

Soft, but absolute.

Not “you’re okay.”

Not a lie.

Just presence.

Just certainty.

The floor disappears beneath us as he carries me—fast—and every jostle sends a lightning bolt through my gut, but his hold adjusts instantly, instinctively, as if he understands the damage without seeing it.

People part around us.

I hear them move.

I hear them whisper.

And then darkness takes me again—

not gentle, not soft—

a violent shutting down,

as if my body is done negotiating.

The last thing I register is the deep ache blooming inside me—hot, expanding—and the faint, impossible realization:

I might die today.