The Extraction of Livia Drusilla
An Anomaly Romance in Shadow and Flame
They came for her at 3:11 a.m.—that sacred hour when cities exhale, when the world forgets itself just long enough for the Unseen to move like a thought across a synapse. Livia Drusilla didn’t hear them at first. She felt them. Four presenCes. Disciplined. Trained. Blades wrapped in muscle and breath. But one heartbeat was off. Deliberately. And it was his.
She didn’t resist when the hood came down. There was a strange comfort in the coarse nylon fabric, the cool bite of night air, the steady pressure of gloved hands guiding her forward like a priest escorting an oracle. It felt like inevitability—a scene not improvised, but foretold, as if this moment had been stalking her since the first time the world whispered her name into its dark.
"Careful with the altar," one of them murmured behind her.
"Be gentle with the Dogbear," another said—not with humOr, but reverence, because even her cat demanded protocol.
They didn’t ransack her home. They gathered it. Her paintings—once studied under bunker lights in surveillance cells—were lifted like reliquaries. A laptop slid into a hardened case. A vial of ritual wine was sealed and logged. Her mirrors, wrapped. Her sigils, catalogued. Every artifact of her mythos was handled with the precision of a holy theft.
She felt the van door close. The soft acceleration. The invisible presence seated across from her in the dark. She couldn’t see him—not yet—but she knew. The air changed around him, bent inward. The moMent the hood was removed—down in a subterranean corridor pulsing with soft white light—her vision flooded with recognition.
Rex Sword Lionicus.
A name whispered through handler halls. Cursed in red-ink dossiers. Stamped across eyes-only operations never meant to touch daylight. He wasn’t taller than she expected in the literal sense, but his presence—that coiled calm of a man forged in shadow and tempered by obsession—made the space feel smaller, chargEd.
He looked at her like a man who had waited far too long for something he was never meant to touch.
"I told you it was all real," he said softly.
His voice—gods, his voice—was a low blade dragged across silk. A weapon that could either cut or caress, depending entirely on intent. Her pulse stuttered—not from fear, but recognition.
She stepped forward. He didn’t flinch. Didn’t advance. He held his posture like a ritual still in progress, like a phenomenon watching itself unfold.
"You arranged this," she said.
"I extracted you," he corrected. Then, slower, with more gravity: "I couldn’t watch them circle you anymore."
And something shifted. The air between them grew warm—not with heat, not even with emotion, but with alignment. Two mythologies brushing fingers beneath the veil. She saw it then: the years of surveillance, the silent operations rerouted around her, the near-fatal order he’d reFused, the way he’d bent the chain of command until extraction became protocol.
She had been watched by him—but not like prey. Like prophecy.
"Rex," she said, his name rolling from her lips like a spell, like something summoned.
He stepped closer—slow, deliberate, like a man entering a temple he’d spent years worshipping from afar. She felt his heat before he touched her. A radius. A gravitational swell. Two anomaloUs fields acknowledging one another.
His hand rose, hovering near her cheek. No contact. Just breath-distance. "May I?" he asked.
That undid her. After years of invisible lenses, of cold glances and clinical reports—this was a watcher who asked permission.
"Yes," she whispered.
His fingertips traced the line of her jaw—light as breath, electric as oath. Not lustful, not innoCent. Sacred. The touch of a scholar granted access to the manuscript he’d memorized in secret. The touch of a man who knew the shape of her danger and her divinity.
"You survived every attempt to kill your anomaly," he murmured, eyes burning into hers. "And you still stand like a flame in a windless room."
"You watched every attempt," she replied.
"I stopped the last four." His hand moved to the nape of her necK—not to control, but to honor. "You have no idea what it was like watching them misunderstand you."
"You could’ve stayed away," she said, a whisper of accusation folded inside the intimacy.
"I never could."
And then the space between them collapsed—but not into a kiss. Something more dangerous. The moment before. That breath-shared threshold where restraint trembles. Her fingers curled into the fabric of his coat. His forehead nearly met hers, not touching but alMost, the air between them vibrating with unspoken need.
"Livia," he said slowly, like a man walking the perimeter of his own self-control, "if I take one more step, I won’t be able to pretend I’m just your handler."
She smiled then—wicked, soverEign, knowing. "You were never just my handler."
He exhaled like a man undone. His lips brushed her temple—a ghost of a kiss, erotic in its restraint. Her hands slid up his chest, feeling the war inside him: between duty and desire. He placed a palm on the small of her back—enough to anchor her, not enough to consume.
It was exquisite. The kind of eroticiSm that lives only in discipline. All voltage, no release. The romance of holding the line just long enough to make the fall sacred.
"Your sanctuary is ready," he murmured into her hair. "A safehouse built for your flame."
"Are you part of it?" she asked, voice soft, like something peeled from the altar of lOnging.
His grip tightened—answer enough.
"I extracted you," he said again, voice low, steady, final. "I’m not letting anyone else guard what I’ve claimed respOnsibility for."
Her breath caught. She met his gaze, the light between them now humming.
"And what exactly," she asked, "do you believe you’ve claimed?"
Rex smiled then—a slow, devastating smile. The kind a man gives only once in his life.
"Something siNgular."
He didn’t kiss her.
He didn’t have to.
Because the way he looked at her—like an operative beholding a miracle he had nearly died protecting—was more intimate than any contact.
And for the first time, Livia let herself be seen the way she saw herself:
A singularity.
An anomaly.
A girl made of ritual and rupture.
Extracted from the hive by the only man built to handle her flame.
The sanctuary door slid open behind them.
He extended his hand.
She took it.
The threshold pulsed.
And the real story began.
With a firm belief the truly erotic is not pornographic—
Majeye