A Bleeding Mafia Boss Collapsed at Her Door at Midnight—When He Woke Up, He Already Knew Her Name

PART 1

Copper. That was the first thing — the smell of copper cutting through the hallway air before Maren Cole even opened the door.

Then the knock came again, softer this time, more like a body sliding down wood than a fist.

She’d been awake anyway, grading nothing, staring at nothing, the particular insomnia of someone whose bank account and whose patience had both run dry in the same week. When she finally pulled the door open, barefoot on cold tile, the hallway light caught on a man she recognized instantly and had spoken to exactly once in her life.

Damian Voss.

He owned three restaurants she’d never be able to afford, half the block her apartment building sat on, and a reputation nobody in this city said out loud in public. Bartenders went quiet when his name came up. Cops changed the subject. She’d once heard a regular at the Amberline swear that a man who crossed Damian Voss simply stopped existing — no body, no headline, just an absence where a person used to be.

He looked at her now with glassy, unfocused eyes, one hand braced against her doorframe, the other pressed to his side where his shirt had turned nearly black.

“Maren,” he said. Just that. Her name, like it cost him something to say it.

Then his knees buckled and he went down across her welcome mat.

She stood there for a full ten seconds, sweatpants and bare feet and a stranger’s blood spreading toward her shoes, before her brain caught up to what her eyes were reporting.

Three months earlier, she’d been the one pouring his soda water at the Amberline, hands shaking so badly she’d splashed a drop onto his cuff. She’d braced for the scene, the complaint, maybe losing the job on the spot. Instead he’d glanced at her trembling fingers and said only, “Breathe.” That was the entire conversation. She hadn’t expected to think about it again.

Now he was dying on her doormat.

Calling for help wasn’t a simple choice — not for a man like this. Half the department would tip off whoever had put a blade in him before an ambulance even arrived. The other half would just make her disappear from the paperwork entirely, the way inconvenient witnesses sometimes did in this city.

She crouched instead.

“Hey.” She slapped his cheek, harder than she meant to. “You don’t get to die on my mat. My landlord already hates me.”

A groan rattled up from somewhere in his chest — proof of life, barely.

She hooked her hands under his arms and hauled, every inch a fight against two hundred-some pounds of unconscious muscle. By the time she’d wrestled him over the threshold and kicked the door shut, her spine was screaming and her palms were slick and red.

Two years of nursing school lived in her hands even now, even after she’d walked away from the program to cover her father’s gambling debts. She knew shock when she saw it — the clammy skin, the thready, racing pulse.

She cut his shirt open with kitchen shears.

The wound beneath his ribs wasn’t a graze. It was deep and deliberate, still weeping blood in slow pulses.

A blade. Not a stray bullet from across a parking lot — someone had gotten close enough to put a knife into Damian Voss’s body. Someone he’d let get close.

She sprinted for her bathroom, came back with gauze, saline, tape, the emergency kit she kept stocked because sirens were just weather in her neighborhood.

The second the saline hit raw tissue, he woke up roaring.

His hand shot to her throat and slammed her flat against the floor. For one endless second his eyes held nothing she recognized — no memory, no name, just animal violence.

“Let go,” she choked out. “I’m the one keeping you alive, you idiot.”

Something shifted behind his eyes.

“…you. The waitress.”

“Maren.”

His grip fell away. His eyes rolled back and his arm dropped limp to the floor.

She coughed until her ribs ached and thought, seriously thought, about simply standing up and walking out, letting the city solve its own problem.

She didn’t.

She packed the wound instead, pressed until her arms trembled, sealed what she could. Ugly work. Effective work. By the time she finished, her living room looked like something out of a crime report — bloody towels on the floor, saline bottles rolled under the coffee table, and Damian Voss unconscious beneath the yellow afghan her grandmother had crocheted before cancer took her.

A crime boss, tucked in under daisies.

Maren sat in her kitchen chair with black coffee going cold in her hands and watched him breathe until sunrise found the window.

At 7:30, his eyes opened.

He didn’t panic. That, more than anything, was the detail that frightened her — a man waking gravely wounded in a stranger’s apartment, and instead of alarm, his gaze moved with terrible calm across the room. The blood. The medical supplies. The locked door. The overdue bills on her counter.

Then her.

He sat up slowly.

“You shouldn’t move,” she said.

“You did this.”

“I stopped the bleeding.”

“You didn’t call anyone.”

“Doctors ask questions I can’t answer.”

His gaze dropped to the bandaging.

“So do I,” he said. “How long before you want me gone?”

She stared at him. “What’s your name — I mean, I know your name, but—”

“Maren Cole.” He said it flatly, like a fact filed away long ago. “Twenty-six. Left nursing school two years ago. Working doubles to bury debts your father walked away from.”

Ice moved down her spine. “I never told you my last name.”

“I know everyone who works inside my buildings.”

“That’s not reassuring.”

The faintest curve touched his mouth. “You have a sharp tongue for someone kneeling near a man she just accused of dying incorrectly.”

“You’re welcome for not letting you.”

The smile vanished as fast as it came.

“Why did you open that door?” he asked, and this time his voice had gone quiet in a way that made the question feel dangerous — like the real one, underneath.

She didn’t have an answer yet.

But somewhere three floors down, in the alley behind her building, a black SUV was already idling, and men with gasoline and photographs of his own bodyguards were about to start knocking on every door between the bar and the freeway.

PART 2

“Because blood stains laminate,” she finally said.

“Lie.”

“Because I’m not a murderer.”

“Everyone becomes one, given the correct circumstances.”

He rose, swaying, bare feet on cold tile, and even wounded and pale he seemed to fill the small apartment like weather. He crossed to her.

She held her ground.

Close enough now that she caught cedar under the whiskey and iron. “You saved me,” he said, “because you couldn’t stand watching something die. That is a dangerous weakness to have.”

“I’m not part of whatever world you live in.”

“You are now.”

“No.”

“I came *here* because you were the only person near me who wouldn’t sell my location for a favor.” His voice dropped. “I know you refused to water down a drink when a manager told you to cheat a customer. I know you returned a wallet with twelve hundred dollars still in it. I know exactly what kind of woman lives behind this door.”

Something in his certainty landed like an ache instead of a threat.

“I won’t tell anyone you were here,” she said. “You can leave.”

“I can’t.”

He held up his phone — a photo his men had just sent. Two black cars outside her building. Three men interrogating her landlord on the sidewalk.

“They’ll assume you helped me,” he said. “By noon they’ll be tearing this building apart floor by floor.”

She looked at the blood already drying in a smear beneath her own door and understood, with sick clarity, that her life had ended the second she’d opened it.

“Five minutes,” Damian said. “Pack a bag.”

She packed jeans, a toothbrush, the one photo she had of her mother. The elevator had been broken since spring, so she wedged herself under his arm and half-carried him down four flights while he bled through fresh gauze the whole way.

A matte SUV idled in the alley. A broad man in a dark coat held the door.

“Mr. Voss,” he said, pale eyes flicking to her.

“She comes with us, Rourke,” Damian breathed, and the man asked no questions at all — which somehow frightened her more than anything else that morning.

PART 3

They drove north as dawn spread thin and gray over the water, and Damian’s bleeding worsened before they’d crossed the first bridge. Maren found a trauma kit under the console and started an IV with hands that had gone eerily steady, while Rourke drove like every traffic law was optional.

“You’re very calm,” Damian murmured, eyes on her face.

“I’m terrified.”

“You hide it well.”

“Panic doesn’t clot blood.”

The safe house waited on a cliff above the coast — glass, steel, concrete, a fortress dressed as architecture. It had its own surgical suite. Dr. Priya Anand, gray-haired and unbothered, took one look at Maren’s stitching and said, “Crude. But it held.” Then, almost as an afterthought: “He’d be dead otherwise.”

Rourke locked Maren in a guest suite the size of her whole apartment. Four hours later, Damian entered alone, pale but steady on his feet, bandaged ribs beneath a plain white shirt.

“You saved my spleen,” he said.

“Wonderful. Can I go home?”

“No.”

“You owe me your life. That’s usually how debts work — they get *paid*, not *collected*.”

He held out his phone again. Her apartment building. Her landlord’s hand, visibly broken, wrapped in gauze on a stretcher.

“They came forty minutes after we left,” Damian said. “He wouldn’t answer them.”

Her stomach turned to ice. “What did they do to him?”

“His bills will be paid. His family protected.” No excuse offered — just the plain fact of it, which somehow disarmed her more than an apology would have. He set a keycard on the table between them. “This opens every door in the house except two. You are not a prisoner here.”

“A locked room stopped being locked ten seconds ago. That doesn’t make it not a cage.”

Something raw moved under the composure in his face.

“My enemies may have taken your old life,” he said. “I intend to make sure they don’t take anything else.” At the door he paused, didn’t turn. “I am beginning to understand how badly I want you to choose to stay.”

Then he left the door unlocked behind him.

For three days she lived inside his fortress while his organization quietly prepared for a war she hadn’t asked to be part of. Nobody stopped her from leaving — the SUVs sat unguarded in the garage, her keycard opened the front gate — but surveillance photos told the real story: men watching her old building, her nursing school, even the cemetery where her mother was buried. Leaving wouldn’t be freedom. It would be a target with no walls around it.

On the fourth morning she found Damian arguing with a younger man named Silas Cade — broken nose, tailored suit, the barely-leashed energy of someone who solved problems with his fists first.

“The Kessler crew hit you,” Silas was saying. “Give me twenty men and one night.”

“Kessler uses guns,” Damian said. “Whoever did this used a blade. That’s not business. That’s personal — someone who knew which alley I’d take, and which night I’d dismissed my own detail.”

Silas noticed Maren in the doorway. His hand drifted toward his jacket.

“Touch that weapon again,” Damian said without raising his voice, “and you’ll lose the hand.”

Silas dropped it. “She’s a liability.”

“Say that again.”

“No disrespect meant.”

“Yes, there was. Get out.”

After Silas left, Maren crossed her arms. “You threaten everyone who looks at me sideways.”

“He was calculating whether killing you would simplify his week. I adjusted his math.”

“Comforting.” She held his gaze. “You said your enemies came for me because I helped you. That’s not the whole truth, is it.”

Damian went still.

“There was a second man in the stairwell that night,” she said. “I saw him through the peephole before I even opened the door. Shaved head, scar from his ear to his jaw, gray eyes. He saw *me* too.”

Color drained from Damian’s face. “Silas Rusk,” he said — no, he corrected himself: “*Caleb* Rusk. A contractor. He sells clean hands to people who don’t want to get their own dirty.”

“So he’ll keep hunting no matter where I run.”

“I will find him first.”

“You keep promising protection,” she said, “and your version of protection burned my life down to the studs.”

He didn’t argue. He walked to the window instead, looked out at gray water for a long moment.

“My father taught me that fear was the only loyalty worth trusting,” he said quietly. “That caring for anyone handed your enemies a weapon.”

“Sounds lonely.”

“It was efficient.” He turned. “Then you opened your door.”

That night, Rourke delivered a box salvaged from her burned apartment — her mother’s cracked photo frame, two scorched textbooks, and the yellow blanket, half of it blackened beyond saving. She sat on the floor of the guest suite and finally cried, ugly and loud, for the first time since this started.

Damian found her there. He lowered himself beside her despite the wound in his side and said nothing at all — just waited.

“They destroyed everything,” she whispered.

“I know.”

“And you’re going to kill everyone responsible.”

His silence was answer enough.

“Will that fix my landlord’s hand?” she asked. “Will it un-burn my mother’s picture?”

“No.”

“Then stop pretending revenge repairs anything.”

“In my world,” he said, low, “restraint reads as weakness.”

“Maybe your world is the problem.”

He looked at the scorched blanket in her lap for a long moment. “I was afraid,” he admitted finally, “that if you walked out that door, I would lose the only person who ever saved me and wanted nothing back for it.”

“You want something now.”

“Yes.”

“What.”

“You.”

The word sat between them, unshouted, undemanded. Confessed.

She stood. He rose too, close but hands still at his sides.

“You don’t get to call it wanting me,” she said, “while your men guard every exit in this house.”

“I know.”

“You don’t get to turn gratitude into ownership.”

“I know.”

“And if you ever call me *yours*, I walk. Assassins or not.”

Something almost like amusement crossed his face. “Unwise.”

“I’ve never claimed to be wise. Only brave.”

Two weeks later, they found the leak inside his own organization — a senior lieutenant named Victor Marsh, who’d hired Rusk to send a message about Damian going soft, about too many rules protecting civilians who weren’t supposed to matter.

Damian’s response wasn’t the massacre Silas wanted.

“Bring him alive,” he said.

Silas blinked. “*Alive?*”

“Dead men repair nothing.” Damian didn’t look at Maren when he said it. He didn’t need to. He’d been listening the whole time.

The raid on Marsh’s warehouse was set for that night. Maren was ordered to stay behind at the safe house.

At 9:17, the power died.

Red emergency lights bled down the hallway. Rourke’s voice crackled through her phone: “Lock your door. Breach.”

Downstairs, glass shattered. Three gunshots followed.

She found Rourke bleeding from the shoulder near the kitchen. “Rusk,” he ground out. “Used Marsh’s access codes. He’s in the security room, wiping the archive.”

She pressed a towel to Rourke’s wound. “Stay down.”

“That’s usually my line to give.”

“Tonight’s unusual.”

She moved through the dark house alone, gun from the bedside safe heavy in her hand, and found the security room door standing open. A man in black tactical gear stood over the monitors — and even from behind, she recognized that scar curling under his ear.

Rusk turned. Gray eyes found her.

“The waitress.”

She raised the weapon, remembering Rourke’s lessons — *distance, exit, survival, not heroics.* She backed toward the hall instead of letting him corner her.

“Voss isn’t here,” she said.

“I know. I came for what makes him careless.”

Her blood went cold. He lunged; she fired once into the floor between them, and the shot froze him just long enough for her to run, hit the fire alarm, and drop steel shutters over every window. Water sheeted from the sprinklers, slowing him on the polished floor. Rourke rose from behind the counter and cracked a serving tray across his skull. Maren slammed the emergency partition, and reinforced glass sealed Rusk into the flooded pantry corridor, trapped.

Damian arrived twenty minutes later, blood on his collar, fury written across every line of his face — fury that broke the instant he saw her standing, alive, dripping wet, gun still in her hand.

He crushed her against him hard enough to lift her off the floor. “I told you to stay safe.”

“You weren’t here to enforce it.”

He looked through the glass at Rusk, cuffed to a support beam. “Open it.”

“No,” Maren said.

“He came here for *you.*”

“And now he’s alive. He can testify against Marsh. If you kill him now, you prove Marsh was right about you — that fear is the only thing holding your world together.”

Damian’s breathing slowed. Rourke waited by the controls, saying nothing.

Finally, Damian stepped back. “Call Dr. Anand for Rourke’s shoulder. Then get me the attorney.”

Rusk laughed through the glass. “You’re finished, Voss. She made you weak.”

Damian turned to him, calm settling back over his face like a mask reassembling itself.

“No,” he said. “She made me choose which kind of man survives what’s coming.”

Rusk gave up Victor Marsh within hours — not out of conscience, but because Damian’s attorney offered him a choice between cooperating with federal investigators or shouldering the full weight of arson, attempted murder, and the attack on Maren’s landlord alone. Men like Rusk always chose survival.

Marsh fled before dawn and made it as far as a delivery truck outside the city limits before Damian’s people ran him down. But Damian didn’t kill him either. He handed Marsh’s financial records — bribes, narcotics shipments, dirty cops on retainer — over to a federal prosecutor through his own lawyer, knowing full well the paper trail would also expose pieces of his own empire.

“It will cost me millions,” he told Maren, sitting on the floor of her new, modest apartment across from the park, eating takeout from a paper carton like it was any ordinary Tuesday.

“Money grows back.”

“It may cost men their freedom.”

“If they hurt innocent people,” she said, “freedom was never yours to protect for them.”

He was quiet a long moment. “My father built this empire on the belief that it could never be run any other way. I spent my whole life trying to prove otherwise without becoming him.”

“Did you?”

“For a while.” He looked up. “Now I don’t know if something built on fear can ever be repaired.”

“Maybe it isn’t supposed to be repaired. Maybe it’s supposed to become something else.”

“You say that like tearing down an empire is simple.”

“No,” she said. “I say it as the woman whose whole life got flattened building yours.”

That landed. She watched it land, and he didn’t look away from it.

“What happens to us,” he asked quietly, “if I actually do this?”

“There is no *us* while you think you owe me a debt.”

“You were never a debt.”

“Then what am I?”

“The first future I’ve ever actually wanted,” he said, and the honesty in it frightened her more than Rusk’s gun ever had.

Three days later, he handed the files over anyway.

The fallout shook the whole waterfront — dirty cops arrested, Marsh’s network dismantled piece by piece, several of Damian’s own men indicted alongside him. He wasn’t charged, but federal investigators opened inquiries into decades of his family’s business, and he responded by dissolving the shell companies that had never done anything but launder cash, selling off the properties tied to Marsh’s operation, and converting two of his own warehouses into a community clinic and a training center for veterans reentering civilian work.

He put none of it under his own name.

“You could use the good press,” Maren told him once.

“One decent act doesn’t erase twenty indecent ones.”

“No.”

“I’m starting to find that inconvenient.”

She smiled. “Good.”

She reenrolled in nursing school that fall. He offered to pay her tuition outright; she refused. He offered an interest-free loan; she refused that too. Then an anonymous scholarship appeared through a foundation for students who’d left school to support family — and its board, she discovered, was chaired by one deeply “independent” Rourke.

“You promised not to pay my tuition,” she accused him in his office.

“I didn’t. The foundation did.”

“Whose board is your head of security.”

“He’s very independent.”

She fought not to laugh. “You’re impossible.”

He crossed to her — close, but waiting this time, the way he always waited now. “I can withdraw it,” he offered.

“That punishes every other student on the list.”

“Then perhaps,” he said, “you should accept that sometimes people help you because they simply want to.”

“That sounds familiar.”

“I learned it from a waitress.”

Months passed. Summer folded into fall. She went to class by day, worked hospital reception on weekends, and Damian visited when he could — never with an entourage, never demanding anything. Some nights he slept on her couch because the nightmares found him worse when he was alone. Some mornings she still checked the long-healed scar under his ribs out of habit more than necessity.

They kissed for the first time in her kitchen, no blood on the floor, no gunfire outside. He touched her cheek and asked, simply, “May I?” She answered by closing the distance herself.

In November, Marsh — who had never truly disappeared, only gone quiet — called her directly, his voice pouring cold down the line as she walked home from an evening class.

“You cost me everything,” he said. “Tell Voss to come to Pier Nine. Alone. Bring police, and twelve dock workers standing on a floor soaked in gasoline won’t make it to morning.”

Her blood turned to ice water. She made him put a worker on the line, heard the fear in the man’s voice, heard machinery grinding somewhere behind him.

“Midnight,” Marsh said. “Alone.”

Damian arrived at her apartment nine minutes after her call, Rourke a step behind him. They alerted federal agents, sent a tactical team quietly toward the storage facility, and Damian studied a map of the pier with the same stillness he wore into every crisis.

“He wants me to believe the workers are the threat,” he said. “That’s the distraction. He’ll be where Rusk tried to kill me the first time.”

“You are not going alone.”

“I have to make him believe I did.”

At 11:50, Damian walked into the same abandoned warehouse where this had all begun, a wire hidden under his collar carrying every sound back to the surveillance van three blocks away, where Maren sat gripping the edge of her seat while agents confirmed, quietly, that the twelve workers had already been released — the gasoline drums standing empty. Marsh’s threat had been theater, all along, meant only to strip Damian of backup.

“You dismantled your father’s whole empire for a waitress,” Marsh’s voice crackled through the speaker.

“I dismantled *your* operation because you burned a woman’s home to the ground and broke an old man’s hand for refusing to talk.”

“Your father would be ashamed.”

“My father is dead. His empire doesn’t have to keep being.”

A gun clicked, audible even through static.

“Join me,” Marsh said. “Rebuild. Remove the girl. In a year no one remembers this weakness.”

“She has a name,” Damian said, evenly.

A shot cracked through the speaker.

The feed dissolved into static.

Maren was out of the van before Rourke’s hand closed around her wrist. “Wait,” he said. “He’s wearing a vest.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s alive.”

Then Damian’s voice returned, strained but present: “Marsh is moving toward the east exit.”

The operation broke open fast after that — agents converging, Marsh bursting from the warehouse firing wild, sprinting for a boat moored at the pier’s edge, Damian limping after him with one hand pressed to a fresh wound in his shoulder. Marsh reached the water’s edge and spun, weapon rising toward Damian’s chest.

Through the windshield, Maren saw two things at once: Damian dropping behind a concrete barrier, and a fuel truck rolling toward the intersection behind the agents’ vehicles, its driver oblivious to the gunfight ahead.

She didn’t think. She ran, waving both arms, screaming for the truck to stop. It skidded, tires shrieking on wet asphalt, and halted feet from the barricade — but the delay let Marsh reach the boat.

Damian rose behind the barrier, weapon leveled at Marsh’s back.

For one suspended second, the whole pier seemed to hold its breath. Marsh had ordered the stabbing, the fire, the broken hand, the threat against twelve sleeping-shift workers. No court would ever weigh the true cost of what he’d done.

Damian’s finger tightened.

Then, slowly, he lowered the gun.

Federal agents tackled Marsh before the boat’s engine ever caught.

Only then did Damian turn to find her soaked to the skin, rain running down her face, and the fury in his eyes cracked wide open into something closer to disbelief.

“You left the van,” he said.

“There was a truck.”

“You could have died.”

“So could everyone else standing there.”

He crossed to her, rain hammering between them, and for a second she thought he might actually shout. Instead he laughed — not the cold, dangerous sound from his office months ago, but something exhausted and unguarded.

“What am I supposed to do with you?” he asked.

“Start with a hospital. You’ve been shot.”

“I mean for the rest of my life.”

Sirens washed red and blue across the warehouse walls. Marsh shouted somewhere behind them, ignored. Damian took both her hands.

“The night I knocked on your door,” he said, “I thought saving my life made you mine.”

“I remember.”

“I was wrong.”

“That might be the most romantic thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“I’m not finished.” He lowered himself onto one knee, rain soaking straight through his ruined suit.

“You’re bleeding,” she said.

“Yes.”

“In the rain. On a filthy pier.”

“Maren.”

She went quiet.

He drew a plain silver ring from his coat. “I don’t want to own you,” he said. “I want to earn every moment you choose to give me — your temper, your impossible rules, your terrible coffee, every argument I’ll probably lose.”

“Probably?”

“Certainly.” A ghost of a smile. “I can’t promise you a good man. I can only promise that the next time the easy choice is put in front of me, I’ll remember the woman who opened her door for a stranger bleeding out on her mat, and chose to save him anyway.”

Her eyes stung. “Stand up.”

His face fell. “That sounds like a no.”

“You have a bullet wound and you’re kneeling in a puddle of contaminated pier water. I am not accepting a proposal like this.”

Rourke, somewhere behind them, muffled a laugh.

Damian stood. She cupped his face in both hands.

“My answer is yes,” she said softly. “But I finish nursing school first.”

“Agreed.”

“And I keep my apartment.”

“We’ll discuss it.”

“That means I keep it.”

“…Yes.”

“No security tailing me into the grocery store.”

“Two agents outside.”

“One.”

“Two.”

“One, and Rourke can watch the cameras.”

He exhaled, something between exasperation and adoration. “You negotiate like a criminal.”

“I had a very good teacher.”

He kissed her under the flashing lights while federal agents loaded Victor Marsh into the back of a car, and for the first time since a bleeding stranger had collapsed on her doormat, Maren Cole felt something steady where the fear used to live.

A year later, she graduated. Her landlord came leaning on a cane, complaining loudly about the auditorium seats. Her old neighbor cried through the whole ceremony. Rourke claimed dust in his eye, twice.

Damian sat in the front row — no entourage, no armed men at the doors, no demand for special treatment. He simply stood when her name was called and clapped louder than anyone else in the building.

That night, back in her small apartment, the mended yellow blanket draped across the couch where it had lived for over a year now, he poured them both sparkling cider because she had an early shift.

“You still make terrible coffee,” he said.

“You still drink it.”

“I’ve built up a resistance.”

She leaned into him and listened to his heartbeat, steady now, nothing like the thin, racing pulse she’d once fought to hold together on her living room floor. The scar beneath his shirt marked the night that had broken her whole life open. The ring on her hand marked everything that had grown back in its place.

He never became an innocent man. Life didn’t work that way, and she’d stopped expecting it to. But the warehouses that once hid a narcotics operation now held a free clinic and a training center for people rebuilding their own lives from nothing, and every year, on the anniversary of the night he’d collapsed bleeding on her doormat, he woke her at 2:14 in the morning and whispered the same four words against her forehead.

“I still need you.”

And every year, she gave him the same answer.

“Then keep choosing me.”

THE END.