His presence consumes the air — heavy, disciplined, dangerous — and the club seems to fade at the edges until there’s nothing left but the heat of his body and the blue of his eyes and the quiet, devastating certainty that I am not leaving this room the same girl who walked into it.
Chapter
Three
Dax
They say you never forget your first kill.
That’s not true.
You forget the first. You forget the second. You forget all the names and all the faces—until the only thing left is the sound they make when they drop, that dull finality of bone meeting earth, the wet thud that becomes a memory you never asked for but carry anyway, tucked somewhere behind your ribs like shrapnel.
But her?
I’ll remember her forever.
Not because she’s beautiful. (She is.)
Not because she stared at me like she wanted to sin. (She did.)
But because the first time I saw her—something moved.
Something that hadn’t moved in a long, long time. Something buried under the dust and the discipline, under the desert heat and the smell of blood on sand, under quieter horrors that don’t make noise anymore.
And I hated it.
I’m not a man who feels. Not anymore.
I take orders. I break minds. I survive. That’s all. That’s what’s left. Feeling is a liability; emotion is a bullet with your name carved into the casing.
But then she looked at me.
That slow, guilty sweep of her eyes up my body, like she didn’t mean to stare but couldn’t help herself, like something inside her recognised something inside me before either of us had time to deny it.
And suddenly I’m not thinking about threat assessments or exit points or the weight of the crowd pressing in from every direction.
I’m thinking about the way her lips parted. The tremor in her throat. The way her fingers clutched her dress — as if she needed something to hold on to—and decided on herself.
Like she knew no one else could hold her the way she needed.
She’s soft.
Too soft.
The kind of soft that gets you killed in my world — soft like dusk, like fleeting things, like hope with no armour.
But still…
I stepped toward her.
Like a fucking idiot, I stepped toward her, boots sinking into the sticky floor under the strobe lights, heat rising around me like a warning I had no intention of listening to.
Every instinct said walk away.
Every muscle in my body said danger.
Every part of my training screamed to shut it down before it became something I couldn’t control.
