I could run.
But his voice follows me, silk over venom. “Go ahead. Walk out.”
“And if you leave now,” he adds, “you’ll spend every night wondering what it would’ve felt like.”
I feel him everywhere.
“You’ll lie awake with your hand between your thighs and my name in your throat, and it won’t matter who tries to fuck it out of you. It’ll always be me you ache for.”
My knees almost buckle, and I realise he wants me to leave, not because he’s letting me go, but because he knows I’ll come back, because he knows he doesn’t need to chase what he already owns.
I back away, step by step, until the hallway light hits my face, and when I look back, he hasn’t moved.
He just watches.
Smiling.
Like he’s already inside my bloodstream.
Hook
She walks out of the room with her spine straight and her heart pounding, and I let her.
Not because I’m finished with her.
Because I’ve only just begun.
The door clicks shut, and the silence she leaves behind is almost holy. The club hums beyond the walls — bass vibrating through concrete, laughter bleeding down corridors, bodies grinding together under lights that hide more than they reveal — but in here, there is only stillness. Control. The kind of quiet money buys. I don’t move. I don’t drink the whisky. I don’t adjust the cuff on my left wrist or smooth the curl of black hair that’s fallen over my forehead. I sit there, composed, like I didn’t just smell the arousal on her skin or feel her pulse through the air between us like a war drum calling me home.
I let her leave because prey that runs is so much more satisfying to catch again. Because escape sharpens the hook. Because the mind does most of the work if you let it.
Because now she knows my name.
Now she’s tasted the edge of the hook.
And now she’ll rot with the question of why it felt so good to be afraid of me.
She’ll go home and tell herself she doesn’t want it. That she’s strong. That she’s survived worse. She’ll lock her door, slide down the wall, maybe cry, maybe shake. But it won’t matter, because I’m already inside her now. Inside the space she pretends is safe. Inside the silence she thinks belongs to her.
Not in the way I want.
But obsession always comes before penetration.
That’s the foreplay most men never learn.
I stand. Stretch. The black coat falls into place like it belongs on me — which it does. Everything I wear fits perfectly because everything in my life is built to specification. My life is made of measured edges, exact decisions, tightly constructed control. Rooms like this don’t exist by accident. Neither do men like me.
Until her.
She throws off the balance. She wasn’t part of the plan. She was a variable I noticed and then allowed to become inevitable.
But now she is the plan.
Tahlia fucking Fernwynd.
I know her name like a sin I’ve already confessed to. Because I found her months ago, shaking in a police precinct after punching her ex so hard she broke his orbital bone. They had her in cuffs, asking questions, trying to figure out how a five-foot-nothing girl turned a man twice her size into a sobbing mess of blood and piss on a bathroom floor. No one asked her why. No one ever does.
She smiled in the mugshot.
