One slides onto the bench beside me, her perfume thick and sugary. She touches my arm lightly—testing, bold. Another leans across the table with a smile that promises a night she assumes I want.
I give them the same charm I always do—easy, polite, with a cool smile that doesn’t reach my eyes. A nod here. A murmur there. Enough to entertain, never enough to invite. They notice. They always do.
The spark they’re looking for isn’t there.
Desire doesn’t stir. Interest doesn’t flicker. Their softness, their perfume, their practiced flirting—none of it touches me.
My mind is elsewhere.
On Eden. Her voice. Her sharpness. The way she assesses a room without announcing it. The careful distance she keeps. The tremor she tries to hide. I see her in flashes, little moments that wouldn’t mean anything to most.
She’s lodged in my thoughts like a trigger that refuses to reset.
I take a drink, letting the burn slide down my throat. The club hums around me—dice being thrown on a nearby table, poker chips snapping together, someone cheering after a bet pays off. Lukyan leans back, laughing at some joke Ardaleon throws at him.
The night should feel good. It usually does.
Instead, restlessness coils under my skin, fed by the memory of her voice.
The hours blur. Deals discussed in coded language. A brief argument between two drunk men that Kirill ends with a single look. More women drifting in and out, hoping for attention I don’t give. Games of chance, shots of liquor, smoke curling from cigars in the VIP booth next to ours.
Then Viktor approaches through the crowd—silent, focused, and cutting through the noise like a blade. He leans down beside me, voice low enough only I hear.
“She went to a police station today.”
The club seems to pause around me. I set my drink down slowly. “Details.”
“She didn’t speak to anyone,” he says. “Didn’t file anything. Didn’t go inside. She stood at the entrance for a few minutes, looked around, then walked away.”
Ardaleon, seated beside me, tenses slightly. “Checking her options.”
“Or testing boundaries,” I murmur.
Viktor nods once. “We followed her the whole time. No one approached her. No phone calls. No messages after. She seemed… conflicted.”
Conflicted. The word settles deep in my chest.
Lukyan whistles low across the table. “If she’s thinking about talking, we need to move before she does.”
“No,” I say.
The single word shuts down the conversation around us. My men look at me, waiting, knowing I measure everything before I commit.
I lean back, letting the thrum of the club wash around me again, letting myself feel the shape of this new development.
She almost stepped inside. Almost.
Fear pushes people into certainty. Curiosity pulls them into danger. Eden is caught in the middle. Torn between what she knows and what she senses. That tension—the line between running and staying—is exactly the moment I’ve been waiting for.
The moment where she’s vulnerable enough to bend.
A slow grin unfurls across my face—not warm, not soft, but sharp. Predatory. Satisfied.
Ardaleon sees it and shakes his head. “That look means trouble.”
“For who?” Lukyan asks.
“For her,” Ardaleon says, though his tone carries a flicker of something else. Recognition, maybe even concern.
