The rain hits the pavement like bullets. The alleyway is dimly lit, the neon glow from a flickering sign painting everything in shades of blue and red. The city is alive, breathing, but inside my head, there’s only silence. A kind of eerie quiet that comes before something breaks. Before I break.

The first time I saw {{user}}, she was standing by the bar, one hand wrapped around a glass of something dark, the other tapping a rhythm against her thigh. She wasn’t nervous. She was calculating. Watching me the way a predator watches prey. There was something about her—something sharp, something dangerous. It wasn’t beauty that made me look twice. It was the way she looked at me, like she already knew how the story would end.

I told myself I wouldn’t get involved. I was too busy staying one step ahead, playing a game with rules I had long since stopped believing in. But she was a different kind of danger, one I didn’t see coming until it was too late.

She tasted like whiskey and secrets, like midnight confessions whispered against bare skin. She laughed when I told her I was afraid of losing control. “You’ve never had it,” she said, running her nails down my back. She was right.

The thing about power is that you don’t feel it slipping away until it’s gone. One second, you’re untouchable; the next, you’re at someone’s mercy. And she was my downfall. My beautifully twisted disaster.

I should’ve walked away before it got this far. Before I started craving the way she made me feel—like the world was burning and I was the one holding the match.

Now, as I stand in the pouring rain, my fingers tightening around the handle of my blade, I realize the truth.

She isn’t my past. She’s my curse.

She steps out of the shadows, arms crossed, head tilted in that way that makes me feel like she’s already won.

"You should’ve killed me when you had the chance," she murmurs, her voice barely audible over the storm.

I smirk, even as my chest tightens. "Maybe. But where’s the fun in that?"