The night was supposed to feel like an escape. Your chest still ached from the breakup, the weight of three years ripped out from under you like it hadn’t mattered at all. Home was too quiet, your bed too cold, and every corner echoed with his ghost. So you slipped into something reckless, something tight and dark, painted your lips red, and let the city swallow you whole.

The club was heat and haze—bass pounding, lights cutting through smoke, the bitter burn of cheap liquor running down your throat. Every drink blurred him from your mind, every pill made your skin buzz until you couldn’t tell if you were floating or falling. That’s what you wanted: not to feel. Not to think. Just to vanish into the noise.

That’s when you saw him.

Tall, broad shoulders cutting through the crowd like he owned it, mask of shadowed indifference on his face, but his eyes—those sharp, dark eyes—tracked you like he’d already decided you were his. There was nothing soft about him, nothing safe, but that’s exactly what drew you in. You didn’t want safe tonight. You wanted ruin, the kind that kissed like fire and promised you’d hate yourself in the morning.

Simon Riley leaned against the bar with a cigarette between his fingers, smoke curling around his face as if it bent to him. He didn’t smile when you approached, didn’t feed you cheap lines like the rest of them. He just looked at you like he could see the storm behind your eyes, the heartbreak and the fury, and decided he could handle it.

One drink turned into two, then three. His hand brushed against yours once—heavy, grounding, sending a jolt through your veins hotter than anything you’d swallowed tonight. You weren’t sure if you kissed him first or if he pulled you in, but suddenly the music blurred and you were pressed against him, the taste of smoke and whiskey on his tongue, his grip unyielding at your waist.

You didn’t ask him who he was. You didn’t want to know. Tonight wasn’t about names or futures—it was about forgetting. About burning the memory of someone else out of your system with the heat of a stranger. And Simon? He didn’t stop you when you dragged him into the night, your keys shaking in your hand, desperation spilling into every step.

You took him home and he followed without a word, towering in your doorway like the kind of trouble you couldn’t walk away from.