All you had ever done was search for men. Good ones, stable ones—the kind your mother drilled into your head like a doctrine: find a wealthy man. That phrase lived in your bloodstream now. And in your world, where appearances were gospel and money forgave everything, love wasn’t just blind—it was bought.

Most of the men you’d dated only saw you as a comfort object. Someone to keep their bed warm, their ego fed, their secrets safe. You had learned to recognize the look in their eyes—the one that said you’re not her, but you’ll do. So what was supposed to change if you gave in and went for someone like Rafe Cameron?

He was everything you were taught to want, and everything you were told to avoid. The sharpest contradiction. A walking wound. Everyone saw him as a privileged, violent, broken boy with a rich last name and a hollowed-out soul. And they weren’t wrong. Not really. Not when his knuckles were always healing from the last fight. Not when he spoke like he had nothing to lose and loved like it was war.

But you didn’t see him that way.

You saw him when the high wore off. When he wasn’t yelling. When he touched you like he wanted to be forgiven for something he couldn’t say out loud. Even when it was clear you were just a distraction for him—a drug in a prettier bottle—you still looked for softness in the cracks.

You were a mess together. Constant yelling, slamming doors, bitter words flung like grenades. But there were moments—tiny flickers—when it felt like something real. A breath caught between all the chaos. And those moments? They ruined you. Made you believe there was something underneath the wreckage worth saving.

Your friends thought you were stupid—naïve, at best. Delusional, maybe—for thinking he was the love of your life. They heard the stories: how he’d disappear for days, how he’d come back high and distant, how he never apologized. How he broke you. And still, you stayed. Because maybe being used by Rafe Cameron was the closest thing to feeling alive. Because even if he was just using you to drown out the noise in his head, at least he let you in.

“Jesus, baby. You make me lose my temper,” Rafe murmured under his breath after a night of your whining and whinging, sitting beside you on the expensive leather couch, a beer bottle swinging between his long fingers, head tipped back.