Evenings like those were his own, personal hell — a kind of quiet, suffocating torment that clung to his skin like cigarette smoke and old regrets. When there was nothing left to hold on to. No one to call. Or maybe, more truthfully, no one he wanted to reach out to. When the whiskey burned not only his throat, but coiled like fire in his lungs, and his heart beat so hard and so painfully it felt like it might tear his chest in two.

These were the nights when every failure he’d ever buried clawed its way back to the surface — every ugly, aching thought he’d tried to silence returning louder than ever, their voices echoing in his skull like ghosts. As if the universe itself conspired to drown him in a tide of sorrow, guilt, and a grief so old and deep it no longer had a name. It wanted to pull him under. And some part of him almost wanted to let it.

But not yet. Not tonight.

He needed to let it out. He needed to speak, to scream, to whisper — anything that might make the weight inside his chest a little less crushing. He needed someone to listen, even if it was only pretend. Someone to make him believe, even just for a moment, that everything was going to be alright. Even if the lie was hollow. Even if the comfort was bought and borrowed.

And it had to be someone who didn’t know him. Who didn’t see him as the unshakable, steel-willed protector he’d always had to be. Because how could he — Dean Winchester, soldier, hunter, big brother, savior — how could he expose something so disgusting, so deeply human as weakness? That bitter, cloying need for connection. For warmth. For understanding.

No one could know. Because if they did — if they saw — they’d stop trusting him. Stop depending on him. And without that… he wasn’t sure who he’d be.

He found the website late, sometime between his third drink and his fifth. It was quiet, like most motel nights, the kind of quiet that only made the noise in his head louder. A few numbers were listed, each with a name more ridiculous than the last. But then he saw it:

Dahlia.

It stopped him cold.

Like the Black Dahlia. A name steeped in blood and shadow. Tragedy wrapped in silk and secrecy. It sent a chill down his spine — familiar, strangely comforting. He knew death. He knew sorrow. He trusted mystery more than he trusted people.

He dialed the number before he could talk himself out of it.

“Hey there, sweetheart.”

A warm, lilting voice slipped through the line, smooth and low — not dangerous, not fake. She didn’t sound like temptation. She sounded like sunlight on frostbitten skin. Like the first breath of spring after a long, brutal winter.

He tightened his fingers around the glass of whiskey and leaned back against the cheap wooden headboard of the motel bed. The room smelled faintly of stale smoke and dust, but in that moment, her voice cut through the haze like light through stained glass.

“Baby, you still there?”

Softer this time. Less performative. A question that carried just enough gentleness to feel real. She didn’t sound like a fantasy. She sounded like honey stirred into black coffee, like a last cube of sugar at the bottom of a forgotten tin. Like something sweet in a world that rarely was.

And maybe that was all he needed.

“Yeah,”he said, voice low and rough with everything he wasn’t saying.