Sinful Nights

The air in the room was thick—humid, searing.

A man’s body heat, like a surging wave, enveloped her.

“Feels that good, huh? The way you’re moaning...” His voice melted against her ear, low and languid, the tail of his sentence rough and teasing. “What about this—?”

“Ah…!”

Madeline Yeager’s eyes flew open, her heart plummeting as if she had just fallen from a great height—skipping a beat so hard it left her breathless.

Consciousness returned in fractured pieces. It was a dream. Just a dream...

And yet, the aftershock lingered. Her throat was parched, her pulse thrumming furiously, as if the phantom of his touch still echoed in her body’s memory.

It took several moments for her to steady herself. She reached out instinctively, hand gliding to the space beside her in the bed.

Empty.

Cold.

Her so-called husband hadn’t come home.

Madeline blew out a frustrated breath, sweeping her hair back from a damp forehead before climbing out of bed to fetch a glass of water. She moved through the dim room, but the cling of discomfort made her pause. After hesitating for a beat, she pulled clean clothes from the wardrobe and slipped into the bathroom to change.

Women have needs, too. Men aren’t the only ones.

And Madeline? She had needs. She was a woman who once had a very active marital bed—intimately entwined nearly every night until the early hours. But that was before. Before that day when everything changed. Now, it had been nearly a full year since her husband had taken up his overseas post.

How ridiculous. No wonder she’d dreamt about him tonight, conjuring memories of times when—

Her thoughts snapped like a taut wire when her phone vibrated, its insistent wail cutting through the silence of the late hour. The sound was jarring. She glanced at the clock—she’d only just slipped her clothes into the hamper. It was the middle of the night.

Still, as an on-call surgeon, being roused at odd hours wasn’t unusual. She didn’t think much of it as she answered the phone.

“Hello?”

“Is this Madeline Yeager?” A man’s voice, unfamiliar.

“Yes, speaking. Who’s this?”

“This is Officer Carlton from the Carlton Street precinct. I’m calling about Sebastian Yeager. He’s your husband, correct?”

“I... Yes. He is. Why?”

“He’s been involved in an incident tonight. Got drunk at a bar and got into a fight. We’ve got him in custody here. We need you to come down to sort things out.”

Madeline froze, the words hitting her like a slap.

Sebastian was back? Back in the country?

And he was calling attention to himself already—by starting a brawl, no less?

“Alright.” She kept her voice neutral, though tension rippled under her skin. “I’ll be there soon.”

She swapped her clothes for something appropriate to venture out in the night, grabbed her car keys, and made for the door in swift, deliberate movements.

The Carlton Street district loomed miles away from her villa on the outskirts of Notadel City. It was infamous—streets of neon lights pulsing in fractured hues, a hotbed of nightlife and reckless abandon. It was four in the morning by the time she arrived, the precinct still teeming with bleary-eyed crowds and chaotic voices.

Her gaze locked on him the moment she stepped through the glass entrance.

Sebastian Yeager.

Even amidst the cluttered, cacophonous holding area, he was impossible to overlook. He sat apart from the rest, exuding an almost gravitational allure as though the world had subconsciously parted for him.

The man hadn’t changed—not in the year since she’d last laid eyes on him.

White button-down shirt, black slacks. He’d skipped the tie and jacket, but the meticulous lines of custom tailoring fit his six-foot-two frame as perfectly as armor to a knight. His trousers rode up slightly where his legs spread apart, revealing dark socks encasing his ankles. Two buttons undone at his collar drew the eye to his sharp throat and the faint line of his collarbone. He looked as though elegance itself had taken human form yet lounged now with all the ease of a devil-may-care wreck.

His head hung low, but perhaps sensing her presence, he raised it with languid deliberation. His dark, liquid eyes were hazy from the effects of alcohol, their corners faintly tinged red—a texture of allure far more provocative than his usual poise. The sight stirred something buried deep within her, a destabilizing sensation, as if she’d stumbled upon some private fragment of him she had no right to glimpse.

This is how he looked, she thought instinctively, in the heat of passion. Vulnerable yet devastatingly magnetic.

Now he sat here, all of it raw and exposed. And everyone else in the room was seeing it—others sneaking glances as if just being in proximity to Sebastian Yeager was a stroke of fortune.

Even at his messiest, he was still first in line to the Turner family empire. Blessed with talent and beauty, power and privilege. The man was a creature of unattainable heights, the kind people didn’t dare to provoke. Yet tonight, he’d done what was unthinkable. He had brought himself low. Tangled with street-level chaos and ended up—

Here. Of all places.

What was he thinking?

He lingered under her gaze for a moment longer, his eyes half-lidded with no apparent recognition, though something faintly familiar flickered in his expression. His signature charm, unwavering even in this setting, softened the drunken sheen in his gaze.

Madeline didn’t move toward him. Instead, she stepped to the front desk and spoke with the officer on duty.

“Good evening,” she said, keeping her voice even. “I’m Madeline Yeager. Someone called me earlier.”

A younger policeman emerged, his badge marked with an A prefix, his shoulder insignia identifying him as a junior officer, likely just starting out. He was polite but unaware, clearly not attuned to Sebastian Yeager’s VIP status.

“So, you’re Sebastian’s wife?” he asked. “Yeah, your husband got into it with some folks at a bar. You can check the surveillance footage yourself if you want.”

He pulled up the video feed, which fed from a camera mounted directly over Sebastian’s location. The image was crystal clear.

Sebastian leaned against the bar, one hand lazily tucked into his pocket, the other scrolling through his phone. Even under the garish light of the club, his sculpted features seemed untouchable, his expression a cocktail of boredom and toe-curling indifference.

Then, a woman entered the frame.

Tall, with a body that curved in all the ways men noticed, she approached him boldly and wrapped her arms around his waist, pressing herself against him.

Madeline’s fingers tightened reflexively around her car key, the sharp edge biting painfully into her palm as she gaped at the screen.

The woman leaned up on tiptoes, whispered something into Sebastian’s ear that coaxed a crooked smile from his lips. As her husband tilted slightly toward her, she caught the glimmer of gold—a pair of thin, frameless glasses perched on his nose. They lent him an air of bookish decadence, the sort that lured you closer only to ruin you.

The video rolled on.

Moments later, several younger men stepped out of the elevator and intercepted Sebastian. Words were exchanged, their tension lost in the grainy audio distortions. Sebastian’s response was measured, and then—

Methodic. He slipped off those glasses, as if shedding civilization itself, tucking them into his pocket. And then fists flew.

He moved like precision honed incarnate.

Years of Turner-financed training had mastered him into someone surgically efficient in combat, his blows calculated and fatal in their grace. His opponents, by contrast, fell like hapless weeds under a finely whetted blade.

Madeline barely absorbed the other details. Nothing imprinted itself quite like watching another woman’s hands claim her husband, a phantom sensation that branded her skin.

She turned her gaze to Sebastian, still slumped over in drunken detachment. Around him, others stared, gossip palpable. Two young women among the injured exchanged mutterings as their wary eyes darted toward Madeline.

“God, what a mess,” one of them whispered loud enough to sting. “Poor lady. Her husband’s out here cheating and picking fights in bars. Now she has to clean it up. I’d leave the bastard.”

“I know, right?” chimed the other, sympathetic yet smug. “And over what? I told him he looked good, and my friend joked I must’ve had an abortion for my tiny waist. He must’ve thought we were talking about his girl or something. Loser totally snapped.”

Abortion.

Madeline felt her spine stiffen as a wave of nausea seeped through her. Her hand wandered to her stomach reflexively, an old, hollow ache threatening to resurface.

So that’s what broke him, she realized. That flippant, juvenile barb was all it took to shred Sebastian Yeager’s gilded image entirely. Here—in this dingy, fluorescent-lit precinct—he had collapsed from his throne entirely, leaving her to bear witness.