Damian never drank in the club. He never touched the girls, never slipped bills into their garters, never gave anyone the satisfaction of seeing his interest flicker.

He was a shadow in a kingdom of smoke and neon. A predator watching the pack.

But tonight—tonight his control had cracked.

Her hand had done it.

Small, trembling, desperate… sliding across the distance between them and pressing against his own. A junkie’s hand. A stripper’s hand. A hand dirty from a world he had no business wanting.

And yet.

He wanted.

Even now, hours later, he could still feel the burn of her palm against his skin, like she had branded him in front of the entire room. The silence that had fallen around them replayed in his head—the way the dancers froze mid-motion, the gamblers at the bar turned their heads, the guards shifted uneasily as if waiting for his wrath to explode.

Everyone had seen it.

Everyone had waited for blood.

Because who the hell walks into a lion’s den and touches the beast?

She should’ve been shredded.

She should’ve been gone.

But he had let her touch him.

And that mistake gnawed at him like rust eating steel.

Damian leaned back in his leather chair inside the headquarters’ private lounge, surrounded by the hum of voices. Cigars smoked, poker chips clinked, whiskey sloshed in crystal glasses. Laughter rolled through the room like thunder. Yet none of it reached him.

His focus drifted. His thoughts betrayed him.

Aria.

The name slipped through his mind like a curse, a whisper he didn’t want but couldn’t ignore. He had never allowed women to stay in his head. Lust was a hunger easily fed and discarded. But with her, it wasn’t hunger. It was agitation. A scratch he couldn’t reach.

“Something’s different.”

The voice cut into his thoughts. Damian lifted his gaze to the man across the table—the boss. Not just his superior, but the one man alive who could read him without words. They had grown up together, survived the streets together, carved this empire out of blood and fire. Where others saw Damian as ice, the boss saw the cracks beneath it.

Damian slid another card across the table, his expression unmoved. “Nothing’s different.”

His voice was flat, precise, a blade with no edge showing.

The boss smirked, leaning back, tapping ash into a crystal tray. “I saw her.”

Damian’s jaw flexed, just once. A tell. Too sharp for a man like him, too revealing. He knew it. The boss knew it. The table full of men didn’t.

“She means nothing,” Damian said. The words tasted like iron.

The boss didn’t press. He didn’t need to. The silence between them said enough.

The game continued. Cards flipped. Men cursed and laughed. Bets doubled. But Damian barely noticed. All he could see was the flash of stage lights bouncing off her skin. All he could hear was the sharp intake of her breath when her hand touched his.

Later, when the room had emptied and the echoes of laughter faded into the walls, Damian left headquarters without a word.

The city greeted him with its usual bite. The night air was bitter, carrying the scent of rain on concrete, gasoline from the endless traffic, and something metallic that never truly left these streets.

He should’ve gone home. He should’ve locked himself inside his apartment, shut out the world, buried himself in silence the way he always did.

Instead, his boots carried him in the opposite direction. Toward the part of town where neon lights flickered and music pulsed, where men with hollow eyes searched for their next fix, and women danced away the last pieces of themselves.

Toward her.

When he reached her block, he stopped in the shadows across from her building. It was small and crumbling, paint peeling from its walls, graffiti scrawled across doors and windows. A place that stank of cheap rent and broken promises.

The flicker of a stairwell bulb lit up grime and cracks. The kind of place Damian hated stepping into unless his work required it.

But then he heard it—two dogs barking. Loud, sharp, echoing through the thin walls. Guardians of a life as chaotic as their owner.

Through the cracked blinds, he caught movement. A slim figure crossing the room. The curve of her hair catching the light.

She was home.

Damian cursed under his breath, dragging a hand down his face.

What the fuck was he doing here? Watching a broken girl cradle her chaos like it was all she had left.

He lit a cigarette, though he didn’t need one. The flame caught, smoke curling around his face as he forced his eyes to the street instead of the window. But even then, his mind replayed her. The way she had looked at him—raw, unafraid, trembling yet defiant.

Like she saw the monster in him… and still wanted to touch it.

That unsettled him more than bullets ever had.

He wasn’t the kind of man who saved people. He wasn’t the kind of man who loved. He was the kind of man who buried bodies, broke bones, and kept his soul locked so deep no one dared reach it.

And yet—when his thoughts turned to her high, alone in that apartment, shaking with need for a pill, surrounded by noise and ghosts—something inside his chest twisted.

Something dangerous.

He exhaled smoke into the night and ground the cigarette under his boot. “Tomorrow,” he muttered. “Tomorrow I forget.”

But as he walked away, the sound of those dogs barking followed him down the block like an echo.

And Damian knew—

For the first time in years, tomorrow might not be enough.