I’d spent the day biting my tongue through workshops on “ethical marketing strategies”. The kind peddled by suits who’d probably covered up three patient deaths before breakfast, then green-lit a stock buyback the moment the quarterly projections looked ripe enough to squeeze for profit.
And they did it with the same hand, same pen, same smile.
Working in Compliance was one thing. I could stomach the gray. I had. I did. That was the job. But getting up on a stage to preach about integrity with that kind of beatific conviction?
Please—spare me.
Gray used to mean nuance. Now it meant rot in a tailored suit.
This wasn’t about ethics. It was misdirection dressed in corporate drag—sleight of hand with just enough polish to pass for principle. Surrounded by smoke, mirrors, and teeth-baring grins while the knife was still lodged between your shoulder blades, and thanking the bastard who put it there.
The bathroom sweated with leftover steam, thick enough to choke on. I peeled the curtain back and reached for the towel—soft, white, hotel-issue cotton. Pressed it to my face like that could muffle the echo of the day. Still dripping, breath stirring the fog, hair shellacked to my neck, shoulders, and back.
Three steps to the vanity.
My reflection waited in the misted glass—mascara bleeding down my cheeks, black fingers streaking flushed flesh, lips parted. Like I was caught somewhere between confession and collapse.
I braced my palms on the counter. Cool stone. Anchor point.
Closed my eyes…
…and felt him.
Not physically. But the memory pressed against the backs of my eyes, settled heavy behind my ribs. Warm palms, grip flexing on my thigh. His mouth sealing over mine like he meant to swallow any protest before it formed. His weight pinning me, daring me to shove him off.
“Tell me to stop.”
Whether a ghost, or a fantasy wrung from the damp clench of my cunt—didn’t matter. My body didn’t know the difference between being touched and being haunted.
I dunked my face into the water gathered in my palms like it might jolt me back to reality. Hoping it could rinse the filth and want from me, and douse the heat burning under my skin.
I wiped the streaks away with a clean towel, as if cotton could erase a week’s worth of regret. As if it could blot out the echo of his mouth or the stain of my consent.
It couldn’t.
I twisted my hair into a towel and reached for the waffle-textured robe hanging on the back of the door. Dragged it over skin still damp from the shower. It clung in all the wrong places—too clean, too cool. Penance in cotton.
The room was freezing, and I should have been numb. Instead, my thoughts circled like vultures over the carcass of my composure. All I could focus on was how close he’d been in the lounge—how impossibly warm. A match that refused to go out. Heat I kept trying to convince myself I didn’t want, and couldn’t stop remembering.
I flipped off the bathroom light. The minibar winked at me from the corner. Slim pickings, a perfect reflection of this trip and of me, barely holding it together behind the veneer of hotel glass and corporate polish.
Pretending I wasn’t already fucked. Pretending my virtue hadn’t been manhandled by a man who looked just as decadent in custom Italian wool as he probably did in nothing at all.
I cracked the cap on a vodka shooter, knocked it back, and clenched my teeth against the shudder it left coiling at the base of my spine. Palmed the other.
Yesterday’s conference packet was still folded on the desk, smug in its refusal to be discarded. Lingering like it meant something, like anything about this fucking conference ever mattered.
But it did.
A list of sponsors ran along the bottom margin—small, clean logos, barely worth a second glance.
Except one.
A crescent: minimalist, precise, and sharp enough to split my fraying nerves like a whetted blade.
I stared, swallowed again, and not because of the vodka.
It was the same logo on the letterhead in the file we weren’t supposed to have. Unredacted, prominent, and too visible not to have been intentional.
I didn’t remember grabbing my keycard. Didn’t remember the hallway or the smooth plastic of the elevator call button under my thumb. Didn’t remember pressing the number for his floor.
Just felt it pulsing behind my eyes like a migraine:
Room 914.
I watched the floors climb. My reflection warped across the mirrored panel beside me while my pulse thudded in my ears—too steady. A the moment of apprehension before something breaks open. Like wandering through a house of mirrors, hunting for edges that didn’t push back. Searching for a path forward that didn’t shift underfoot.
I wasn’t sure why. Why I thought showing up at Miles’s door draped in damp cotton and denial was going to slide the pieces into place.
Why I was still arguing with myself. I wasn’t going in.
Sure. Keep telling yourself that.
The elevator dinged. The doors peeled open slow, like a warning. A plea for common sense.
Go back. Spare yourself the regret.
I stepped out. Rounded the blind corner.
Stopped cold.
Bare feet. Perfectly manicured toes. A blur of sun-kissed leg—long, tight, and toned.
I nearly slammed into her.
Her badge slipped from her grip and fluttered to the carpet between us. I opened my mouth to apologize. The words jammed in my throat the moment our eyes met, daring me to choke on them.
I knew her.
Knew the way she’d looked at Miles last night in the lounge like he was the axis the room spun around.
Blonde, damp hair towel-dried, heels hooked in her fingers, skin dewy. And the shirt?
Not hers.
Light blue, with mother-of-pearl buttons. I’d memorized the cut on him. I knew how it would smell if I pressed my nose to the collar—clean heat, faint smoke, cedar, and citrus. His skin. The same shirt he’d worn last night—top buttons undone, sleeves rolled to his forearms while he leaned in like an indulgence I wasn’t supposed to want.
Now it was draped across skin he’d definitely touched.
The hem brushed her mid-thigh. Long enough to play at modesty, but only if you weren’t really looking.
And I was. I couldn’t stop.
The fabric clung like a whisper, thin enough to reveal everything it pretended to hide. The dark pink peaks of her nipples were visible through it, pert against the sheer material. The faint, shadowed wedge of her black lacy panties made more obscene by the half-assed attempt at chastity.
Jesus.
Heat slammed through me, vicious and sudden. My chest clenched tight, and I hated it. Hated him. Hated her, a little.
But mostly? I hated myself for how easy it was to imagine what his heat soaking through fabric felt like. How his palms glided across bare skin with the confidence of a man who knew he wouldn’t be denied.
He’d be leaned into, embraced, begged for more.
I swallowed hard, and stooped to pick up the badge on the floor.
Her name: Harper—printed in heavy black type set. And underneath: Synthera.
I stood slowly, holding the badge out to her like an offering. Her eyes met mine. Held.
And everything clicked. So loud it echoed in my skull. In my teeth. In the cool surety of reason as it came flooding back.
Fuck me. I’d just found my smoking gun.
Now I knew what Miles had traded for the file we weren’t supposed to have, and who he’d gotten it from.
Her gaze dragged over me, head to toe. Deliberate. Lingering. Sizing me up, as if she’d just watched the full picture come into focus behind my eyes.
The way her lips turned at the corners? Yeah, I’d seen that look on another face too—direct and smug as sin.
She didn’t look like a woman caught at the tail end of a regrettable decision. Not one making her walk of shame back to her room. Not one caught sampling the forbidden fruit or dancing with the devil.
She stepped past me without a word, rounding the corner with the sort of loose, easy grace that didn’t need an audience to feel like victory. Like she’d won something. Like she’d ever really been playing the game. Like she’d taken something I hadn’t wanted until I saw her holding it.
She had his hands on her skin. Walked away draped in his shirt, heels hooked over two fingers like proof of conquest.
I saw it too clearly: the way he’d cradle her jaw while he tongue-fucked her mouth. Not sweet. Not careful. Just heat and pressure and that low, filthy growl he’d let go when I’d let him slide deeper.
Like he was starving.
My cunt clenched, sharp and wet. Stuttering around nothing but air and regret. My body remembered the way his fingers sank into me. The way my thighs shook while my body begged.
She’d been toyed with, but in all the right ways. The ways that had you choking on your own pleas for more.
My pulse roared in my ears. My face burned. My skin crawled.
Miles Wren.
Corporate-slick motherfucker with a god complex. A walking, talking, breathing conflict of interest wrapped in vice and luxury. My boss.
And I still fucking wanted him.
The ghost of his grind surged between my thighs—slow and relentless. Memory with a hard-on. Hung like sin, cocky enough to know it, and smug enough to make you say please.
I braced a hand against the wall, breath catching as I chased clarity through a brain soaked in sweat, heat, and bad decisions.
Forget the giggly bitch in Wren’s shirt. I had ammunition now. I wasn’t the only one being played.
I could burn them both to the fucking ground and walk away without a single singed hair on my head.
And I knew someone who’d strike the match with a smile. There was one person, besides me, who’d love to see Miles Wren go up in smoke—especially if the scandal had teeth.
Liam Rourke.
I had the full picture now. And god, I could see it: the look on Miles’s face when it clicked. The slow drain of control he commanded so effortlessly. And his giggly side-piece with her little smirk wiped clean while the walls caved in on both of them.
Because Miles was slick—yes. But he wasn’t infallible. He wasn’t nearly as untouchable as he liked to think.
And I wanted him to know. Wanted to look him in the eye and say:
When the fuse runs out—it’s me. I lit it. And I’m going to watch while it burns.
Game. Fucking. Over.
Room 914.
I knocked once. Hoped he’d come to the door slicked in Miles Wren swagger so I could watch it liquefy in real time.
What I didn’t know—what I wouldn’t admit—was that this was never about revenge.
Not really.
I couldn’t admit I was chasing the low hum under my skin, sweet and poisonous. A pull I’d been pretending to ignore.
Because for all my righteous fury, if he opened that door, if he asked me in…
There wasn’t a chance in hell I could say no.
So I stood there, caught in the hinge between vengeance and ache. Between cold reason and raw need.
Going back meant silence. It meant playing the long game, and cold sheets against skin still burning from fantasy. It meant lying in the dark, breath shallow, heart racing, with his name hot on my tongue. Like it had been every night since the basement.
And my fingers would drift low, starving for what I refused to name while the rest of me screamed the truth.
The door opened.
Fuck.
He was temptation given flesh. Naked from the waist up, hair a damp, tousled mess. Sweatpants slung low, clinging to the deep cut of his hips.
Double fuck.
No underwear. And the outline? Criminal.
Just above the band of fabric—ink. Lettering carved across the front of his pelvic bone, a whisper of temptation:
Sub pectore ferro.
I felt the heat rise in my cheeks—a scalding swell that rolled down my spine and settled in my core.
Suddenly I was aware that I’d left my room in nothing but a bathrobe. I stood there for a second, hips angled like I might bolt. Like I hadn’t just imagined the press of his hand between my thighs, confirming the want we both knew I was desperate to swallow.
He looked like every mistake I’d always wanted to make, and never had the guts to.
I forced my eyes up to meet his.
“You always sign your checks with your dick?”
His brow lifted. His eyes skimmed over me, slow and unbothered, from throat to ankle. Not leering, not exactly. But my robe felt stupidly porous under his gaze.
“Wouldn’t you like to know, Maddox?”
His proximity felt like a fucking invitation. That smug, magnetic pull he wielded like a weapon. Like he knew its effect, and counted on it.
My hands curled into fists at my sides, nails biting sharply into the meat of my palms, hard enough to sting. Clenching tight like they could hold the line.
“I could burn you.” I said, voice tight as my throat. “Burn you and the giggly bitch. Thought you should know.”
A muscle ticked in his jaw. A crack in the veneer. Like he almost smiled, or almost snapped.
“That right?” he asked, voice thick with illicit promise. He nudged the door wider with the slow press of his foot, leaned into the frame like sin wearing skin. “Come in. You can tell me all about it.”
No way in hell.
Not with him looking like that—half undone, wholly dangerous. Reeking of heat, scotch, sex, and a dozen bad decisions I hadn’t let myself make. Yet. Grinning in that well-fucked way that said the night wasn’t over—he was still hard for it. Like whatever he’d just taken apart wasn’t quite enough.
He looked at me like I was the fire he wanted to dowse in gasoline. Like he wanted another taste of me, because the first wasn’t enough. As if he needed to see if I’d burn hotter the second time.
The threshold felt like a line I’d drawn in chalk, only to pray for rain. Looming like an exit sign from hell, or maybe it was the entrance. I couldn’t tell anymore.
I felt the tremble in my hands. Restraint stretched so taut it hummed through my limbs, threatening to snap. I knew it, he knew it. It wasn’t rage dragging me here, or revenge. Not really.
It was desire: gnawing, relentless, real.
He reached, fingers brushing my wrist. A whisper of contact that sent an electric pulse careening up my spine.
I didn’t pull away.
His fingers curled, grip firming, thumb dragging lightly against the underside of my arm. He stepped back, just enough to draw me with him, the pressure on my wrist deepening—not forceful, but insistent.
My feet moved before my sense could tell them to stop.
The door slammed shut behind me, hard enough to rattle the cheap art on the walls. The room was dark, lit by only a single lamp by the bed—its glow low and honey warm, throwing long, deliberate shadows across the walls.
Across him.
All shadow and muscle, cut in angles and suggestion. Broad shoulders, bare skin burnished gold where the light kissed him. Half-undressed, half feral.
“How do you sleep at night?” I asked, voice low. “Using people like currency. Like leverage. Like something to be spent.”
“I sleep rather well actually,” he said, eyes finding mine through the gloom. “All things considered.”
He spoke with the lazy confidence of a man who knew guilt looked better on other people. And sin?
Better on him.
He tracked the tension in my jaw, the heat burning just beneath the surface. Tilted his head, filed it away like proof, mouth twitching like he’d just confirmed a theory.
“This about Harper?” He asked, lips curling into a smirk. “Lovely lady. Not much of a conversationalist, though—not like you.”
He was watching me unravel like he’d pulled the thread just to see how far it’d go. To map my fault lines himself, witness the way I’d come apart.
“Don’t look so dejected sweetheart,” he said, voice all smoke and provocation. “If you want me Maddox… all you have to do is say so.”
He took a step, then another. Stopped only when he eclipsed the light. The weight of his palm landed heavy against the door behind me. I pressed back against it, half-hoping if I leaned hard enough it might swallow me out from under him.
He cradled my jaw in his hand, kept my gaze caught by his, and leaned down close enough that his breath ghosted across my lips.
“So say please.”
The memory hit like a punch to the gut. Not just the kiss—what followed.
The scrape of teeth. The wet heat of his tongue in my mouth, his fingers buried in my cunt like he knew the terrain.
And the worst part?
I’d wanted it. Wanted more. Spent every night since trying to forget how good it felt to be broken open by a man who never asked, just dared me to tell him to stop.
My lips parted, tasting the memory of him like a sin I’d already confessed to.
Where the fuck was my resolve?
Gone, ripped away by the gravity of him.
What remained wasn’t anger. It was need, raw and unrepentant, throbbing beneath my skin like a bruise.
The air pulsed—charged and feral. It crawled under the robe, up my legs, between my thighs and found the heat between them like it meant to touch me before he did.
My breath hitched.
“Please,” I whispered.
That was all it took.
His mouth crashed onto mine—teeth, tongue, pure fucking claim. I met him just as hard, bit his lower lip, devoured the taste of him like it was the only thing tethering me to the present.
Maybe if I kissed him hard enough, it would absolve me of all the ways I’d already said yes.
He claimed every inch he could reach—lips, throat, jaw, collarbone. Teeth scraping more than kissing. Like he’d waited too long and hated himself for every second of restraint.
He fisted in the fabric at my waist, yanked the tie loose with the fury of a man who blamed the knot for keeping him from what he wanted. Forearm taut beside my head, braced, boxing me in.
Mine.
Like he knew I wouldn’t stop him—and I didn’t. I needed this. All of it. The roughness, the dominance, the breathless devotion of it. I was burning alive in his hands, coming apart where his mouth branded my skin. Scorched…
