Bound For 365

~ Seraphina ~

“Hello, y’all! It’s my girlfriend’s birthday tonight! And I tell you, I know her, inside out.”

A ripple of lewd snickers spread. My cheeks burned. He was finally saying it publicly. He had never.

“I know the depth of her pussy—”

My breath caught in my throat. I widened my eyes. “Stop!” I gasped, my voice barely a whisper against the pounding music. I reached for his arm, my fingers digging into the thin fabric of his shirt.

He was doing it again, selling me piece by piece to strangers, trading my dignity for a moment in the spotlight. Laughter, louder now, echoed the frantic thumping of my heart.

Mark shrugged off my hand, his eyes cold and mocking as they met mine.

“As I was saying, I know her angles, where to tilt, where to rotate,” he whined his waist as he did.

“Yeah, Mark!” His friends hailed him.

“Mark stop,” now I stood. Only to be shrugged off the sofa.

All eyes were on me. Waves of laughter peeled.

“I know the size of her panties and bras,” he continued, a smirk playing on his lips, “I know where to touch if I want her wet, and I can make her faint whenever I set my mind to!”

More laughter rose. It was a raucous, derisive wave that washed over me, drowning me in shame. Each peal was a fresh assault, tightening the invisible vise around my chest.

“She faints as though she farts, that's true,” a comment came from the side where his friends were seated.

If it were with his friends. I wasn't strange to it. But there were strangers in the hut. And he chose to do it right there?

“Stop,” I begged as I stopped again. “It’s not funny.” My vision blurred at the edges, the familiar warning signs of an impending blackout. I blinked. Not here. Not now.

Mark leaned down, his breath reeking of cheap tequila and stale cigarettes. “I want to make money, for us,” he hissed, his eyes glinting with a cold, calculating greed that made my stomach churn. "Don't you get it, Sera? This is for our future."

My future. With him. The thought was a lead weight in my gut. “Don’t do this,” I pleaded, tears pricking my eyes, hot and stinging. “This is blackmail, Mark! You know my weakness, that my heart is dying and you’re banking on it. It’s not supposed to be my today, my birthday.”

He just smirked, a cruel twist of his lips that turned my blood to ice. “Who's willing to bet that this twenty-three-year-old can black out when I tell her to?”

“Mark stop!” I shouted.

Dollar notes began to pile up on the table.

“And then, I bet my dick on it,” he said. “Cut it off if she didn't faint!”

He pulled out his phone, the screen already lit, and held it up with a flourish. “Ready for your present, sweetheart?”

I didn't want to see it. I knew what it would be. He'd been hinting at it for days, a twisted game of psychological torture. My eyes locked onto the screen, unwillingly drawn. It was him. And another girl. Naked. Fucking. Not just some other girl, Ari, my best friend.

The sight hit me like a physical blow, stealing the air from my lungs. My breath hitched in a strangled gasp. The world spun, faster and faster.

The music, the laughter, Mark’s smug, triumphant face—it all blurred into a suffocating vortex, a kaleidoscope of humiliation and betrayal. My vision tunneled, the edges darkening, closing in. My knees buckled. Then, nothing.

***

The first sensation was a throbbing ache behind my eyes, a dull drumbeat against my skull.

My tongue felt like sandpaper. "Mark?" I rasped. No answer. Only the gentle lapping of waves somewhere nearby.

Fear, cold and sharp, pierced through the haze in my mind. Where was I? On the floor. Where I had passed out. Left for dead.

I pushed myself up, my limbs heavy, my head swimming. I was alone in the dimly lit hut. “Mark?” I called again.

I shouldn't be looking for him. But who else would I call?

I stumbled to the doorway, my legs wobbly, pushing aside a thin, straw curtain. The beach was still alive with muted sounds of the party, distant laughter, and the murmur of voices, but my eyes snagged on a sight that stole what little breath I had left.

Mark. And a woman. Curvaceous, impossibly long-legged, and unashamedly naked, her chest pressed against the rough bark of a palm tree. Mark was grunting, thrusting into her from behind, his head thrown back in what looked like ecstasy.

He had humiliated me on my birthday. I had passed out. And he was there, fucking a beach bitch.

Tears streamed down my face, hot and stinging, blinding me for a moment. My heart hammered, a frantic bird trapped in a cage, threatening to burst through my ribs.

I had to look away. I didn't want to faint again. But I looked back at them.

The pain was unbearable. It was a sharp, searing agony that had nothing to do with my failing heart and everything to do with the man I’d loved. Or thought I loved.

“You are unlucky to be with him,” a voice, low and resonant, rumbled from beside me. It wasn't the drunken slur of a partygoer, but something deeper, richer, like the earth itself.

I flinched, spinning around, my tears blurring the figure beside me. A man stood in the shadows, his face obscured by the darkness of the hut’s entrance and the angle of the moonlight.

“He cashed out on your weak heart and bought the costliest prostitute on the beach. And you're left here, to die,” he said.

My lips pressed together in anger. I knew Mark was an asshole, but I had never thought he was that heartless.

However, I squinted my eyes. There was something about the stranger, about his stance. And his eyes, they felt... familiar. My vision swam again, a memory surfacing, hazy and potent, like a half-forgotten dream.

A school hallway.

The metallic scent of disinfectant and stale textbooks.

A younger, more innocent version of myself, trembling, my backpack slipping from my shoulders, my books scattered around my feet.

A hulking figure, another boy, sneering down at me, his friends laughing. My breath came in shallow gasps, my vision blurred, and my heart seized up in my chest.

And then, a figure stepping forward, always too serious, too intense, his jaw set, his fists clenched, ready to fight for me.

But he couldn't. Not then. Not against him. Not against Dino Moretti, the Campus Don.

The man in the shadows shifted and a sliver of moonlight caught his face, revealing harsh, defined lines, a jaw set in granite, eyes that held a dangerous, predatory glint. It was him. The boy from my past. Alessandro Torricelli.

My legs gave out from under me. Darkness claimed me again.