Chapter 3: Contractually Yours

Dante's POV

I was still thinking about his hands by the time I got home.

The rain had already stopped, but I was completely soaked, as though I had stayed beneath it long after the storm ended.

Water dripped quietly from my clothes onto the polished floor as I walked into my bedroom, my mind replaying the scene beneath the bridge over and over again.

That stranger’s face.

The panic in his eyes.

The way he had run toward me without hesitation.

I still could not understand it.

He had looked young. Very young and completely terrified on my behalf. As though seeing me standing there had genuinely scared him. And then he grabbed me like letting go would cost him something personal.

Nobody did that anymore.

Nobody ever ran toward me like that.

People usually concluded too quickly that I was so strong and I never needed saving.

I exhaled slowly and pulled off my wet shirt, tossing it carelessly somewhere behind me before stepping into the bathroom.

I grabbed a towel and dragged it through my damp shoulder-length-hair, staring absently at my reflection for a brief moment before walking back into the room.

The incident kept replaying in my head anyway.

He must have thought I was going to jump.

The thought almost made me scoff.

“Why on earth would I jump off a bridge?” I muttered under my breath.

I had only wanted the rain.

That was all.

The cold. The silence. The feeling of something real against my skin. Sometimes when the noise inside my head became too loud to carry quietly, I needed something stronger than my own thoughts to drown it out.

Yet somehow, even that moment had been interrupted.

And now I could still feel his touch lingering against my wrist.

One accidental touch from a complete stranger should not have followed me home this way. It should not have stayed in my head long enough to matter.

But it had.

I loosened the towel around my neck and glanced toward the mirror again.

Thirty-nine years old.

The number echoed heavily inside my head.

Time was not just running out anymore. It was sprinting.

Every male heir in my family died before—or on—their fortieth birthday.

No exceptions.

My father died at thirty-eight. Healthy one day and gone the next.

My grandfather barely made it to forty.

My great-grandfather never reached it at all.

The curse was not some old family rumour or stories whispered to frighten children. It was real. A truth carved so deeply into our bloodline that nobody even tried denying it anymore.

I could probably list every age, every death, stretching back generations before I was even born.

The curse never missed.

It waited patiently for your time to come… and when it did, it took you.

And now I was thirty-nine.

One year away from forty.

One year away from my own death.

Everyone around me believed I had accepted that fate a long time ago. Even my mother thought I was too detached to care. They looked at me and saw a man completely unbothered by the shadow hanging over his life.

As though I spent every day pretending death was not slowly walking beside me.

But that was never the truth.

Deep down, I was terrified.

Some nights, I could almost feel death standing quietly beside me, waiting for the clock to finally run out.

The curse was not a rumour in my family. It was a calendar.

And mine was almost full.

I had made peace with that. Or at least I had convinced everyone around me that I had, which was close enough to the same thing.

What I hadn't made peace with was tonight.

Specifically, the restaurant I had left empty handed three hours ago.

I had sat at that window table for almost two hours. Watching the entrance. Checking my phone. Telling myself five more minutes, then another five, then another.

The person I had been talking to on DirtyLink for three months had finally agreed to meet, and I had actually shown up. Which was not something I did. Ever.

Then the message came.

"Something happened. I can't make it. I'm sorry."

Nine words. No explanation. No reschedule.

I had stared at those nine words for a long time before closing the app and driving straight to the bridge.

I picked up my phone from the dresser and opened DirtyLink quietly. His last message was still sitting there unanswered on my end. I had read it a dozen times already without responding.

My fingers hovered over the keyboard for a moment.

Then I locked the phone and set it face down.

A soft knock came at the door before I could think any further.

Then the door opened before I could answer, because only one person in this house knocked and walked in without waiting for permission.

My mother.

And just like I expected, she stepped into the room, but the moment her eyes landed on my face, she stopped walking.

"You went to the bridge again," she said. Not a question.

And I didn't try to confirm or deny it.

I didn't answer at all.

She crossed the room slowly and sat on the edge of my bed, her eyes moving over me with that quiet calculation she had never lost despite everything age had taken from her.

"Dante," she said carefully. "The serum. The one I placed in your jacket before you left this evening." She paused. "Where is it?"

I frowned. "What serum?"

Her expression shifted immediately into something I hadn't seen on her face in a long time.

Fear.