Chapter One: The Sound Behind the Door

The key slid home with a quiet click, a sound instantly buried under another one that stopped Jennifer cold. It wasn't the television. She'd assumed that at first.

It was a low, wet rhythm, broken by a rough, guttural gasp she knew far too well. His gasp.

Her overnight bag slipped from her fingers and hit the hardwood with a dull thud. The emergency at the clinic, a patient crisis, had kept her there until three in the morning. She'd texted him about it.

Working late. I wish I could be there with you.

He'd sent back a heart, and she'd nearly begged a coworker to take her shift. Tonight was supposed to be their engagement dinner, postponed once already. She'd pictured it on her drive home, the ring catching the light, the dinner they'd finally get to have.

Now the ring felt like a cold band of metal locked around her finger.

The sound pulled her forward anyway, the way a flame pulls in something that already knows better. She could hear the moaning now, soft and keening, filling the hallway.

Her stomach turned as she glanced down at the floor she'd mopped only yesterday. The bedroom door hung open. A pink heel lay discarded near the threshold, and beside it, a pale silk blouse crumpled like it had been peeled off in a hurry.

Her pulse hammered as she crept closer, her shoulder brushing the cool wall. She didn't want to look.

She had to.

"Oh, fuck. Just like that. Just like that." His voice, thick and ragged, spilled into the hall.

There was no mistaking it.

Gerald.

Her fiancé.

His bare feet were planted on the rug she'd picked out herself, the muscles in his calves flexing with every thrust of his hips. A woman knelt between his legs, dirty-blonde hair falling forward to hide her face, her head bobbing in an unsteady rhythm. One hand braced against his thigh. The other worked the base of him in a slow, twisting grip.

Jennifer's breath caught as her eyes dropped to the blouse again, and then to the woman's hair, and the room seemed to tilt sideways.

She knew that hair. She knew that blouse. She'd been the one to zip it up for her three Christmases ago, laughing about how well it fit.

Sylvia.

Her best friend since they were nineteen. The one person Jennifer had trusted with every version of herself, the bad haircuts, the broke years, the nights she cried over Gerald's canceled plans. Sylvia, who had called her that very afternoon, voice syrupy with sympathy, saying she had her own dinner planned with a friend tonight and couldn't make it to the engagement party after all. Asking, almost as an afterthought, what time Jennifer's shift ended.

She hadn't been busy. She'd been making sure the apartment was empty.

Something in Jennifer's chest cracked clean in half, a different kind of pain than she'd braced for. This wasn't just Gerald. This was years of trust folded up and handed back to her in pieces.

She clapped a hand over her mouth to smother the sound trying to claw its way out of her throat.

A low growl rumbled from Gerald's chest. "God, Sylvia. Your mouth is criminal. I could stay right here all night."

Sylvia's pace quickened as Gerald fisted a hand in her hair, guiding her deeper. She gagged, sputtered, and kept going anyway. A thin thread of saliva stretched from her lip to him before it snapped.

"You're so good at this."

She pulled back with a wet, audible pop, her voice syrupy with smugness. "Better than that pathetic little charity case you're marrying?" She didn't wait for a response, dragging her tongue slowly around the tip, watching his face crumple with pleasure.

Something white-hot cracked through the numbness in Jennifer's chest. Pathetic little charity case. That's what she was to them. A joke they shared between themselves, something to laugh about mid-betrayal. She saw Gerald's stomach tighten, his whole body going rigid.

He was close.

"Don't stop," he begged, voice fraying. "Don't you dare stop."

Jennifer had seen more than enough. She turned on her heel and fled the apartment, scrubbing furiously at her eyes. She left the bag behind. Let him find it. Let him know she'd stood there and watched the two of them destroy the one night that was supposed to be theirs.

But she wasn't going to wait around for an apology that would never come close to being enough. She'd spent years being the perfect fiancée, cooking him dinner after her longest shifts, showing up to every function he asked of her, swallowing every canceled date and broken promise without complaint.

Tonight, the scales were going to even out. Somehow.

"What can I get you, miss?"

The bartender looked like he belonged in a different decade, band posters plastered behind him and a shirt reading METAL NEVER DIES in dripping red letters. Dirty-blond hair brushed his shoulders.

Dirty blond. It made her stomach clench, an unwelcome echo of honey-blonde hair she never wanted to think about again.

"Something strong," she said. "The strongest thing you've got."

He gave a slow nod. "I've got just the thing."

A glass slid across the bar toward her a minute later. "If you're trying to forget your boyfriend's an asshole, this'll do the trick. Fair warning though—"

She wasn't listening. She grabbed it, tipped her head back, and drank. The burn hit instantly, clawing down her throat like fire, stealing her breath. Her face went red as she fought to steady her lungs.

"You're supposed to sip it," the bartender finished, unbothered, already pouring her a glass of water. "Don't know what you're running from, sweetheart, but dying in a dump like this isn't the answer."

She took the water gratefully, though it did nothing to douse the fire still churning in her chest. "Something lighter, maybe?"

"Good call."

It wasn't.

One drink shouldn't have been enough to loosen her like this, but by the second, the floor beneath her barstool had started to tilt. Her head felt weightless. Her tongue felt clumsy.

Was this what Gerald chased every night he came home smelling like a bar? She'd never let herself get properly drunk before. What if the clinic called? Who'd drive Gerald home from wherever he was tonight?

"Enough," she muttered, waving a hand in front of her own face. She wasn't here to think about her cheating excuse of a fiancé. She was here to feel anything else.

"Scotch."

She caught the scent before she registered the voice, something warm and dark, wood and spice curling through the air around her.

Jennifer breathed it in without meaning to, turning to find the man standing beside her. He was tall in a way that made her feel impossibly small, dressed in a crisp white shirt with the sleeves shoved to his elbows. Ink wound along his forearm, dark lines tracing down to his wrist like veins under the skin.

The nurses back at the clinic would lose their minds over him.

"How would you like that?" the bartender asked.

"Neat."

His voice did something to her. She couldn't tell if it was the alcohol, but it slid through the fog in her skull like silk, low and rough at the edges, the kind of voice that felt like fabric against bare skin. Like the lingerie she'd bought for a trip Gerald swore he'd take her on.

He never got around to booking it.

Her gaze climbed slowly, stalling on the side of his face. She couldn't see him head-on yet, but his jaw looked carved from something far more expensive than bone, and his profile alone was doing things to her pulse.

She caught her bottom lip between her teeth as warmth bloomed low in her stomach.

A reckless thought crept in. If she was going to get even, why not do it with someone who looked like this? Even if it was terrible, at least she'd walk away with the memory of his face.

She cleared her throat. He turned toward her.

When she opened her mouth, it wasn't really her talking. It was the scotch, the humiliation, the ten different kinds of anger

boiling under her skin.

"Would you like to sleep with me?"