The first time I saw him, the world slowed down.
Not in that beautiful, cinematic way people describe when they meet someone who changes everything. No—it slowed the way a predator does when it's about to strike, when silence coils in the air and every instinct in your body whispers: run.
I should have listened.
The studio was dim, lit only by strips of neon that glowed against the smoke-filled air. Music pulsed low from somewhere in the back, the kind of bass-heavy rhythm that settled in your bones. The walls were lined with art dragons breathing fire, roses blooming from skulls, serpents wrapping around spines and the faint scent of ink and metal clung to the air like a secret.
I didn't belong there. Everyone knew it. My best friend was laughing, pulling me through the door with the ease of someone who didn't understand what kind of place this was. Her voice was carefree, her eyes wide with excitement. Mine weren't. I felt it the moment I crossed the threshold—that heavy awareness that this place wasn't just about tattoos. It was something darker, something that demanded silence.
And then I saw him.
He sat in the corner of the room, half in shadow, a sketchpad balanced on his knee. Black ink stained his fingers, his arms, his throat, disappearing beneath the collar of his shirt. His presence was quiet, but it filled every corner, the way smoke curls and claims the air without asking permission. People glanced at him, but no one lingered. They respected him, or maybe they feared him.
His eyes lifted once, briefly, and landed on me.
It felt like a blow—clean, sharp, and final.
Because in that second, I knew: he saw me. Not the polished mask I wore at the hospital, not the calm I used to keep people at a distance. He saw the fractures. The ones I had buried so deep I sometimes convinced myself they weren't there. His gaze stripped everything bare until I wasn't a woman standing in a tattoo studio—I was just a broken thing pretending not to be.
And still, I didn't turn away.
Something about him was magnetic, the kind of danger that didn't shout, but whispered. He wasn't beautiful in the way fairy tales promised. He was beautiful in the way fire was—consuming, alive, inevitable.
He didn't speak to me that night. Not a word. Just a glance that lingered too long, a look that stayed etched into my mind long after we left. My friend chattered beside me, blissfully unaware, but my pulse never slowed, and even hours later, I could still feel the weight of his eyes on my skin.
It should have ended there.
A fleeting moment.
A stranger in the shadows.
But it didn't.
Because fate has a cruel way of binding people together, stitching threads you can't cut no matter how much you bleed. I told myself I wouldn't see him again, that I didn't want to. Yet somewhere deep inside, beneath all my careful logic, I already knew the truth.
This wasn't a meeting.
It was a warning.
A beginning written in ink and scars, one that promised an ending carved out in blood and desire.
And standing in that studio, I couldn't shake the terrifying certainty that my story had already ceased being mine the moment his eyes found me.
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cover by bxttertae
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