Our Dark Fantasies

Chapter 4: The Quiet Before the Fire

Sofia

I wake up tangled in sheets that smell like cedar and s*x and Damien’s skin. The rain has stopped; the city outside his windows is the color of wet steel, still half-asleep. For once, my body isn’t buzzing with the need to run. It’s quiet. Terrifyingly quiet.

He’s already gone from the bed. I hear the low clink of a coffee cup in the kitchen, the soft pad of bare feet on marble. I lie very still and listen to him exist, because it feels like a miracle that he’s still here after everything I confessed in the dark.

Last night we didn’t f**k.

We undressed each other slowly, like we were handling something explosive. He traced every scar I’ve never let anyone see, the thin white line on my rib from a broken champagne flute in Monaco, the crescent burn on my thigh from a stranger’s cigarette in Ibiza and he kissed them like apologies. I mapped the raised edges of the childhood cigarette burns on his shoulder blades and understood, for the first time, why some people stay broken: because someone taught them early that pain is the only proof they’re real.

We talked until the sky turned lavender. Not about diagnoses or boundaries. About the first time I realized money could buy silence but never safety. About the night he found his mother unconscious on a bathroom floor and decided he would never again be powerless. We traded origin stories like contraband, whispered them into each other’s mouths between kisses that tasted like salt and surrender.

I never fell asleep feeling this… held. Not once in twenty-nine years.

Now the mattress dips as he slides back in beside me. He’s warm, morning-rough, carrying two mugs. Steam curls between us.

“Drink,” he says, voice gravelly. “You’re dehydrated.”

I sit up, sheet clutched to my chest out of habit more than modesty, and take the coffee. Black, no sugar. Exactly how I like it. He remembered from the single cup we shared in his office yesterday—Damn, was it only yesterday?

He watches me over the rim of his own mug, eyes unreadable.

“Tokyo flight’s at noon,” he says. Not a question.

I nod. “Private charter. I can push it twenty-four hours. Maybe forty-eight. After that, the pilots file a new flight plan and my father’s people start asking why.”

He sets his coffee on the nightstand. “And if you don’t get on that plane at all?”

My heart stutters. “Then the trust defaults to my cousin Mateo. He’s been waiting for me to implode since we were twelve. My mother gets cut off. My little sister loses the only buffer between her and the family vultures.” I swallow. “I’d be free. And I’d destroy four people who never asked to be collateral damage.”

He doesn’t flinch from the math. “And if you do get on the plane?”

I look at him straight. “I spend six months smiling for cameras in rooms full of men who think buying me dinner entitles them to my throat. I keep chasing the thing that makes the screaming stop. Eventually I find someone who’ll hurt me the way I think I deserve. And one day I don’t come back from it.”

The silence is enormous.

He reaches out, brushes a thumb across my lower lip like he’s checking I’m real. “There’s a third option.”

I raise an eyebrow, pulse already racing.

“You stay,” he says quietly. “Not forever. Just long enough for us to figure out what the hell this is when it isn’t adrenaline and broken rules. You let me keep you safe while you decide what Sofia actually wants, not the version the world scripted for you.”

Safe. The word lands like a foreign language.

“I don’t know how to be kept,” I admit.

“I know,” he says. “That’s why you need someone who won’t let you run until you’re ready.”

I set my coffee aside and crawl into his lap, straddling him, knees sinking into the mattress on either side of his hips. His hands settle on my waist automatically, steadying. I rest my forehead against his.

“Forty-eight hours,” I whisper. “Give me that. No titles. No contracts. Just truth. After that, I’ll get on the plane or I won’t. But I need to know what it feels like to choose something that isn’t self-destruction.”

His grip tightens, almost bruising. “Forty-eight hours,” he agrees. “But if you stay, there are rules.”

I laugh, soft and shaky. “You and your rules.”

“Rule one,” he says, voice dropping into that dangerous register that makes my thighs clench. “You don’t hide from me. Not the ugly parts. Not the scared parts. All of it.”

I nod, throat tight.

“Rule two. You let me take care of you. Sleep. Food. Whatever you’ve been denying yourself to stay sharp. That stops.”

I start to protest; he silences me with a look.

“Rule three,” he continues, “when the forty-eight hours are up, we decide together. No unilateral disappearances. No ghosting. You owe me that much.”

I search his face, the faint scar through his left eyebrow, the tension around his eyes that says he’s just as terrified as I am.

“I owe you more than that,” I say.

He kisses me then, slow and deep, like he’s sealing a vow.

When we break apart, I’m trembling.

“One more thing,” I breathe against his mouth. “While I’m here, I don’t want to be fixed. I just want to be… seen.”

He cups my face, thumbs stroking my cheekbones.

“Baby,” he says, the endearment rough and reverent, “I haven’t taken my eyes off you since you walked into my office.”

Outside, the sun finally breaks through the clouds, spilling gold across the bed, across us.

Forty-eight hours.

I have no idea who I’ll be at the end of them.

But for the first time, I’m not running toward the exit.

I’m running toward him.