He hadn’t stopped watching since they’d stepped onto the floor. He saw everything, everything...
The way Stan’s hands held her waist. The way Sophie pressed into him without reservation. The way they moved together, slowly, perfectly, like two people who had discovered a frequency only they could hear.
And now this. The almost-kiss. Foreheads touching. Lips a breath apart. His hand on her face. Her fingers in his hair.
Sothing inside Damien’s chest twisted hard, ugly, venomous.
He grabbed another shot. Threw it back without tasting it. Reached for the next one imdiately. And the next. And the next. Each glass hit the table with a sharp clack before he snatched the following one, drinking with the frantic, chanical rhythm of a man trying to drown sothing that refused to stay subrged.
His guards watched from the periphery, their expressions shifting from professional neutrality to genuine concern. Damien’s face had gone red. His eyes were glassy. His movents were losing their precision.
One of the guards leaned forward slightly. "Sir, perhaps you should,"
Damien raised one hand, a sharp, silencing gesture, without looking at them.
’I’m fine. Leave alone.’
He poured another shot. His hands were shaking now. Not from the alcohol, from the thing the alcohol was failing to suppress.
The song ended. The next track brought the energy up slightly, and the couples on the floor began to shift and rearrange.
Stan leaned close to Sophie’s ear.
"I’m going to grab us sothing to drink. Wait here?"
Sophie nodded, still slightly flushed from the dance, still wearing the dazed, luminous expression of a woman who had been one milliter from a kiss and could still feel the ghost of it on her lips.
"Don’t take too long."
Stan smiled, released her waist, and moved toward the bar.
The mont Stan’s back was turned, Damien stood up.
The movent was abrupt, unsteady, fueled by alcohol and bitterness and the particular brand of entitlent that cos from a lifeti of getting what you want. His chair scraped backward. The whiskey bottle on his table was nearly empty. His eyes were fixed on Sophie with an intensity that had crossed the line from interest into sothing darker.
His guards reacted imdiately, two of them stepping forward, hands raised in careful restraint.
"Sir, sir, please. You’ve had a lot to drink. Maybe you should,"
Damien raised his hand again. The guards hesitated, caught between their professional obligation to protect their employer from himself and the very real fear of what happened when they contradicted him.
The hand stayed up. The guards stayed back.
Damien crossed the dance floor in six uneven strides.
Sophie saw him coming. Her expression shifted from relaxed to wary in the span of a single heartbeat.
"Dance with ." Damien’s voice was thick, slurred at the edges, stripped of the polished charm he’d deployed at the car. This wasn’t a request. It was a demand wearing the thinnest possible disguise of civility.
"No thank you," Sophie said firmly, stepping back.
Damien didn’t stop. He reached for her waist, clumsily, aggressively, his fingers closing around her wrist with a grip that was far too tight for a social setting.
"I said dance with ,"
Sophie tried to pull away. His grip tightened.
"Let go of ,"
He yanked her toward him. His other hand grabbed at her arm, pulling her off-balance. His face was close, too close, and his breath reeked of whiskey. Sophie’s composure cracked into genuine fear. She twisted, pushed at his chest with her free hand, but his weight was too much and his grip was iron-locked by drunken determination.
"You think you can reject ? You think you can choose so kid over,"
A hand landed on Damien’s shoulder from behind.
The grip was not gentle.
Damien had half a second to register the pressure, to feel the fingers dig into the muscle and bone with a strength that didn’t belong to any normal person, before the world rotated violently around him.
The punch ca from an angle he never saw. It connected with the center of his face, a single, clean, devastating impact that lifted his feet off the ground and sent him sailing backward across three ters of dance floor.
He hit the ground hard. Skidded. Rolled once.
When the world stopped spinning, the first thing he noticed was the taste of blood, thick and copper-bright, filling his mouth, seeping between teeth that were no longer all where they’d been a second ago. Sothing sharp and jagged sat on his tongue. He spat it out. A tooth, cracked in half, trailing a thin ribbon of red.
The second thing he noticed was the pain.
The third thing he noticed was Stan, standing exactly where Damien had been standing a mont ago, his fist still half-raised, his expression carrying the cold, focused calm of a man who has committed to violence and found it entirely justified.
"HOW USELESS ARE ALL OF YOU?!"
Damien’s scream was wet, distorted by the blood in his mouth, but the fury behind it was unmistakable. He was on his feet in an instant, lurching, swaying, pointing at his guards with a trembling, bloody finger.
"You just, you just STOOD there, you watched get punched by this, this,"
The guards snapped out of their shock. Professional instinct overrode hesitation. Six n in black suits moved as one, closing on Stan from three directions, a coordinated formation honed by training and experience.
These weren’t amateurs. They were private security, hand-selected for size, strength, and combat proficiency. Two of them were built like heavyweight fighters, thick-necked and broad, the kind of n whose presence alone usually ended confrontations before they started.
The first one reached Stan in two quick strides, throwing a straight right aid at his jaw.
Stan sidestepped. The fist sailed past his ear. His counter landed, a short, brutal hook to the ribs, and the guard folded like a chair, dropping to one knee with a choked gasp.
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