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A little something from my drafts! This story is lightly edited, and I wanted to put it out there for you guys to read while I focus on working on my series. Enjoy! 🔥✨ It is medium spicy. But hopefully flavourful.
INAYA
The headache wasn’t just pain; it was a living thing, a gremlin with a pickaxe chiseling away right behind my left eye, scooping out the soft parts like melted gelato. The bed was a betrayal. An expensive, cloud-soft betrayal that swallowed me whole, the mattress clutching at my spine like a desperate lover I couldn’t shake off. Every tiny shift of my body felt like I was rearranging fresh bruises.
Then consciousness hit like a freight train full of regret.
I was naked. The sheets—Egyptian cotton, probably, the fancy bastards—slid against my skin, and for one blissful, stupid second, I expected warmth. I expected the hard plane of a shoulder, the lazy, post-coital grin of the man who’d spent half the night making me forget my own name. Julian. The one who’d actually laughed at my ridiculous new character, Barnaby the neurotic rabbit, during the book launch afterparty. A genuine, crinkled-eyes laugh, not the polite, dead-eyed smile of a publishing intern counting the minutes until they could snort coke in the bathroom.
I turned my head.
Empty. The space beside me was a crater of cold sheets. Sunlight blazed through the floor-to-ceiling windows like an interrogation lamp, and a greasy wave of wrongness rolled through my gut. Probably the three—no, four—mimosas. Or maybe it was the dawning horror. Hard to tell the difference when your body is a crime scene of bad decisions.
I lifted my hand to rub my temples, and my gaze snagged on my index finger. Bare. Naked. The spot where my mother’s ring had lived for eight years, through two near-drownings, a car wreck, and a fistfight with a woman in a Frankfurt train station over the last pretzel, was just smooth, unbroken skin.
The world didn’t just stop. It backhanded me.
“No.” The word came out as a croak, a prayer to a god I’d stopped believing in when I was fourteen and they’d dragged my parents’ bodies from the Baltic Sea. “No, no, no, you absolute turd-sucking son of a—”
I launched out of bed like the sheets were on fire. Gravity punished me immediately, the room doing a slow, nauseating cartwheel. I grabbed the nightstand to steady myself, knocking over a lamp that probably cost more than my first book advance. Didn’t care. My hands were already tearing through the room with the systematic desperation of a woman who’d lost the only irreplaceable thing she owned.
I upended my purse. A cascade of receipts, half a dozen lipsticks, a passport, and exactly zero rings. I clawed through the bathroom, checked behind the toilet like some kind of deranged raccoon. Nothing. I pulled cushions off the loveseat, kicked aside my crumpled dress from last night—the one he’d peeled off me with his teeth, the prick—and felt the first hot, humiliating sting of tears.
Forty minutes later, the hotel room looked like it had been hit by a hurricane with a personal vendetta. The mattress was half off the frame. Drawers hung open like dislocated jaws. A chair was on its side. I stood in the center of the wreckage, wrapped in a sheet, mascara carving dark trenches down my cheeks, shaking so hard my teeth chattered.
The manager arrived first—a slim man with an immaculate suit and the kind of bone-deep patience that only comes from years of dealing with rich people’s meltdowns. The two police officers followed, their expressions hovering somewhere between professional concern and the weary resignation of men who’d already seen six domestic disputes and a bar fight before noon.
“Ma’am,” the manager said, surveying the devastation with a single, twitching eyebrow. “Would you like something to calm you down? Perhaps some tea? We have an excellent chamomile blend.”
His kindness was a cheese grater on my last nerve. I couldn’t scream at kindness. Couldn’t weaponize my legendary vocabulary against a man offering me fucking tea. It was infuriating. It was a violation of my right to be a complete bitch in a crisis.
“Just...” I swallowed, the curses stacking up behind my teeth like cars on a foggy highway. “Find him, officer. Find the limp-noodle, micro-dicked, sentient venereal disease who thought he could—” I stopped, physically biting my own tongue. The metallic tang of blood grounded me. Marginally. “I want my mother’s ring back.”
The older officer, a broad man with a mustache that had seen some things, clicked his pen. “Can you describe the individual, Miss Roy? And the... nature of the encounter?”
“Julian.” The name tasted like battery acid. “He said his name was Julian. Handsome in a way that should’ve been a red flag, but my critical thinking skills were apparently on vacation with my dignity. Chiseled jaw, dark hair, eyes that did this crinkly thing when he smiled. Tall. Built like he knew his way around a gym and possibly a felony.”
“And he was a guest at your book event?”
“He was charming,” I said, the word dripping with contempt. “Came right up to me while I was being my usual thorny, unapproachable self. I’m not the one men hit on, officer. I’m the one they cross the street to avoid after I’ve verbally eviscerated their friend for a bad opinion on Tolkien. I have a face like an expensive cat who’s been mildly inconvenienced. But he didn’t care. He just... leaned in.”
The memory unspooled like a tape I wanted to burn. His hand on my thigh under the hem of my dress, right there on the dance floor, while some remixed pop song throbbed through the speakers. His fingers pushing aside the lace of my panties with a confidence that should’ve been illegal, making me gasp against his throat. The rumble of his laugh when I came apart in public, hidden only by the crush of bodies and the dim lighting.
“We came back here,” I continued, my voice flat. “It was good. It was really fucking good, which is somehow the most insulting part. He didn’t act like a man who was about to rob me blind. He acted like a man who wanted seconds. Then I passed out, and it was the kind of deep, unnatural sleep that makes me want a tox screen.”
The younger officer blinked. “Ma’am, you stated the encounter was consensual.”
“It was consensual.” I met his gaze, unblinking. “The sex was very enthusiastically consensual. The theft? Not so much. Roofies don’t just facilitate rape, officer. They also facilitate a very clean, very cowardly exit for limp-noodle thieves who don’t have the balls to steal from a woman who’s awake and looking at them. This isn’t a sexual assault. Let me make that crystal clear. This is a grand larceny, and if you don’t find him, I swear on my mother’s grave I will track him down myself and introduce his family lineage to a level of creative vengeance that’ll make the Old Testament look like a children’s bedtime story.”
The officers exchanged a glance that said they believed me. The manager quietly stepped backward, chamomile tea forgotten.
“Your mother’s ring,” the older officer prompted, steering the conversation back from the cliff edge of my threats. “Can you describe it?”
“Gold,” I said, and my voice cracked on the word, just a little. Just enough to betray that under all the fury was a wound that hadn’t scabbed over in a decade and a half. “Antique. The band was shaped like a serpent eating its own tail. There was a ruby chip for the eye. It was the last thing she gave me before...” I didn’t finish. They didn’t need to know about the cruise ship, the storm, the bodies they never found. “It’s irreplaceable. Not sentimentally irreplaceable like a greeting card. Irreplaceable like the only piece of her I have left on this godforsaken planet.”
“Did you have any security footage of the event, or the hotel corridor?”
I gestured at the manager, who snapped to attention like a soldier under fire. “I’ll pull everything immediately,” he said. “Every camera, every angle. We’ll find this son of a bitch.”
“Don’t call him that,” I muttered. “Bitches are loyal. He’s a hair clog in the shower drain of humanity.”
The officers finished their notes, promised to be in touch, and filed out with the look of men who were absolutely going to discuss my vocabulary in the squad car. The manager lingered for one agonizing moment, his hand hovering near my elbow like he wanted to pat me but feared losing fingers.
“I’m fine,” I said, before he could ask. “I’m not going to burn the rest of the room down. Just... send me the footage. And the bill for the lamp. And please, for the love of god, no more kindness. I can’t handle kindness right now.”
He nodded once, sharply, and fled.
I stood alone in the wreckage, wrapped in a sheet that smelled like sex and betrayal, and let the silence press in. My hand went back to my bare index finger, thumb rubbing the phantom band that wasn’t there.
“I will find you, Julian,” I whispered to the empty room. “And when I do, I will make you wish your mother had swallowed.”
It wasn’t an elegant threat. It wasn’t one of my best. But it was a promise, and I’d never broken one of those.
