The first thing I felt was the cold.
Italian Carrara marble against bare skin, shocking enough to make me gasp. Two a.m. and the bathroom of our penthouse apartment was still cold enough to be a morgue. Or maybe that was just me.
I sat perched on the edge of the vanity, naked except for the necklace.
Twenty million dollars worth of Harry Winston diamonds around my neck, catching the harsh vanity lights and fracturing them into a thousand cold rainbows. I'd fled the Met Gala three hours ago and hadn't even bothered to take it off. The platinum chain dug into my nape, heavy as a collar, and in the mirror's reflection I watched myself drag the sharp edge of the biggest diamond across my collarbone.
Not gently. Not the way you'd touch something you loved.
I dragged it like I wanted to cut.
A thin red line welled up in the diamond's wake. The pain was sharp and immediate and perfect. I did it again, higher this time, where the skin was thinner. Again. Another red ribbon on my chest, another spike of sensation that finally—finally—made me feel like I was actually inside my body.
The diamond felt alive against my skin—cold, hard, merciless. I tilted it, letting one of the smaller princess-cut stones catch the light just so, and pressed the point directly to my left nipple. The first touch was ice. The second was fire. I dragged it slowly, deliberately, watching the pale pink flesh darken and rise under the pressure. A bead of blood appeared at the tip, bright against the white skin, and slid down the curve of my breast like slow mercury. The sting radiated outward, hot wires threading through my chest, pooling low in my belly.I exhaled hard through my nose. My thighs clenched on the marble edge. I moved the stone lower, tracing the underside of my breast, then down the soft plane of my stomach, leaving a constellation of thin red scratches that burned in the cold air. Each line felt like it was waking something up—something that had been asleep for years.When I reached the sensitive skin of my inner thighs I hesitated. Just for a second. Then I spread my legs wider, the mirror reflecting every inch of exposure, and pressed the diamond flat against the tender flesh there. I dragged it upward, slow, letting the facets catch and tug at the skin. The pain was different here—deeper, more intimate, blooming into something almost sweet. I did it again, harder, watching the red bloom in thin parallel lines, watching my own pupils blow wide in the reflection.My breathing had turned ragged. The chain pulled tight against my throat with every inhale, the weight of it reminding me I was still wearing a collar, even if I'd chosen this one tonight. I dragged the stone back up, across my right nipple this time, circling the areola until it was swollen and dark and aching, then down again, faster now, chasing the burn. Blood smeared across my fingertips. The metallic scent rose, mixing with the faint perfume still clinging to my skin from the Gala. Copper and tuberose. Hunger and ruin.I was panting now. The pain had become rhythm, each scrape a pulse that echoed between my legs. My free hand slid down instinctively, fingers brushing the fresh red lines on my inner thighs, spreading the warmth, pressing into the hurt until it sang. The diamond hovered above my clit now, not touching yet—just close enough that I could feel the cool metal radiating against the swollen heat. I held it there, trembling, letting anticipation twist the knife deeper.Then I pressed.A low, broken sound tore out of my throat. The edge kissed the most sensitive spot and I rocked forward, grinding against the unyielding facets, pain and pleasure fusing into one blinding current. My hips jerked once, twice, chasing the sharp crest. Blood and arousal smeared together on my fingers. In the mirror I looked feral—eyes glassy, mouth open, chest striped with crimson, diamonds glittering like frozen violence around my neck.I dragged the stone one last time, long and slow from clit to navel, leaving a final burning trail. The orgasm hovered just out of reach, cruel and flickering, so close I could taste it.Then it slipped away.I dropped the necklace. It clattered against the marble, heavy and careless.I stared at my reflection: the woman who had just turned twenty million dollars of jewelry into a weapon against her own numbness.And for the first time in hours, I could feel my pulse everywhere—except where I needed it most.
My breath caught in my throat. The blood welled up in tiny beads where the diamond's edge had broken skin. For the first time all night, I could actually breathe.
The apartment was dead silent. The kind of silence that only exists in places that cost more than most people make in a lifetime. Soundproofed. Climate controlled. Perfectly, horribly still.
In the mirror, I watched myself. Elena Vance, thirty-three years old, senior partner at Aura, the woman who'd just been crowned "Queen of the Met" by Vogue. I looked like a stranger. Eyes too wide, pupils blown dark, chest heaving like I'd just run a marathon instead of sitting perfectly still. The diamonds around my throat looked less like jewelry and more like a leash.
Three hours ago, I'd been walking the red carpet at the Met Gala.
The flashbulbs had started before my feet even touched the carpet. Blinding white explosions popping in sequence, so bright they left spots in my vision. By the third flash, my facial muscles had locked into a permanent, painful smile—the kind that makes your jaw ache. I'd spent three hours having my makeup artist retouch my face between every shot, making sure the foundation was flawless, the eyeliner sharp enough to cut, the lipstick the exact shade of "fuck me" that wouldn't actually threaten anyone.
I knew how to work a red carpet. I'd been training for it since I was twenty-two.
The Valentino gown was white, a strategic choice. Everyone else would be in black or red or metallic, fighting to look edgy or dangerous or glamorous. I wore white like a weapon. The couture fitted my body like a second skin, every seam placed with millimeter precision to create curves that the dress didn't actually have. When I moved, the silk flowed like liquid. When I stood still, I looked like a statue carved from something expensive and untouchable.
The carpet went silent when I stepped onto it.
I could feel it happen—the way conversations died mid-sentence, the way heads turned, the collective intake of breath from three hundred people who made their livings being unimpressed. This was my power. Not the money. Not the diamonds. The ability to make a room full of narcissists forget they existed.
I posed. I knew every angle. Chin tilted exactly fifteen degrees up—assertive but not arrogant. Shoulders back but not rigid. The slight, knowing smile that suggested I was in on a joke nobody else understood. The Vogue photographer called my name and I turned toward the sound like a flower to sunlight, the dress rippling around me.
"Elena!" someone shouted from the ropes. "Who are you wearing?"
"Valentino," I called back, my voice smooth as cream. "Custom."
The flashes exploded harder. I gave them three more seconds of smiles and angles and then I was moving down the carpet, dismissing the photographers without even being obvious about it. I'd learned early that the people you ignore hurt more than the people you insult.
Speaking of insults.
I felt her before I saw her. That particular frequency of desperate energy that radiates from women who are trying too hard.
Amanda something. She'd married into old money three years ago and had been trying to claw her way up the social ladder ever since. She was wearing a red gown—Gucci, maybe, or a really good knockoff—and she'd positioned herself directly in my path. Her makeup was fighting her face. The diamonds around her neck were the right size but wrong everything else.
I didn't stop. I didn't even slow down.
But as I passed her, my eyes dropped. Just for a fraction of a second. Just long enough to take in the hem of her dress, the slightly uneven stitching where it had clearly been altered. Last season's hemline. The kind of detail only someone in my position would notice, because my job was literally noticing details.
I looked back up at her face and smiled.
Not a fake smile. A real one. The kind you give to someone you're about to destroy.
Amanda's smile faltered. She looked down at her dress, then back up at me, and I watched the blood drain from her face. She knew. She knew I'd seen it, she knew I'd judged it, and she knew that by tomorrow morning, half the women in this room would know it too.
"Nice to see you, Amanda," I said, not even stopping. "Love what you've done with the dress."
The double meaning landed. She froze. I kept walking, the crowd parting around me like water, and I didn't look back. In the vanity mirror, three hours later, I watched myself close my eyes at the memory, my lips curving into something that wasn't quite a smile.
God. That feeling. That hot, sharp rush of dominance. The way power hit my system like ice water poured into my veins—chilling and clarifying everything at once. For three hours tonight, I hadn't been Elena Vance, the asset. I hadn't been Mrs. Julian Vance, the maintained property. I'd been the queen. I'd been the one who decided who mattered and who didn't.
I'd been alive.
And then.
Then had come dinner.
We were seated at the head table, naturally. Julian on my right, some senator's wife on my left, three senators and a Supreme Court justice and two tech billionaires scattered around us like expensive confetti. The conversation was the usual blend of carefully worded politics and carefully curated gossip. Everyone was performing. Including me.
I'd just finished telling a story about a client acquisition—funny but self-deprecating, the kind that made me seem competent but not threatening—when Julian leaned in.
To anyone watching, it looked like a husband whispering something intimate in his wife's ear. Affectionate. Romantic. Maybe even a little possessive, in the good way.
But I didn't feel warmth. I didn't feel affection.
I felt the temperature drop ten degrees.
"You're leaking emotion," he murmured, his voice freezing the skin of my neck. "Bottle it. I want a smile that hints at secrets, not one that shouts for pennies."
His voice was low enough that only I could hear, calibrated precisely to carry no farther than my ear. No emotion. No warmth. Just data, delivered like a GPS recalculation route. The warmth I'd imagined—the husband leaning in to whisper something affectionate—curdled and died.
My smile froze.
Literally froze. I could feel the muscles lock, stiff as a marionette's the moment the strings go taut. Julian had been training me for five years—five years of micro-corrections, of "your posture is slouching" and "your laugh sounds artificial" and "you're holding your glass like you're terrified of spilling"—and my body had learned to respond to his voice like a puppet on a string.
I felt my lips reposition themselves, muscle by muscle, until they hit the mask he wanted. Less teeth. Less crinkling around the eyes. The kind of smile that suggested I knew something you didn't, rather than the kind that begged for approval.
The "Vance Asset Maintenance Manual," page thirty-seven, section four: The Appropriate Social Smile.
"Better," Julian said. He straightened, his hand retracting from my waist like he'd just finished adjusting a display. "You looked desperate for a second there. We can't have that."
He didn't look at me.
He turned back to his conversation with the senator to his right, leaving me sitting there with my perfectly calibrated smile, feeling like someone had reached inside my chest and turned off a switch I hadn't even known existed.
A switch flipped. I felt it go dark inside me, like someone had blown out a candle. The body in the Valentino gown kept smiling. The body kept nodding at the right moments. But I wasn't in there anymore.
I sat through the rest of the dinner in a kind of dissociated trance. Smiling when I was supposed to smile. Laughing at the right moments. Nodding at the appropriate intervals. Somewhere far above the table, I watched myself do it—this woman in white silk, draped in twenty million dollars of diamonds, performing for an audience she couldn't even see.
Now, in the cold silence of the bathroom, I opened my eyes and looked at myself in the mirror.
"Fix it," Julian's voice echoed in my head. "You looked unhinged."
My hand moved between my legs.
I didn't even decide to do it. My body just acted on its own, desperate to erase his voice, desperate to feel something that wasn't calibrated or measured or approved.
I stared at my reflection: the woman who had just turned twenty million dollars of jewelry into a weapon against her own numbness.And for the first time in hours, I could feel my pulse everywhere—except where I needed it most.My hand moved between my legs before the thought even finished forming.No decision. No permission. Just instinct—raw, animal, starving.Two fingers slid in, slick from blood and the shameful heat that had been pooling since the first cut. The intrusion was sudden, almost violent. I curled them hard, pressing up against that swollen ridge inside, searching for the spark that would finally burn Julian's voice out of my skull.Faster.The heel of my palm slammed against my clit in brutal, staccato rhythm. Wet sounds filled the bathroom—obscene, echoing off marble like accusations. My hips jerked forward, riding my own hand, smearing crimson streaks across pale thighs. The cold vanity bit into my ass, a cruel contrast to the fever building under my skin. Every thrust made my breasts bounce, the fresh scratches stinging anew with each movement."You're leaking emotion."His voice sliced through the haze, low and precise, the same tone he'd used at the head table.I whimpered—actually whimpered—and drove deeper, three fingers now, stretching myself until it burned. My free hand flew to my throat, fingers wrapping around the place where the chain had been, squeezing just enough to make my vision pulse black at the edges. The pressure in my core coiled tighter, vicious, promising silence, promising obliteration."Bottle it."The words hit like ice water poured down my spine. My rhythm faltered. I snarled, teeth bared, and fucked my hand harder, punishingly fast, nails scraping inside, chasing the heat that kept slipping away. Sweat slid down my back, mixing with drying blood. My thighs trembled, muscles locking and releasing in frantic spasms. I could feel it building again—low, dark, tidal—threatening to finally drown him out.I bit my lip until copper flooded my tongue again. The pain sharpened everything. I rocked into my palm, grinding, desperate, so close I could taste the white static at the back of my throat.Almost.Almost—"Better," Julian murmured in my memory, straightening his cufflinks, turning away like I was furniture. "You looked desperate for a second there. We can't have that."The coil snapped.Not a slow unwind. Not a gentle retreat. A sudden, brutal execution. The heat vanished. The pressure dissolved into nothing. My fingers were still buried inside me, still moving on autopilot, but the current was gone. Static. Dead air.I froze.Panting. Shaking. Slick and bloody and empty.The orgasm that had been so close it felt inevitable simply... wasn't.I stared at the cracked mirror, at the woman with wild eyes and heaving chest and red-streaked skin, fingers still inside herself like she didn't know how to stop.Why?The question screamed behind my eyes. Not what did I do wrong. Not how do I fix it.Why can't I feel anything—even this?Even the simplest animal release had been taken from me."Fuck."The word ripped out, raw and ugly. My hand finally fell away. I curled forward, forehead pressed to the cold marble, shoulders shaking with something too broken to call sobs.The bathroom stayed silent. Perfectly, horribly still.
Faster. Harder. I bit my lip until I tasted blood. The diamond necklace dug into my neck, the sharp facets pressing against my throat, and I leaned into the pain, welcomed it, needed it. My fingers moved furiously, slick and desperate, and I could feel it building—that heat, that pressure, that moment where the world goes white and silent and for one fucking second you're not thinking or performing or being anything other than pure sensation.
Almost there.
Almost—
And then it was gone.
Not a fade. A sudden, brutal cut to static. Like a dead channel. I was left panting, staring into the mirror with eyes that saw nothing.
Ten seconds. Twenty.
The cold of the marble finally seeped past my skin and into my bones.
Why?
The question was a silent scream in my head. Not what did I do wrong, but why can't I feel. Even pain would have been something. Even shame would have been a feeling. But this—this hollow nothingness, like someone had reached inside and scooped out everything that made me alive—
"Fuck."
The word ripped out of me, raw and ugly. My fingers curled around the diamond chain, knuckles white. The platinum clasp snapped with a sound like a gunshot.
I hurled it across the bathroom. The necklace hit the mirror and shattered the glass, a spiderweb of fractures blooming outward from the point of impact.
In the broken mirror, I stared at my fractured reflection.
Who was this woman?
This woman with the wild eyes and the heaving chest and the red marks scratched into her skin? This woman who couldn't even come without her husband's permission? This woman who had everything and felt nothing?
"Elena?"
Julian's voice from the bedroom, muffled by the closed door but still precise. Still controlled. Still sounding like he was reading from a script.
"Are you alright in there?"
I froze. My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird.
"Fine," I called back. My voice sounded breathless, wrecked. "Just—just cleaning up."
Silence from the other side of the door. Then, after a moment: "Try to be quiet. Some of us have early meetings."
"Go to sleep, Julian."
Another silence. Then the rustle of bedclothes as he settled back in.
I sat on the vanity for a long time, just breathing, staring at the broken mirror, at the multiple versions of myself reflecting back from the fractured glass. Eventually I got up and walked to the door and rested my forehead against the wood.
In the reflection of the darkened window glass, I saw the dinner table again.
The moment that had almost broken me.
We'd been served steak. Medium-rare, exactly the way Julian preferred it. The waiter had set the plate down in front of me with that particular ballet of fine dining—white-gloved hands, silent efficiency, the slight bow as he retreated.
And I'd just stared at it.
The meat was still red in the center. Not pink—red. Raw muscle fibers weeping onto the white china, a thin translucent pool of blood and fat spreading like something alive. In the harsh restaurant lighting, it glistened.
And the smell.
The metallic tang of blood rose from the plate, sharp enough to make my mouth water. It mixed with the scent of Julian's cologne—that antiseptic, sanitized blend of bergamot and something that smelled like a hospital corridor. Blood and disinfectant. The clash made my stomach turn, made the hunger somehow sharper, nauseating and intoxicating at the same time.
I couldn't look away.
I'd been staring at it for thirty seconds when I realized my mouth was actually watering. Not in a polite, "this looks delicious" way. In a way that felt predatory. My pupils had dilated. My throat moved as I swallowed, and I had this sudden, terrifying urge to reach out with my bare hands and grab the meat and shove it into my face, tear into it with my teeth like a fucking animal, let the blood run down my chin and feel the muscle fibers snap between my teeth, raw and warm and—
*Kick.*
Something hard hit my shin under the table. I jolted back to reality, my eyes snapping up from the plate.
Julian was looking at me. Not at my face, exactly—at a point just above my left shoulder, like he was addressing a piece of furniture.
"Drink your water, Elena."
His voice was low. Calm. The kind of calm that comes before someone murders you.
"What?"
"You're staring at your food. It's disturbing. Drink your water and compose yourself."
I looked down at my plate. I'd been leaning over it, I realized. My hands were curled on the tablecloth like claws. My knife and fork lay untouched on either side of the plate.
Slowly, I reached for my water glass. My hand was shaking. I took a sip, forcing myself to swallow, and when I looked back up, Julian had already turned away, already resumed his conversation with the senator beside him.
But I saw it in his face, just for a second.
He'd been disgusted.
Not annoyed. Not irritated. Disgusted. Like he'd seen something crawling out from under a rock. Like I'd shown him something that revolted him.
I'd spent the rest of the dinner picking at my food, pushing the meat around the plate, terrified to look at it, terrified he'd notice me noticing it. Every bite I forced myself to take tasted like ash. Every swallow felt like choking.
Now, standing in the bathroom doorway, I ran my tongue over my teeth.
I was still hungry.
That was the worst part. Despite everything—the humiliation, the failure, the utter hollowness of sitting on a cold vanity with a necklace worth more than most people's homes lying shattered on the floor—I was still starving.
My body craved something raw. Something dirty. Something that would leave me bleeding and satisfied.
I opened the bathroom door and stepped out into the bedroom.
The temperature-controlled air hit me like a wall. Julian's side of the bed was exactly as he'd left it—the blanket pulled up to his chest, his arms crossed over his chest like a corpse in an open casket, his breathing so perfectly rhythmic it sounded artificial.
I walked past him without making a sound. Years of training had taught me how to move through expensive spaces without leaving footprints.
The balcony doors were open just a crack. I slipped through and into the cool night air, the city spread out beneath me like a galaxy of electric stars. Manhattan at two a.m. looked like a circuit board, millions of tiny lights burning in patterns that made sense only from a distance.
Up close, everything was chaos.
I stood at the railing, naked, letting the wind cut against my skin. Twenty stories down, the traffic was still moving, a river of yellow taxis flowing through the canyons of buildings. Somewhere, someone was having the night of their life. Somewhere, someone was dying. Somewhere, someone was eating, fucking, screaming, laughing, living.
My private phone buzzed on the balcony table where I'd left it.
I froze. My work phone—the one that rang 24/7 with European market crashes and client crises and reputation fires that needed extinguishing—was inside on the nightstand. But this was my personal line. The burn phone. The number only twelve people on Earth possessed.
At two a.m., a call on this line meant one of two things: someone had died, or someone was about to.
Unknown number.
My first thought was crisis—Julian's father's health, perhaps, or a client meltdown in the Tokyo office. I reached for it with practiced calm, already assembling crisis management protocols in my head.
Then a photo popped up in the message preview.
I stared at it.
My breath stopped.
It was me.
Not the me from the red carpet, with the perfect smile and the couture gown. Not the me from the Vogue photoshoot, looking like something carved from marble and expensive lighting.
This was the me from the dinner table.
The photo was grainy, clearly taken from a distance, probably from a phone. I was leaning over my plate, my pupils dilated, my expression hungry and unguarded and almost feral. The raw steak was visible on the plate, glistening under the restaurant lights. My hands were curled like claws.
I looked like I was about to tear the throat out of something living.
My hands were shaking as I opened the full message. There was text under the photo:
"You look hungry."
Disgusting.
The word rose in my throat, bile-sharp. Someone had been watching me. Someone had captured my most private, most unhinged moment and turned it into... what? Blackmail? A joke?
My thumb hovered over the delete button. This was violation. This was a reason to call security, to track this number, to make someone pay.
But I didn't delete it.
I zoomed in on the photo.
My own face stared back at me, grainy and distorted. My pupils were blown wide, black holes swallowing the irises. My mouth was slightly open, the lower lip trembling. And in my eyes—
Hunger.
Raw, naked, starving hunger.
Julian had seen this same expression and looked away in disgust. He'd seen something crawling out from under a rock. He'd seen damage.
But this stranger—
This stranger had seen the hunger itself.
My thumb moved from the delete button to the save button.
For the first time in five years, someone saw me. Not the Elena Vance who bottled every emotion. Not the Elena Vance who smiled with secrets she didn't feel. They'd seen the animal underneath. The one who wanted to rip the world apart with her teeth.
A laugh bubbled up in my chest, sudden and sharp.
I stood naked on a balcony twenty stories above Manhattan, gripping a phone with a stranger's message on it, my husband's sleeping form just visible through the sliding glass doors behind me.
This was it. This was what I'd been waiting for.
The cage door was open.
I turned and walked back into the bedroom.
Julian hadn't moved. He lay on his back, hands crossed over his chest, breathing in that perfectly rhythmic, artificial pattern. The blanket had slipped down during the night, exposing his throat.
I stopped beside the bed.
My eyes found the pulse point in his neck—that fragile blue vein beneath the pale skin, thump-thump-thump, the only evidence that blood still moved through him. For a second, just a fraction of a second, I imagined what it would feel like to sink my teeth into that soft flesh. To feel the pulse against my tongue, hot and frantic, before it stopped.
The hunger surged again—dark and sudden and vicious.
Then it was gone.
I climbed into bed beside him. He didn't stir. His breathing remained perfectly rhythmic, perfectly artificial, perfectly dead.
I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling and smiled at the darkness.
The photo was still burned into my retinas—my own hungry face, captured like evidence.
"You look hungry."
I pressed the phone against my chest, right over my heart. I could feel it beating faster than it had all night.
My eyes closed, but I didn't sleep.
I waited.
And for the first time in five years, I couldn't wait to play.