I sat chained to the vinyl chair beside her bed, a modern-day Orpheus in scrubs, watching machines fuck life into her lungs with the cold, rhythmic insistence of a piston in a high-end brothel. Each mechanical breath rose and fell like a paid performance—precise, dutiful, utterly devoid of desire.

The screens flickered their cruel little numbers, turning mortality into a goddamn balance sheet: heart rate, O2 sat, ICP—spreadsheet cells that decided whether a girl got to keep breathing or became another tragic line item in the universe's ledger of "almosts."

Hours.

I'd known her for mere hours.

One fevered day, a handful of a stolen hour in her gilded prison—that third-floor mausoleum with its floor-to-ceiling windows flaunting views richer than bloodlines.

Moonlight had poured in like liquid silver, licking across her bruises and turning them into abstract art: violet blooms, yellowing edges, the kind of canvas that would fetch millions if only the pain weren't real.

She had danced for me then, body trembling from muscle memory and terror, hips swaying like she was trying to recall the taste of freedom before it was punched out of her, one calculated fist and slaps at a time.

She had kissed me like I was the first clean breath after years of slow drowning in shallow, expensive water.

Lips starved, tongue desperate, teeth clashing with the hunger of someone who'd been told "no" so often that "yes" felt like blasphemy.

She'd moaned my name—Eros—like it was a prayer and a curse at once, voice shredded to velvet and broken glass, begging for more because no one had ever given her even the scraps.

And I, apparently, had developed a raging hard-on for salvation. Collecting broken women the way bored billionaires collect Basquiats—each one a masterpiece of damage, each one mine to restore or ruin further.

Darkly hilarious, really: a seventeen-year-old demigod with a messiah complex and a cock that seemed to think emotional bonding was a contact sport.

Yet those few hours had branded me deeper than years with others. The bond snapped into place like a chastity belt in reverse—inescapable, possessive, immediate.

I could taste it instantly: whether a woman would orbit me forever or drift away like background noise.

One glance into those ice-blue eyes—winter sky pregnant with blizzard—and I knew. She was already written into my constellation, another brilliant, bruised star adding weight to the chest of a boy who'd never been told he wasn't allowed to play god.

Lila was mine. Had been from the instant she'd kissed me, danced for me, her eyes begging me to save—small, startled, as if she'd spent her whole life waiting for someone to arrive and I'd finally kicked the door in fashionably late.

I didn't know if the feeling was mutual. Maybe I was just the first man who hadn't hit her on sight. Maybe she'd wake up, blink at the teenager brooding in the corner like a gothic novel cover, and wonder why the kid with the Women Hero complex was having a full existential orgasm over her hospital bed.

But I would make her mine anyway. Drag her out of that cage, teach her body what pleasure felt like when it wasn't laced with fear, show her that life could be more than a third-floor secret shamefully hidden from polite society.

And then Dex—because of course there's always a Dex—decided to turn attempted murder into a party trick.

Just yeeted her off a balcony like choosing between another bump of coke or a casual homicide, and went with the option that promised better stories at brunch.

Hilarious, in the blackest way possible. The kind of punchline that leaves you laughing while your soul bleeds.

The monitors bathed the room in their sickly blue pulse—heartbeat, oxygen, pressure—reducing a living woman to a dashboard of "still functional." The machines whispered their mechanical lullaby, drunk uncles at a wedding, slurring reminders that she wasn't truly breathing on her own, just borrowing time from circuits and plastic tubes.

I stayed anyway, hand wrapped around her cold fingers with possessive love for her and grief, waiting to see if the girl who'd kissed me like salvation would decide the world was worth waking up to—or if the darkness Dex fed her for years would finally win.

I couldn't tell if Dex was merely drowned in Cristal—bubbles of liquid arrogance fizzing through his veins until entitlement curdled into something murderous—or if his rot ran marrow-deep, the kind of spoiled marrow only old money can grow.

A man so convinced of his own untouchability that he believed he could shove a woman off a balcony in front of two hundred glittering witnesses and simply buy the silence afterward, the way one buys another bottle of champagne.

Fear as currency, hush money as aperitif, generational wealth as a velvet-lined shield against anything so vulgar as consequence.

Rich-people logic is its own exquisite psychosis. A shared hallucination so potent it warps reality like heat over asphalt, until the world itself bows and pretends not to notice the blood on the marble.

I didn't care which version he was.

He would pay.

Slowly.

Deliciously.

Not yet, though. Not while Lila still slept the thin, drugged sleep of the almost-dead. She was the true victim here, not me.

I wanted her awake, eyes open, voice steady, telling her story to microphones and courtrooms.

I wanted her to taste something rare: a system that actually worked for her instead of chewing her up and spitting out bones because she couldn't afford the kind of lawyers who bill in private jets and moral vacancy.

She deserved to watch justice arrive in daylight, served on silver, instead of stolen in the dark.

So, for now, I let the police play their little theater of importance.

Two hundred thirty-seven witnesses, named, photographed, subpoena-ready. Too many people had watched, Dex's manicured hands planting themselves between Lila's shoulder blades like he was launching a yacht.

Even Dexter money couldn't gag that many throats fast enough without making a noise loud enough to summon worse predators—reporters, regulators, the internet's endless appetite for rich-boy carnage.

ARIA had already gutted Dex's past like a skilled surgeon dissecting a still-breathing cadaver. Five confirmed kills. Five souls extinguished because they inconvenienced him.

Five.

Let that number rest on your tongue—bitter, metallic, impossible to swallow.

This wasn't a wayward heir sowing wild oats. This was a trust-fund serialist with a crisis PR firm on speed dial and a taste for ending stories that threatened his own.

Two deaths by his own manicured hands: a "boating accident" that swallowed a male model who'd dared whisper about bruises shaped like fingerprints; a "drug overdose" that silenced a singer-songwriter who tried to claw her way out of the gilded cage he called a recording contract.

Both neatly labeled accidental, paperwork vanished, toxicology reports massaged, witnesses suddenly struck with selective blindness.

Money sliding into the right pockets like lubricant.

Because when your surname is old enough, "accident" becomes an all-access pass to murder.

Unlimited lives, no reload required.

Three more deaths ordered the way one orders bottle service—quiet phone calls to men who don't list their talents online.

Two loose-end witnesses who saw too much, one woman foolish enough to try blackmail with proof of the family's creative accounting. Muggings gone wrong. Tires blown out on rainy highways. Tragic coincidence, no villain in sight.

Clean. Professional. Expensive.

Four men, one woman. Lila would have been the sixth, a pretty little footnote in his ledger, if I hadn't lunged and caught her wrist mid-air.

Hero of the fucking year, ladies and gentlemen—special power: existing in the exact second gravity almost won.

But the deaths were only the headline.

The mansion itself was a cathedral of quieter cruelties, an archive of screams painted over in eggshell white.

Seventeen documented assaults across years—bruises, fractures, concussions, terror—all treated by private physicians who accepted payment in silence and offshore accounts.

Seventeen.

Not accidents. Not clumsy flirtations gone awry. Not the hazy regrets of champagne and consent blurred by strobe lights.

Seventeen deliberate, choreographed violations.

Seventeen young women—rising starlets, runway sylphs, bedroom-voiced songbirds, screen sirens in the cradle, influencers whose faces were still soft with the dew of almost-famous—lured to those beachside bacchanals under the glittering promise of "opportunity."

Brought in on the arms of handlers who smiled like uncles, ushered through marble corridors that smelled of salt and money, then locked behind doors that clicked shut with the finality of a coffin lid.

A factory, yes. Conveyor-belt carnage dressed in designer gowns and bottle service. Each girl fed into the machine because her dreams were the perfect bait—ambition sharp enough to cut her own throat if it meant a rung higher on the ladder.

They endured fists, teeth, cameras, threats, because the alternative was the abyss of obscurity, and obscurity, they'd been taught since childhood, was a slower, crueler death than anything Dex could inflict in one night.

They never went to the police. Couldn't. Dex held their futures in his manicured fists like dirty Polaroids: explicit photographs that would detonate careers, iron-clad contracts laced with ruin clauses, audio of their own choked whimpers edited into something that could be spun as consent.

And if shame and leverage failed, the Dexter payroll stretched all the way into precincts and courthouses—cops who suddenly couldn't spell "probable cause," judges who golfed on family yachts, prosecutors who misplaced entire evidence lockers for the price of a second home in Aspen.

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