Page 78 of Sinful Desires
“You’re the sum of the people you surround yourself with,” General Lefebvre used to say, blunt as always, when anyone had asked how he’d become such a great fighter.
His words had stuck with me, and I’d taken them to heart. I’d built a gap between myself and everyone else.
I didn’t do people. Noise. Small talk. The fake grins and all that empty shit they fed off.
When they asked why I didn’t drink, I said something harmless. I didn’t like the taste. Clubs gave me headaches. Simple. Just enough to keep them from digging deeper. But the real reason? That was a whole other story.
I didn’t drink because I knew where it led: noise, chaos, and the kind of numbness you didn’t come back from. I’d been there. And I was not fucking going near it again.
Only a few people knew why I avoided those distractions. Why I’d carved myself into something cold and distant. Why I protected the small part of me that was still alive, even if just barely.
Because if I let myself get caught up in it all again, if I let the noise drown out the silence, I’d remember everything.
The scream that had ripped through my lungs. The blood. The tears. The shit I’d buried so deeply it felt like it’d tear me apart if I even thought about it.
My clients had avoided parties.
But the Red Queen? She breathed that shit in.
So here I was. Job in hand. Assigned to protect a goddamn superstar. Someone whose life was nothing but noise. Cameras. Parties. People clinging to her like parasites.
Everything I’d spent more than a decade avoiding, now my job to manage.
I couldn’t stop watching her. A fucking hour of her grinding, laughing, lit like a damn fire hazard. My eyes should’ve been anywhere else, but they’d locked in on the asshole gripping her hips like he’d bought the right.
Her gold dress caught every filthy strobe like she was asking for it. Her legs?…
Putain.
She leaned in, lips close to his ear, and whispered something that pulled a grin from his face. Her hand slid across his stomach, fingertips grazing the edge of his belt. She took his drink, ran her tongue along the rim, then sipped it slowly, her eyes on him. Then she fucking kissed the corner of his mouth, a little too close to be friendly. Her hand stayed on his stomach.
And she kept smiling?…?at me. I should have looked away. I didn’t. Then she threw me a fucking wink and turned her back to me.
Heat roared through my chest. My grip on the glass tightened until it cracked beneath my fingers. I wanted to grab her by the hair, drag her off that fucking dance floor, slam her into the nearest wall, and fuck the smug look off her face for using me, for yanking on my control like it was a fucking toy.
Instead, I set down the cracked glass and grabbed another, some disgusting sugary soda. I lifted it, the condensation slick against my fingers, and swallowed half of it just to force my gaze somewhere else.
Anywhere else.
“You should have a drink, Théo. It’sThe Diamond. Safest club in town. Leonardo Vittori owns it. He’s a friend of Angelo’s. Scarlett’s perfectly fine here.”
I set my glass down. “Club and safe don’t belong in the same sentence, Miss Jung.”
Victoria Jung—Scarlett’s stylist. I didn’t give a fuck about her. But I kneweverything.
Where she’d studied, who she’d dated, what she drank, how loyal she was. Anyone near Scarlett was mapped, tracked, and catalogued—whether they knew it or not.
British, with a clipped accent. Her parents were Korean immigrants who had started with nothing and built their way out of it one grueling step at a time.
Victoria was the result of that kind of climb. Polished. Image-obsessed. Trained in Paris. Smart enough to land the Harper contract after five years of dressing A-list clients with god complexes and too much money.
Her brother Josh hadn’t survived. At fourteen, he couldn’t take the weight of the bullying. After videos of him kissing another boy had surfaced, the world turned on him.
They’d destroyed him. And then, he’d destroyed himself.
Her brother’s death had become a news story, a tragedy they’d moved past in a week. She hadn’t. She’d channeledeverything into her work, becoming a public face for mental health and suicide awareness in their town.
Some would call it admirable. To me, it was just a way to cover the emptiness. The guilt. The ghosts she couldn’t get rid of.
