Night cloaked Rafael Vexley's estate like a shroud—still, suffocating, and heavy with unspoken tension. The mansion, grand and cold, seemed to hold its breath with him. In the dim expanse of his bedroom, Rafael sat hunched on the edge of his king-sized bed, shirt wrinkled, collar open, sleeves rolled halfway up his forearms like he'd given up on pretending tonight.
A half-empty bottle of whiskey dangled from his fingers, the glass glinting gold in the sliver of moonlight that dared creep through the drapes. The silence in the room was pierced only by the occasional soft clink of melting ice, and the slow exhale of a man on the brink. His steel-grey eyes—cold, calculating, haunted—stared into the void, but what he was seeing wasn't the room. It was the past. They kept replaying infront of him.
The crash. The betrayal. The blood-soaked silence that followed. His pulse ticked in his ears louder than the ticking clock on the wall.
