Marked At Midnight

Brigit is twenty-three, restless, and painfully bored with the life she built to feel "stable." So when her best friend insists, she come to a hometown reunion, she agrees out of pure monotony. There she runs into her ex-Wyatt, who is still the same: polished, self-absorbed, and talking about his successful life. Six years later, she feels nothing. Just completely, irrevocably over him and ready to leave his presence.

Until the door opens. Alessandro walks in. He's twenty-eight, dark-haired, broad-shouldered in a black dress shirt and tie, moving with quiet control and effortless old gentleman manners. He isn't loud, but the room shifts for him anyway. In a haze of drunken impulse, Brigit finds herself crossing the room and he steadies her when she stumbles, speaks softly, watches her carefully without judgement. The warmth of his quiet kindness melts into her senses. There's something refined about him... and something undeniably dangerous beneath it.

One drink turns into two, tension building slow and electric. When Brigit boldly asks for his number, he takes her wrist and writes it there himself in dark ink. Steady, deliberate, and intimate. The next morning, she wakes with a pounding headache and his mark still etched into her skin... only it doesn't quite look like a phone number anymore. The lines have blurred into something intentional. A symbol. A message. Its meaning grows more unsettling by the hour. Because men like Alessandro don't flirt for fun.
They claim.

Prompt number 99. You wake up with a strange mark on your skin after a late-night encounter you can barely remember, and its meaning grows more unsettling by the hour.
@SODream1