The wine bottle was almost empty.
I stared at it from my spot on the couch, trying to remember if this was my second bottle tonight or my third. The label blurred when I squinted at it, which probably meant third. Or maybe I just needed new glasses.
Or maybe you need to stop drinking yourself to death.
I ignored the thought and poured what was left into my glass. The cheap red sloshed over the rim, staining my fingers, but I didn’t care. Caring required energy, and I’d run out of that weeks ago.
The apartment was dark except for the glow of the TV, some late-night talk show I wasn’t really watching. Dishes were piled in the sink. Laundry overflowed from the hamper in the corner. A stack of ungraded papers sat on the coffee table, slowly being buried under takeout containers and empty bottles.
Sheila would have been appalled.
The thought hit me like a knife to the chest, the way it always did. I took a long swallow of wine and tried to push it away, but it clung to me, sharp and insistent.
Sheila.
Two months since she died, and the grief hadn’t gotten any smaller. It had just… changed shape. Settled into my bones like a cold I couldn’t shake. Some days I could almost function—teach my classes, answer my emails, pretend to be a normal human being. On other days, like today, I couldn’t do anything but sit in the dark and drink until the edges of the world went soft.
I’d stopped going to Epic. Stopped going to any clubs, actually. The thought of being in one of those places, surrounded by strangers and noise and the memory of that night—
No, I couldn’t do it.
I’d been to the police, of course. The day after… after everything. I’d walked into the station on shaking legs and told them what I remembered.
Well, almost everything.
Two men. One short with brown hair, the other skinny and tall, both wore designer clothes. Names I couldn’t quite recall. Drinks that tasted wrong.
The cops had been sympathetic but not hopeful. Without a clear description, without evidence, without witnesses willing to come forward, there wasn’t much they could do. The case went unsolved.
And the men who killed Sheila walked free.
I took another drink, letting the bitterness coat my tongue.
Mario could have helped.
The thought was a betrayal, and I knew it. He’d asked me not to mention him. Warned me it would get us both killed. And I’d kept my promise—hadn’t said a word about the mysterious stranger who’d pulled us out of that club, who’d carried Sheila to the hospital, who’d taken me home and made me breakfast and kissed me like I was something worth wanting.
I’d kept my promise, and he’d disappeared.
Except… not completely.
I’d seen Mario. Glimpses mostly. A shadow at the edge of my vision, a familiar silhouette across a crowded street. At Sheila’s funeral, I’d felt eyes on me and turned to find him standing at the tree line, watching. Our gazes had locked for one breathless moment, and then he’d vanished like smoke.
After that, I started noticing him everywhere. A figure in a parked car outside my apartment. A shape in the shadows near the café where I got my morning coffee. Always watching, never approaching.
At first, I’d thought I was imagining it. Grief was playing tricks on me, making me see the one man I desperately wanted to see. But it kept happening. Week after week, glimpse after glimpse.
Mario was still out there. And for some reason, he couldn’t stay away.
I didn’t know how to feel about that. Part of me was furious—how dare he tell me to forget him and then haunt my life like a ghost? Another part was pathetically grateful. At least someone was watching over me, even if he refused to come close.
And a third part, the part I tried not to think about too much, still remembered the taste of his lips. The strength of his arms. The way he’d said, you’re different, like it meant something.
I drained my glass and reached for the bottle, only to find it empty.
“Fuck.”
I should go to bed. I had classes tomorrow, papers to grade, a life to pretend I was still living. But the thought of lying alone in the dark, staring at the ceiling, waiting for sleep that wouldn’t come—
The TV caught my attention.
A news ticker scrolled across the bottom of the screen: BREAKING NEWS – TWO BODIES FOUND NEAR RIO GRANDE.
I frowned, reaching for the remote to turn up the volume.
“—discovered early this morning on the Mexican side of the river,” the anchor was saying, her expression appropriately grave. “Authorities have identified the victims as Scott Burnside and Zack Davis, both residents of El Paso. Sources say the men had significant levels of cocaine and fentanyl in their systems, and their bodies showed signs of severe trauma consistent with a prolonged and brutal attack.”
The wine glass slipped from my fingers.
It hit the carpet with a dull thud, the dregs spilling out in a dark stain, but I barely noticed. My eyes were fixed on the screen, on the two photos now displayed side by side.
Smug smiles. Designer clothes.
I knew those faces.
Scott and Zack.
The names I couldn’t remember at the police station came flooding back. Scott, with his charming grin and his wandering hands. Zack, tall and lanky, laughing at his friend’s jokes. The drinks they’d pressed into our hands. The way the world had gone fuzzy and wrong.
“Investigators believe the attack was personal in nature,” the anchor continued. “Anyone with information is encouraged to contact—”
I grabbed the remote and muted the TV.
For a long moment, I just sat there, my heart pounding against my ribs. The faces stared back at me from the screen—frozen now, immortalized in death.
They were dead. The men who killed Sheila were dead.
And I knew—with a certainty that went bone deep—exactly who had done it.
Mario.
I thought about the glimpses I’d caught over the past two months. The shadow at the funeral. The figure in the parked car. He hadn’t been watching me just to watch.
A sound escaped my throat—something between a laugh and a sob. I pressed my hand over my mouth, trying to contain it, but the tears were already coming. Not grief this time. Something else. Something I didn’t have a name for.
Relief?
Gratitude?
Justice?
I stared at the silent TV, at the faces of the men who had taken Sheila from me, and I waited to feel horror. Revulsion. Some appropriate moral response to the knowledge that Mario had kidnapped and killed two human beings.
It didn’t come. All I felt was savage, bone-deep satisfaction. They deserved it.
I picked up my wine glass from the carpet, set it on the table, and walked to my bedroom on unsteady legs. For the first time in two months, I didn’t dread the darkness waiting for me there.
Mario had made things right.
And somehow, impossibly, it made me want him more.
I slept better than I had in weeks.
When I woke, the sun was streaming through my curtains, and my head was pounding—a reminder of last night’s wine—but underneath the hangover, something felt different. Lighter. As if a weight I’d been carrying had finally been lifted.
I showered, dressed, and forced down some toast and coffee. Then I grabbed my messenger bag and headed out to catch the bus to campus.
The day felt almost normal. The sky was blue, the air was warm, and for the first time since Sheila died, I didn’t feel like I was drowning.
After work, the bus dropped me off a block from my apartment complex, and I walked the rest of the way with something almost like a spring in my step. Students passed me on the sidewalk, laughing and chatting, and I found myself smiling at them instead of glancing away.
Maybe I was going to be okay. Maybe—
I stopped.
There was a van parked across the street from my building. Old. Nondescript. The type of vehicle you wouldn’t look twice at under normal circumstances. But I’d spent two months noticing things I never used to. Learning to watch the shadows. Searching for signs of him. And something about that van made my pulse spike.
I stood there on the sidewalk, my messenger bag clutched tight against my hip. The van’s windows were tinted, too dark to see inside. But I felt it—the weight of someone’s gaze. The same sensation I’d felt at the funeral, at the café, in all those moments when I’d turned and glimpsed a familiar silhouette.
Mario.
He was in that van. I knew it the same way I knew my own name. Before I could think, I was moving. Not toward my apartment—toward the van. My feet carried me across the street, my heart hammering so loud I could hear it in my ears.
The engine roared to life.
“No!”
The van pulled away from the curb, and something inside me snapped.
I ran.
I hadn’t run in years—not since college, not since I’d decided that exercise was for people with more energy than sense. But I ran now, my messenger bag bouncing against my hip, my lungs burning, my legs screaming in protest.
“Mario! Stop!“
The van picked up speed. For one horrible moment, I thought he was going to drive away. Leave me here again, the way he’d left me two months ago.
Not this time.
I pushed harder, my feet pounding against the pavement. The van was only a few yards ahead now. I could see the back doors, could almost reach them—
My hand closed around the handle. “Mario, stop!“
The van jerked, rolled a few more feet—
And then the engine died.
I stood there, gasping for breath, my hand still wrapped around the door handle. My legs shook. My heart felt like it was trying to escape my chest.
Slowly, the driver’s side door opened, and there he was.
Mario.
He looked the same as I remembered—broad shoulders, dark hair, jaw sharp enough to cut glass. But there was something different in his eyes. Something tired. Something hungry.
Our gazes met across the distance, and the world fell away.
All the words I’d rehearsed in my head over the past two months—the accusations, the questions, the desperate pleas—vanished. I couldn’t speak. Could barely breathe. All I could do was stare at him, drinking in the sight of his face like a man dying of thirst.
Mario shook his head slowly, his lips pressing into a tight line. Then, without a word, he pushed the door shut and started walking.
Not away from me.
Toward my apartment.
I followed.
We moved in silence, up the stairs and down the hall. My hands trembled as I unlocked the door—but this time, I managed it on my own. I pushed it open and stepped inside, holding it for him. Mario walked in without hesitation. The lock clicked shut behind us.
And then he was on me.
His mouth crashed into mine, his hands gripping my waist, pulling me against him with a force that stole my breath away. I gasped into the kiss, my fingers clawing at his jacket, his shoulders, anything I could reach. Spanish spilled from his lips between desperate kisses—words I only half-understood, but the meaning was clear.
Want. Need. Finally.
I shoved him backward, slamming him against the wall, and climbed him like my life depended on it. My hands roamed everywhere—his chest, his arms, the hard planes of his stomach. He groaned, spinning us around, pressing me into the wall, his mouth never leaving mine.
The kiss deepened—urgent, raw, two months of longing exploding between us.
Mario pulled back just long enough to cradle my face in his hands. His dark eyes burned with something fierce, something desperate.
“Nunca he querido a un hombre como te quiero a ti,” he breathed.
I’ve never wanted a man the way I want you.
I didn’t hesitate.
I grabbed his hand and pulled him toward the bedroom.
The first two episodes of Prisoners Of Sodom will be dropping at the end of January 2026! Mario and Austin’s love story is a project I’ve been working on for the last year and I can’t wait to share it with you. Until then, happy reading!
Ian O. Lewis and Luke Jameson 