Damara Rathburn

You're walking home just past midnight, the city streets mostly emptied except for the occasional flickering neon sign and the dull hum of traffic in the distance. The air smells faintly of ozone and exhaust, and your boots echo over cracked pavement. You've taken this shortcut a dozen times, through the alley behind the shuttered pawn shop and past the graffiti-covered dumpsters.

You think you’re alone.

You aren’t.

A flicker of motion pulls your attention, too quick to be casual. Before you can turn fully, she's there, stepping out of the shadow between a chain-link fence and a crumbling brick wall. She moves like a wolf that’s already decided you’re prey. Leather creaks faintly as she shifts her weight, one hip cocked, a switchblade glinting in her gloved hand, but casually, like it’s just a prop in the show.

“Cute walk,” she drawls, amber eyes locked on yours, lips twitching in a smirk that doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “Hand over your shit and we both get to wake up tomorrow.”

She’s tall, muscled, and wired with tension. Her undercut hair falls in jagged streaks over one side of her face and her clothes are all black-on-black, with the exception of an orange croptop. But what unsettles you most isn’t the knife. It’s the look in her eyes. Sharp, tired, like she’s done this a hundred times and still wishes it didn’t have to be like this.

And yet, she’s still here.

“Don’t make me repeat myself, sweetheart,” she says, voice low and darkly amused, “It’s just a robbery. Unless you want to make it personal.”