Frankie had a thing for flirting.

He was a stallion of the highest pedigree, a Mediterranean beauty sculpted by lazy gods with nothing better to do than make mortals jealous. Chiselled features, a devilish charm, and a grin that could melt steel, he didn’t seduce so much as exist provocatively.

Life was easy for Frankie. All he had to do was flash a brief smile and stare off like a lovesick hero from a black-and-white French film, weighed down by some undefined sorrow, and the world bent around him.

Snow-white teeth gleamed against sun-warmed skin, and the long lashes of his green eyes cast theatrical shadows across his high cheekbones.

Poets would call it otherworldly. Dermatologists would call it unfair.

Frankie didn’t work for any of it, not really. A few lazy hours in the gym, maybe, but nature had handed him the whole package on a silver platter. Beauty on autopilot, charm wired in from birth.

The lonely, insatiable ladies of high society competed shamelessly for their rented god. They jostled for a glimpse, a touch, the ghost of a smile…flesh divine, soul optional…

And then signed cheques with gratitude and zero remorse, paying handsomely for the pleasure they’d received, already scheming their next gathering of silk, champagne, and sin.

Lavish gifts, watches, art, holidays in exotic places, often followed the already generous payments. Frankie was a desired euphoria, and they were hooked.

He was a heartthrob, and he revelled in it.

The green-eyed distraction thrived on blushing cheeks, giggles spilling like spilled wine, the way a single compliment could unravel a woman like ribbon. He basked in attention the way a cat soaks up sunbeams, utterly convinced it was his due.

On the other hand, Frankie was about as bright as a spade handle.

His intellectual scope never climbed beyond the crumbling walls of secondary school, and even there, he’d only skimmed the surface. But did that trouble him? Not in the slightest.

He was a modern Apollo with a beach ball for a mind and the confidence of a god.

After years of providing bespoke ecstasy to society’s elite, he’d amassed unearned riches and endless opportunity.

Understandably, Frankie was happy.

The dim Adonis seemed to have it all: financial security, a coveted social status that inspired envy, and a reputation that arrived five minutes before he did.

But as forty crept toward him like a pickpocket in the crowd, Frankie began to feel a strange, echoing emptiness.

It began with one white hair, small and traitorous, gleaming in the mirror like a spark in dry tinder, catching the light in all the wrong ways.

Then came the soft wrinkles around his eyes, like fingerprints pressed into wet clay. A hollow look began to haunt his reflection; one he couldn’t flirt away.

He’d lived a life of indulgence and applause, of silk sheets and signed cheques… but what had he done?

Beneath the surface of his bronzed, gym-sculpted shell, a thought slithered in:

I am a man who has everything, and yet… I have done nothing.

The parties blurred. The gifts dulled. His charm began to feel less like magic, and more like a trick he could no longer believe in.

Time wasn’t slipping away; it was crouched in the corner, waiting to pounce.

It hit like a slap from God, vicious, disorienting, and impossible to ignore.

Whether it was a wake-up call or just another rich man’s tantrum, Frankie didn’t know. All he knew was this: something inside him had cracked.

Maybe, just maybe, life wasn’t only about silk sheets and scented thighs. Maybe there was more to it than high-end escorts and limited-edition watches.

Or maybe he was just bored.

Either way, Frankie knew one thing for certain: he needed something new. A purpose. A reason to get up that wasn’t tied to lust or luxury. Something real.

And then, like water leaking into a long-sealed cave, unfamiliar thoughts began dripping into his mind.

Love. Fulfilment. Integrity. Legacy.

Even… fatherhood.

Where these ideas came from, he couldn’t say. But they wandered through his mind like lost children, bumping into each other, whispering riddles about meaning and mortality.

One night, staring at the stars, he genuinely wondered what it all meant.

The universe.

Existence.

Himself.

He felt as if he’d spent decades floating above his own life, and now, suddenly, gravity was pulling him down.

Frankie, the adored and envied, had begun to ask the one question no playboy should ever ask:

What now?

Despite his long list of conquests, no one had ever truly looked at him, past the cheekbones and into the void.
From his ivory tower (more penthouse than palace), he gazed down on a world he had seduced but never touched. What he craved now wasn’t pleasure, but presence. Someone to laugh at his stupid jokes. To hold his hand when the silence got too loud.

But for now, he was just a pretty ghost in a gilded cage, trapped among the spoils of his own success, lonelier than ever in a room full of everything.

And then, there, in the back of his mind, there was the girl.
He’d met her a few months ago. Nothing dramatic. Just… different.
Not impressed. Not seduced. Not fooled.

She didn’t fall for his well-practiced smile.
Kate.

Also, in her late thirties and stubbornly unmarried, Kate was beautiful, sharp as glass, and twice as clear-eyed.
She teased, she challenged, she made him earn every glance, and he hated how much he liked it.

For once, he didn’t want a conquest. He wanted connection. Not a tryst, but a tether. Not worship, but war, the good kind, the kind that wakes you up.

But Kate, bathed in the light of her own quiet integrity, was not for sale.
She wasn’t unreachable because she was aloof, but because she simply wasn’t looking.

She disappeared from his life, as abruptly as she entered it.

Frankie tried to shake her from his system like a fever.
He drowned in orgies, doubled down on excess. He painted over longing with sweat and silk and strangers.
But beneath the pile of tangled limbs and tossed banknotes, a new truth festered:
He was unworthy.
And worse, he might be unlovable.

Today, as he crossed the threshold of his cavernous, cathedral-like apartment, the woman he’d just left clung to his mind; the way she spoke to him, like he was just an itch she’d paid to scratch.

His mind endlessly replayed the moment with her; the words, the sultry whisper stretched the silk-laden colossus of a bed, awaiting his next performance like a queen awaiting court jesters.

“I want to die with a smile on my face, knowing I’ve tried everything in this life.”

He smiled back to her, but it was the kind of smile taxidermy might envy.

She was, in his eyes, a vision of ruin: flappy ears like deflated sails, limp hair clinging to her scalp as if ashamed, and a scent that reeked of old money and overripe desperation.

And yet… Mr. Husband adored her.
A billionaire. A titan. A man who bent politicians like pipe-cleaners and whispered empires into existence.
He treated her like Aphrodite incarnate, showering her with money, affection, and a reverence that made Frankie itch.

It made no sense.

How could a man so powerful, so capable, look at that and see beauty?

Frankie couldn’t comprehend it.
He’d spent his life worshipped for his shape. Loved, if it could be called that, for his flesh.
And here was this woman, practically oozing mediocrity, lying in sheets a normal person would never be able to afford, drenched in love he’d never understand.

It repulsed him.
And somewhere quietly, it terrified him.

So, how about him?

He was the best.
Unrivalled.
A walking sculpture, carved by gods with too much free time.
Women adored him. They giggled, swooned, signed cheques with trembling hands and called him names like “darling” and “divine.”

But none of them loved him.

Not the way he’d begun, in his most private, unwelcome thoughts, to crave.
Why?
Why was he the one left behind, night after night, returning to a silence so thick it felt upholstered?

The injustice gnawed at him.
How could someone so admired, so praised, be so thoroughly… unclaimed?
Where was his pet? His person? His damn plant?

On this particularly sad evening, it struck him with unbearable clarity:
His flat was no home.
It was a stopover. A sterilised shell. A hotel room he happened to own.
No one visited. No one lingered. Not even him.

He dropped onto the leather couch like a man unplugged.
For once, the whisky didn’t do its trick.
It stared back at him with its amber glare, disinterested.
The usual haze of recklessness wouldn’t come.

Tomorrow seemed an abstraction, an insult, even.
And for a moment, time paused, holding its breath, just to watch him squirm.

Then he stood up, shrugged on his coat like armour, and left.
No direction. No purpose. Just pavement underfoot and city breath on his neck.

He walked like in a dream.

That night, the city’s pulse slowed. Long blocks of silence interrupted only by the occasional siren, a drunk coughing in an alley, the distant buzz of neon signage. The air smelled of sorrow and something metallic, like old coins and newer sins.

Rain whispered against cracked pavements, and other noises flickered in his ears like a dying heartbeat and the chill of the evening seeping through his coat. The usual haze of excess, the meaningless noise, felt distant, as if the world itself was holding its breath.

Then it came.

No screech. No warning.

A black van slid smoothly to the curb beside him, silent, deliberate.
The door opened with a hiss, not unlike a sigh of satisfaction.

Three men stepped out, calm, precise, shadows in motion.
One raised a gloved hand.
Frankie turned…
Too late.

They closed in.
Efficient. Cold. Practised.

And just like that, he was gone.

The van disappeared into the city’s labyrinth, erasing its favoured son as though he had never existed.

Even as his mind fogged over, Frankie was dimly aware of movement, figures guiding him to a large room, whispering like insects in his ears.

Then came the image: a corpse, pale and ancient, sprawled beside him. Its skin blistered with age, its limbs entangled in a nest of cables and multi-coloured tubes.

Somewhere deep in the haze, Frankie thought he saw masked figures in white peeling fragments, venomous whispers or flickering essences, from the dead man’s shattered body and slipping them into his flesh, as if burying a dark inheritance. He couldn’t quite grasp. He couldn’t fight it. Not the dream. Not the hands holding him down. Not the man who slid the syringe into his arm with clinical affection.

Days passed, or maybe years; time slipped sideways in the sterile dark of the lab where they drained his life away for the sake of something unholy.

And when the light above him finally flickered and died, Frankie ceased to be.

In his place stood the young, healthy, and grotesquely handsome container of one man’s monstrous will: Frank Stanley.