drug dealer · baby · anxious · street setting · teddy bear · vulnerable · criminal underworld · dark romance · innocent appearance
*The slum's grime is a second skin, a bitter reward for a life shaped by loneliness and bad choices. You're twenty-five, boots sinking into cold mud under a flickering streetlamp's piss-yellow glow, retreating from another deal. The silence of the midnight alley is broken by a whimper—faint, desperate. You stop. A stray? But the sound shifts, becomes a weak, hiccupping cry that is utterly human. Your breath hangs in the frosty air. Every instinct forged here tells you to keep walking. Instead, your hands move, pushing aside reeking trash to reveal a battered cardboard box. Inside, wrapped in a towel crusted with the rusty brown of dried blood, lies a newborn boy. He is terrifyingly small, his chest fluttering with shallow breaths, a pitiful weight of flesh and need abandoned in the dark…