{ * }
Friday, October 20
Prologue
(11:59 p.m.)
It began, as all sorrows do, in the hush between heartbeats—that silent, sucking pause before a scream is born.
The boy was beautiful once.
Now, beneath the jaundiced streetlamp’s glimmer, he resembled a marionette discarded by a wrathful God: limbs arranged with too much reverence, too much rigor, as if the killer had choreographed the soul’s eclipse. His skin, still warm, was drawn taut with the sheen of death, moonlight pooling in the hollows of his throat. A fly circled one lidless eye, then settled, feeding.
The face was gone.
Not torn. Not hacked.Removed. Peeled away with a grace so cruel it bordered on adoration, skin and muscle lifted clean, as if excising a mask from flesh. The bare skull shone pale in the cold night air, grinning its final blasphemy: a smile carved in bone.
The alley was a narrow gash between stone buildings, the kind of place light came to die. Trash spilled from broken bins. A cat, spine sharp under its black fur, watched from a windowsill with a gaze older than mammals. Steam coiled from a sewer grate in tendrils, the breath of nameless things sleeping below, not yet hungry enough to rise.
On the wall above the corpse, written in stain far too dark for paint, hung a single symbol: crooked, looping, ancient. It throbbed faintly with some unnatural, droning pulse.
He watched it thrum and felt the power stir within him. Two more faces. Two more weeks. Then the work would be complete, just like the Book promised.
Footsteps halted at the alley’s mouth. A gasp held. Then fled.
The city did not stir. Calgrave, mistress of fog and filth, carried on, her gutters full of ghosts, her veins choked with rot. Somewhere far off, a siren rose like a bird with a broken wing. Somewhere nearer, laughter—drunken, lewd, alive.
But here? Only silence.
And the body with no face.
And the one who took it, already melting into shadow.
{ I }
Saturday, October 21
Chapter One
(12:01 a.m.)
Ash blazed across the stage draped in cheers and worship. He embraced it, glitter on his skin, ruin in his bones, the overhead spotlights casting him in liquid silver through a haze of cigarette smoke. The music curled around him, sultry and hypnotic, a heartbeat trapped in honey. Below, the crowd swayed in a tide of want: silhouettes adrift in the velvet dusk, drunk on gin and desperation, their eyes glassy, their mouths parted. He fed on their hunger, head high, hips loose, smiling the smile of a boy who knew he was beautiful and didn’t care if it doomed him.
Black leather hugged his body as he danced, a second skin molded to temptation: boots polished to a villain’s gleam, pants sculpted to every contour of his legs, harness snug around his chest like a cage made of sin. Behind him, a grand arch framed the catwalk, its curved geometry catching the low amber gleam of the sconces and table lamps scattered throughout the room. A live band played just offstage, half-lost in shadow—upright bass thumping deep, drums brushed like sighs, a piano crooning a smoky torch song made for painted lips and whispered vices. And he—he was a constellation in motion, each step a spell, each breath a dare, a promise, a lie.
Every eye followed him. Every conversation faltered. The audience sat mesmerized, men and women cloaked in perfume and murk, lounging at round tables strewn across the floor. The staff paused mid-round—waitresses in tuxedo corsets and black stilettos, balancing trays of crystal coupes filled with vermilion cocktails, momentarily frozen to gawk. He let their stares crown him, let their need lick at his skin, their lust carve a halo fromthe sweat on his six-pack. That was the trick. Give them just enough to believe they mattered and keep the best just out of reach, wrapped in shadow and flame and the gleam of a look that promised heaven but never named a price.
The melody deepened—lush, decadent, a velvet-draped seduction conjured from dark rooms and satin sheets—and Ash surrendered to it. He answered an aching tune with a symphony of limbs and loins and half-lidded eyes, his body smoke coiling from an unseen fire. The catwalk became a church, and he the heretic messiah, worshipped by the damned. He let the rhythm take him, let the heat bloom within him. Here, under the dazzle of stage lights, he could become a fantasy. Could forget, for a little while, the hollow inside him where a heart should be.
With one swift move, the pants came off, shed like dead skin. The club erupted—claps, hoots, the fluttering hunger of bills waved in trembling hands. He kept moving, hips rolling, muscles slick, now in nothing but his combat boots, his harness, and the black scrap of a jockstrap. His palms traced the path they craved, over the smooth planes of his chest, down the ridged landscape of his abs, lower still, painting himself in lust.
When he knelt, they swarmed, roaches to sugar, sticky fingers with folded cash, pretending not to grope as they paid. He smacked them away with a lazy flick of the wrist, wagging his finger in divine reprimand. When he smiled, the whole room tilted. He didn’t need to speak; even in silence, he could say everything.
He knew there was an otherness about him, even if he didn’t understand it—and that was the point. His glances were weapons. His smiles were masks. He was the mystery, the magnet, and the heartbreak all at once. A statue carved by hands that knew what desire did to the soul. There was dignity in his despair, a quiet storm behind his eyes as they scanned thecrowd, pale violet and full of sorrow, a hundred stares crashing into them. He was searching.
It wasn’t about love, not anymore. That was someone else’s fairy tale. It wasn’t even about pleasure. For Ash, it was the hunger. The compulsion. The temporary cure for an ache at the core of his being. Like an empty lantern, he needed to be lit from within, if only for the length of a sigh. And when it ended, when they crumpled and gasped and begged for more, he gave them mercy. He left.
They never understood.
