He straightened at the sink, squaring up to his reflection the way a boxer might before a fight. Broad shoulders. A powerful chest dusted with dark fur, the kind that once made lovers drag their fingers through it without asking. His muscles hadn’t softened with age; they remained, solid and heavy, earned inch by inch over decades of hard labor. He was still standing. Still dangerous.
He stepped into the shower and turned the knob until the pipes shuddered and the water hissed to life. The first blast struck cold, a gasp against overheated skin. He didn’t flinch. Didn’t chase warmth. Let the chill bite into his flesh, the cords of muscle shifting with each breath. Water coursed down the hard lines of his frame, washing the sweat and city grime down the drain. Steam rose slow and ghostly, blurring the corners of the tiled box until it felt like standing in fog. He closed his eyes.
Schreck’s words lingered in his head, whispery, sepulchral, full of implications he couldn’t quite discern.
‘You trespass in the sleep of unspeakable things. You may live to regret it.’
A smarter man might’ve walked away after hearing a warning like that—turned his back, forgotten the whole damn thing, kept living in blissful ignorance. But Rick wasn’t that kind of man.He’d keep digging until he hit bedrock, even if it buried him. It’s not like he had much left to lose.
Schreck’s rat-like face still made his skin crawl. That predatory stillness, like moonlight frozen on grave dirt, never stopped being unnerving. A part of him wanted nothing more than to drag the bastard into the daylight, drive a stake through his heart, and be done with it.
But they had a pact, a truce forged in necessity. Rick looked the other way when Schreck’s nest needed hiding. In return, Schreck fed only on the damned—rapists, killers, men with blood already on their hands. Rick had watched it happen. Had cleaned up afterward. The blind spots of justice filled in by a monster who kept his word.
It didn’t sit right. But it sat. And right now, there were worse things prowling Calgrave’s streets.
Another image bloomed in his mind, worming its way into his thoughts like a prophecy of doom. Ash Hunter, sitting in his car, divine and diabolical. The curve of his lips when he smiled. That slow, feline grace when he stepped into his clothes, half aware of the man watching him, half playing it up. Those impossible eyes. That voice, a low hum wrapped in velvet thorns.
‘I think you’re afraid of what I make you feel.’
If he had nothing more than his voice, he could break your heart with it.
Rick’s hand drifted downward, closing around the base of his cock. It surged to life, huge, hard, pulsing. He told himself it was just release. Just tension. Just too damn long since he’d had someone,anyone, below him, panting into his mouth, clutching at his shoulders, wanting what he had to give. A man had needs. Even a man like him.
A lie, and he knew it.
His grip tightened. His hand moved faster. Water slicked over him like oil. In his mind, Ash tilted his head, smirked. Saidsomething teasing that made Rick’s gut clench. The image flared too easily—Ash’s mouth against his, those clever fingers making him undone, that lean, perfect body laid bare beneath him, hot and pliant. Fantasy burned bright behind his eyes as Ash sank to his knees and leaned in, that ripe mouth wrapping around his cock, sliding down his shaft with hungry precision.
Rick gasped, sharp and guttural, and came with a strangled moan, forehead pressed to the tiles. It wasn’t loud or glorious. It felt raw. Messy. A scab ripped from a wound.
He stayed like that for a long time, breath shuddering, skin burning under the too-warm water. When he finally reached to shut it off, the silence that followed was deafening.
He toweled off and wiped the steam from the mirror with his hand. The glass threw his reflection back at him, blurred at the edges but looking better than it had moments ago. Was it the shower or the orgasm that helped?
Only one more thing left. He ran the tap again, filled the basin, and lathered soap in his palm. With steady hands, he drew the razor along his jawline, each pass revealing sharp angles and quiet resolve. The stubble would be back by the next evening—there was no escaping that—but for now, he could feel clean. Whole.
When he finished, he stepped naked into the cool hush of the apartment, still damp and aching. The television blinked its red standby light in the corner, the only sign of life. The walls felt too far apart and too close all at once. There were no family photos. His brother’s ashes sat in an urn at a cemetery he hadn’t visited in weeks. His ex-wife had taken the last of her things months ago and never looked back.
Outside the window, the moon emerged from behind the clouds—a waxing gibbous. Almost time; in three nights it would be full. He touched the glass, the hair on his forearm rising.Soon, the hunger would come. The change. But for now, at least, it was quiet. And he could rest. If only for a night.
{ IV }
Tuesday, October 24
Chapter Fifteen
(12:09 a.m.)
The engine hummed up his spine as Ash rolled down the riverfront’s last sloping block. The street shimmered with oil-slick puddles, neon, and nightclub runoff, the city’s arterial blood pumping hot and senseless into the dark. He cut the throttle and let the bike idle at the curb.
TheInferno rose before him, a monolith of industrial decadence—steel bones and glass skin, sweating light. Once a carcass of rust and ruin, the old shipping warehouse now pulsed with synthetic life: floodlights chased each other across its façade, a twitching spectrum of acid pinks, toxic greens, and seizure blues. The massive roll-up doors had been replaced with panes of black glass that couldn’t quite contain the beat within, a subterranean pulse bleeding through the concrete. The sign overhead was a red-lit wound in the flesh of the night, casting neon fire over the wet asphalt.
Ash dismounted, kicked the stand down, and raked a hand through wind-wild hair. He didn’t need to check his reflection to know how he looked. He felt it—every glance that turned his way as he crossed the street, every shift in the air, charged and low, when he passed the line of clubgoers waiting to be devoured. The heat of the club reached for him before he even touched the door, a heartbeat dragging him back into the underworld he knew too well.
The bouncer at the entrance spotted him and straightened. Ash realized he’d hooked up with him once, months ago. A cinder block of a man, wrapped in tight black, with a Bluetooth radio clipped to his collar. Arms hefty as bridge cables, inkwinding across dark skin. His mouth curved as Ash approached, equal parts memory and hunger.
“Damn,” the man rumbled, voice rough and warm. “Ash fucking Hunter. I thought you were dead or famous by now.”
Ash grinned. “Still weighing my options.”
