No badge.No gun.No legal authority to investigate or intervene.
I’m off the board.
And Red Hands is still out there, circling closer with every breath.
I grip the steering wheel, my breath coming in short gasps.
I start the engine.The car rumbles to life, that familiar vibration I’ve felt a thousand times.Except now it’s tainted, violated.Someone else sat here, touched these controls, breathed this air.
The violation is visceral, intimate.Worse than if he’d broken into my apartment.A car is personal in ways people don’t think about—your smell soaks into the upholstery, and your habits shape the space.Someone else driving it feels like someone else wearing your skin.
I pull out of the parking lot, my tires squealing slightly.I don’t know where I’m going.
Yes, I do.
Sera’s house.Even though Sera’s monster is there—even though the ghost hates me, tolerates me at best—at least she’s protected within those walls.
The house is her fortress of rot and shadow and jealous, possessive fury, her prison, her weapon.And right now, it’s the only thing standing between her and whatever Red Hands has planned next.
But what happens when she leaves?What happens the next time she walks to her car, keys in hand, oblivious?
What happens when Red Hands decides his patience has run its course?
Chapter 11
Sera
I’mgoingtosaysomething controversial…so gird your loins, I guess?
Those energy drinks are terrible.Terrible-tasting, terrible for you, just terrible.I would rather drink glue or cum or literally anything else than chug some sugary drink that tastes like battery acid mixed with cough syrup, but they seem to be the poison of choice for this city since I have to restock them every single damn day.
I start to do that at the beginning of my shift when the bell above the door dings.I don’t look up immediately, but I know who it is before I do.
I can sense that intense stare caressing my skin.The particular quality of attention that’s become familiar over these past weeks—focused, hungry, complicated in ways I don’t have words for.
My Detective Eddie.
My hands freeze on the case of Monsters, my fingers pressing into the cardboard hard enough to dent it.
He stands in the doorway, backlit by the dark-gray sky outside.Storm clouds have been gathering all day, turning the world outside the fluorescent bubble of Gas N’ Go into something dim and threatening.For a moment, he’s just a silhouette—broad shoulders, the familiar set of his stance, the outline of that leather jacket he always wears.
Then he steps forward into the harsh fluorescent glare, and I see it.
He looks like a ghost, like a man who’s been hollowed out and left standing through sheer muscle memory alone.His blue eyes are red-rimmed, not from tears but from the kind of exhaustion that comes from staring at something terrible.The kind of tired that sleep won’t fix.
His jaw is tight, working slightly like he’s grinding his teeth.
And that’s when I see it.Or don’t see it, rather.There’s no badge on his belt.No gun bulging his jacket either.
“Sera.”My name sounds like gravel in his throat.“I must have just missed you at your house.”
The ruin in his voice makes my breath hitch, and I almost drop the box of Monsters.I set it down at my feet and let the refrigerator door close.
“What happened?”I ask softly.
He walks toward me with the careful, measured steps of a man trying not to shatter.“It’s over.”
Two words, flat and final.
