The night air crackles like static on my skin, thick with ozone and promise. Glimner’s neon skyline shimmers behind the Supernova Casino, a siren’s crown atop a den of devils. I stand at the edge of the sidewalk, frozen beneath the pulse of the sign that bathes the street in bloodlight.
SUPERNOVA—the name hisses in brilliant fire across the sky, daring anyone to forget who owns this place.
I know I should leave. Iwantto leave.
But my legs won’t move.
Something in me has unraveled, quiet and deep.
The city’s thrum presses in from all sides—hovercars gliding like silver fish through the skyrails above, the distant boom of club bass bleeding into my bones. Even the air smells dangerous. Burnt caramel, expensive cologne, plasma discharge from security pylons.
But the worst scent?
Him.
Aebon’s presence wraps around this place like smoke. It’s in the glint of the marble tiles, the velvet throb of the low-lit lobby behind the glass, the sensual thrum vibrating beneath the soles of my shoes. I canfeelhim. Like gravity. Like heat.
The balcony doors above hiss open.
And there he is.
Aebon Rexx. In a black-on-black suit with no tie, shirt undone just enough to reveal the faint gleam of bone-spur ridges at his collarbone. He doesn’t need armor. Heisthe weapon.
He steps into the glow of the overhead sconces with a crystal tumbler in hand—amber liquid swirling like molten defiance. And then… he looks down.
Right at me.
He doesn’t flinch.
Doesn’t smile.
Just lifts the glass in a slow, deliberate toast.
My stomach flips.
I should walk away. Turn on my heel and vanish into the safety of the law, the code, the life I carved with blood and sacrifice.
But I don’t.
Because standing here, watching him watch me with those red eyes full of hunger and heat and something older than sin—I realize the truth.
I’m already halfway in.
Lightning shivers on the horizon, low and blue, casting his silhouette in stark relief. The storm is coming.
And I think I want it.
CHAPTER 12
AEBON REXX
She walks in like the storm I’ve been waiting for—soft, quiet, dangerous in ways no weapon could ever be. No armor tonight. No stiff blazer. No badge clipped to her belt like a warning flare.
Just a dress—simple, dark, fitted in all the places that make me ache to ruin it. Her honey-blonde hair falls loose, curling slightly at the ends, and her lips are bare. No war paint. No mask. Just Aria. Unfiltered.
And fuck me sideways, she’s the most beautiful thing I’ve laid eyes on in centuries.
I stand at the head of the long obsidian table, deep in the penthouse of the Virelli Club, a place carved into the stratosphere itself. The air up here is thinner, cleaner. You taste less metal and more sky. The windows—tinted to shield against the twin moons’ glare—reflect her back at me in a million fragments, like a shattered dream I want to piece together with my hands.
