Chapter One
Alice
I knew I was dreaming. I knew, and it didn’t matter.
The forest wanted me anyway.
Mist coiled up from the black earth, cold and alive against my skin, slipping beneath my T-shirt and jeans like searching hands. Trees I’d never seen clawed toward a sky with no stars, their bark weeping something dark and wet. Flowers glowed along the path—pale, pulsing, beautiful the way a predator is beautiful—and their scent hit me like a drug. Sweet. Ancient.Wrong.
Footsteps.
Not mine.
I ran. Barefoot, bleeding, branches tearing at me like they wanted to keep me there. My breath came ragged and raw, but I couldn’t stop. Something waited in the mist ahead—something that had been waiting for me my whole life, something that made my blood sing and my bones ache with recognition.
I had to reach it first.
Before they did.
Before whatever hunted me.
The fog thickened around my ankles like cold hands. I stumbled and the mist surged higher, wrapping my calves, my thighs, pressing against me with a weight that had no right to exist. Not air. Not water. Something other.
I tried to scream, but the darkness swallowed sound the way it swallowed light.
Fingers—or claws, or something worse—closed around my ankle and pulled. The forest floor vanished beneath me. I clawed at earth and roots and anything solid, but the fog filled my mouth, my lungs, and the last thing I saw before the dark took me was the shape in the mist finally turning to look at me with eyes I’d seen in every nightmare I’d ever had.
Come, it seemed to whisper.Rest. Stop running. Let go.
I wrenched my leg free and something in the fog hissed—an almost-sound, more vibration than voice. It didn’t want me to reach whatever called to me ahead. It wanted to pull me down, swallow me whole, bury me in its white nothing until I forgot I’d ever had a name.
The voice came then, curling through the mist like smoke, like sin. Male. Velvet and ruin. It wrapped around my chest and squeezed.
“Find me.”
I woke with his voice still inside me.
Sunlight threatened on the horizon. I hadn’t slept more than a few hours, but there was no point trying again. Every time I closed my eyes, I was back in that forest. Back in the mist. Back running toward something I couldn’t name.
I pulled my knees to my chest and stared at the lightening sky.
Tinker Bell thought I was letting my imagination run wild—just like my magic. She’d said as much last time I’d tried to explain the dreams. The look on her face, patient and pitying, like I was a child telling her about monsters under the bed.
Easy for her to dismiss. She wasn’t the one who’d set Margot’s dress on fire last week. Margot had wanted red—fiery red, she’d said—and I’d given her fire, all right. The whole coven had seen it. The whispers afterward. The way Tinker Bell’s eyes had lingered on me, weighing, calculating.
She was running out of patience. I could feel it.
My stomach twisted.
I’d be alone. No coven. No protection. No family.
The only thing I had from my real family was the single strand bracelet around my wrist—it had never come off, and it had never done anything magical.
Tinker Bell was the only mother I’d ever known. The coven was the only home I had. Without them, I’d be a witch with no anchor, no allies—just unstable magic that painted a target on my back.
Angelo Santi didn’t tolerate loose cannons. None of the mafia families did. A witch who couldn’t control her power wasn’t just an embarrassment.
She was a liability.
