You don’tchasepeople like the Butcher.
Youwait.
You breathe. You listen. You let the scene settle around you like oil over water. You stop making ripples.
Because anyone worth finding?
They notice stillness.
They notice the one person in the room not trying to be seen, but seeingeverything.
So I watch.
The dart woman keeps playing. Keeps winning. Switches up techniques slightly each round—not to show off, but like she’s adjusting calibration settings. Gathering data. Seeing how the board responds, how her wrist compensates. She’s running tests mid-game, and no one around her even notices.
That’s not casual.
That’smethodical.
A few others take my interest briefly—a pair of gamblers near the slot lounge who argue too quietly, a bouncer who watches one particular booth more than the others, a server whose tray never dips even when shoved. But none of them move like they’re capable of vanishing after tearing a crew apart.
The music shifts. The crowd thickens. New faces arrive. Energy spikes.
The dart woman takes a break. Steps back from the game. Sips a drink that’s been sitting for at least a round. She’s not drunk. Not even buzzed. She’s been sipping slow, measuring her intake.
Another tick in the “maybe” column.
But not enough.
Not yet.
I don’t chase ghosts unless they bite first.
I lean back. Let the thrum of the club flow past me—sweat and smoke and sound pounding in waves. My glass catches the light and fractures it. Voices blur into heat. Bodies move in tides.
And I wait.
I order a drink and wait, letting time do what time always does: reveal who’s pretending and who’s built for pressure.
CHAPTER 4
ROXY
Tickled Pink has been a sensory assault since the second the doors opened.
Heat, sweat, perfume, alcohol—too many bodies moving like a tide that doesn’t care if you drown. I barely cross the threshold before the place hits me like a slap I agreed to in theory but forgot would sting in practice. Bass thumps like it’s wired into the floor, like it's trying to rewrite my heartbeat whether I give it permission or not.
The air’s thick. Too thick. Perfume and pheromones and the sharp, sour stench of spilled synth-liquor mingling with fog machine haze that tastes like melted plastic. I suck in a breath and immediately regret it.
I hate clubs.
They feel like someone else's memory of fun. All flash and chaos and noise where intimacy is reduced to sweat-slick limbs and shouted half-sentences. There’s no room to think. No air to breathe. Just lights and sound and the tight coil of panic tugging at the base of my skull like it wants me to unravel.
Cynna, naturally, thrives.
She slides through the crowd like she owns it—sharp heels, sharper grin, red lips curled into something between a dareand a seduction. Her laugh cuts through the music like a siren, drawing glances and heat in equal measure. She doesn’t even need to try. The room wants her. It always does.
Meanwhile, I feel like a miswired droid blinking in the wrong frequency.
