I rest my hand on the gearshift, the tattoos on my knuckles dark and permanent. I look in the rearview. My eyes look like holes in a mask. A man who doesn’t ask, doesn’t wait, and doesn’t fucking beg.
I told my sister the truth: Wendy is looking for me. She might not understand it yet, but she’s been hunting me as much as I’ve been hunting her. She doesn’t need a saviour. She needs a match. And I’m going to burn everything she is until there’s nothing left but me.
The club’s lights bleed onto the street as I turn the corner. Velvet red against black asphalt. A den of sweat and secrets. A hunting ground dressed as a playground.
My pulse steadies. My hunger grows teeth.
By the time I kill the engine, I already know what I’m going to do when I see her again. I’m not going to touch her. Not yet. I’m going to corner her. I’m going to make the air so thick with the smell of what I just did that she’ll taste the blood on my skin.
Tonight, there is no exit. Only me. And I’m the only thing she has left to fear.
Peter
Ishouldn’t be here. Not in this booth, not in this club, not with her looking at me like I just lit a match over her whole life and smiled as it caught.
But then again, I’ve never cared much about where I should be.
Wendy Darling. My sister’s best friend. The girl who was supposed to be the “good” one, the untouchable one. The one who kept walking into my fire and daring me not to burn with her.
She’s sitting there, and for a second, the rest of the club just… fades. It’s a sensory blackout. I’ve seen women who were technically perfect, symmetrical dolls with blank eyes, but Wendy?
Wendy is a jagged masterpiece. She has this face that haunts my goddamn dreams—heart-shaped and pale as bone, with a sprinkling of freckles across her nose that look like a map of the stars I want to extinguish.
Her eyes are too big for her face, a deep, stormy grey that looks like the Atlantic right before a shipwreck.They’re framed by lashes so thick and dark they cast shadows on her cheekbones every time she blinks, making her look perpetually caught between a prayer and a sin. And her mouth. Fuck. It’s a tragedy. Her lips are naturally plush, a bruised-petal pink, with a sharp Cupid’s bow that looks like it was designed to be bitten. She’s wearing that lipstick again—a shade of deep, crushed-berry red that makes her teeth look blindingly white and her skin look like cream.
Her hair is a riot of dark curls, the colour of midnight and expensive ink. It’s wild, messy, spilling over her shoulders in a way that makes my fingers itch to fist into it and pull her head back. It’s the kind of hair that looks like she just rolled out of a bed—specifically, my bed.
She’s wearing a slip dress that’s more of a dare than an outfit. It’s silk, the colour of a fresh bruise, clinging to every curve of a body that’s been driving me insane for years. She isn’t skinny; she has these soft, dangerous curves—the swell of her hips, the slope of her breasts, the long, elegant line of her throat that I know would taste like salt and desperation.
She doesn’t see what I see from across the room—the men who hover too close, the way their eyes slide over that silk like they’re already peeling it off. She doesn’t hear the way they talk. But I hear it. I hear every filthy thought they have, and it makes my blood boil into something lethal.
And when one of them tries it tonight—some suit with a hand on her wrist and a smile like rot—I’m done watching.
I don’t give him a chance to breathe. I’m out of the shadows and on him before he can blink. I rip himoff her, the force of it nearly dislocating his shoulder, and shove him into the wall hard enough that the glass of the nearby booths rattles in their frames. My forearm presses across his throat, pinning his windpipe. His teeth click together. His eyes bulge, turning a frantic, watery red.
Good. He should be terrified. He should feel the reaper’s breath.
“You see her again, you even think about touching her again—” my voice is a low, tectonic rumble, vibrating with the urge to just snap his neck and be done with it, “—and you won’t walk out of here. You’ll crawl out with your teeth in your pocket. Do you understand?”
He chokes out a noise halfway between a sob and a prayer. I let him go, and he stumbles away, gasping for air, fleeing like the rat he is.
When I turn back, Wendy is standing there. Her glass is still in her hand, her knuckles white. Her mouth is parted in shock, those bruised-berry lips trembling just a fraction. Her pulse is going wild in the hollow of her throat, a frantic, visible thrum under that porcelain skin I want to mark until she’s covered in me. And for the first time tonight, she isn’t hiding it. The fear is there, but so is the heat.
“Why—” she starts, but the word breaks, lost in the thrum of the bass.
“Because he touched what’s mine,” I say simply. I don’t raise my voice. I don’t have to. The truth is heavy enough to crush the air between us.
She shakes her head, her grey eyes flashing with a sudden, sharp fury. “I’m not yours. You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to play the hero.”
“Don’t I?” I step into her personal space, forcing her to breathe in the scent of the violence still radiating off me. “You think my sister doesn’t know where you go every Saturday night? You think she doesn’t tell me exactly where to find you?”
The way her face pales—fuck, it’s perfect. She looks like a ghost. She hadn’t thought of that. She thought she was being clever, hiding in the dark.
“Liar,” she whispers. But her voice is thin, a thread ready to snap.
I smirk, my gaze dropping to her throat, then back to her eyes. “Call her. Ask. See how fast she folds when you put my name in your mouth. See if she doesn’t tell you that I’m the only thing keeping you from ending up in a ditch.”
She looks like she wants to throw the glass at my face. Instead, she drains the pink liquid in one swallow, the movement of her throat so smooth it makes my stomach flip. She sets it down with a sharp clink and glares at me with enough hate to kill a lesser man. But I see the crack. I see the way the betrayal—the idea that her best friend sold her out to the monster—is cutting deeper than my hands ever could.
