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The woods seemed to absorb all light, casting an eerie darkness that clung to the gnarled branches overhead. Shadows danced on the forest floor as a chilling breeze, the last gasp of a stubborn winter, whispered through the leaves.
The Shadow Stalker stood in that darkness, shrouded by a thicket of brambles and undergrowth.
Waiting.
Watching.
The thorns caught at his clothes and bit at his skin, but this was the perfect vantage point to watch her.
Veronica Martens.
His muse.
Every night he would sit in silence, observing her through the binoculars that rested against his weathered coat. He would breathe in the scent of pine and damp soil and dream about the day he could have her.
She had become the Shadow Stalker’s favorite pastime.
Of course, he wasn’t the real Shadow Stalker of legend who lured unsuspecting victims into his bunker to suck out their souls. That was just a fairy tale.
The Shadow Stalker name was a mantle, passed down from one predator to another for centuries. The current Stalker was more dangerous than the myth, because he didn’t actually hide in the night. The Stalker blended in. The Stalker had a life and friends and nobody suspected his dark side, even as they whispered fearfully about his deeds.
And the myth lived on.
It was a tradition older than the woods themselves, and he had been chosen to carry it on. He was proud of that legacy. Someday soon, the current Stalker would retire. The name would finally pass to him and people would whisper about him, too. He’d even had a bunker ready, one he’d found abandoned up on Murder Mountain during a hunting trip. He’d spent months preparing it, readying it for his first victim. When he finally took her, it was beautiful.
Until she had escaped and her friends took it all away from him.
And then the current Stalker had called him reckless.
He clenched his fists at the thought, resentment slithering inside of him like a well-fed serpent. He wasn’t the reckless one. He hadn’t been the one to set Alexis Summers free to hunt her, only to lose her in the forest.
But it didn’t matter now.
Alexis Summers was in the past and the more he thought about it, the more he realized she hadn’t been perfect for his first kill as the Shadow Stalker.
Not like Veronica.
Just beyond the brambles, Veronica’s lighted cabin was a beacon against the night’s black canvas, the only human touch amidst nature’s wild sprawl. She was inside, her silhouetted form pacing behind curtained windows.
Beautiful, damaged Veronica.
A woman who’d flown through the sky in supersonic jets, navigated dangerous territories in service to her country, yet now cowered inside her house, too scared to step beyond its safe confines.
A shiver of anticipation rippled through him as he watched her move, watched her exist in her self-imposed isolation.
There was an unparalleled beauty in her vulnerability. It was raw, untamed. Every night, it beckoned him closer, whispering promises of exquisite pleasure and intimacy in his ear. He could almost taste her fear. It filled him with an insatiable hunger, and he yearned for the day when her fear would be for him.
The curtain moved and his breath came in shallow, ragged pants as her face appeared in the window. Her long, dark hair was pulled up into a ponytail. Her haunted eyes—hazel, he knew, though he couldn’t see the color now—scanned right over his hiding place.
“Look at me,” he whispered.
She turned away from the window, tugging the curtain shut. But it didn’t close fully. Through the sliver, he could see her pick up a book, her fingers tracing the spine.
His body tensed, his gaze never leaving her hands. Touch me like that.
What book was it?
He had to know.
