Pans sizzle, a fryer pops, and someone screams as I shove past stainless steel counters, my hands leaving smeared red prints on cold metal. My foot slips in something slick, and I catch myself on instinct, fingers denting steel as if it’s soft clay.
That realization almost stops me.
Almost.
“Call the cops!” someone shouts. Another voice cracks, panicked. “What the hell did she do?”
I don’t look back, slamming through the back door hard enough that it bangs open against the brick wall outside, night air crashing into me as I stagger into the alley. The door slams shut behind me, cutting off the lights, the noise, the shouting, leaving only darkness and the sound of my own uneven movement as I flee.
Trash bags split under my feet. Rats scatter. The smell of rot, rain, and old oil turns my stomach, but I keep going, legs driving me on instinct, moving before my brain can catch up. I don’t stop until the diner is just a glow at the end of the alley and the screams are nothing but echoes in my head.
Because if I stop…
If I let myself feel it…
I know I won’t survive what I’ve become.
Not thinking, not planning, just moving, my feet carrying me away from the body, from the evidence, from the undeniable proof of whatever the fuck I am now.
The night swallows me as I run, buildings blurring past, my speed carrying me through streets I don’t recognize toward destinations I can’t name. Blood dries on my skin, sticky and damning, marking me as clearly as any scarlet letter.
Killer.
Monster.
Vampire.
The words chase me through the darkness, relentless and true, and I have nowhere to go, no one to turn to, nothing except the crushing knowledge that I’ve crossed a line I can never uncross.
I killed someone tonight.
And God help me, a part of me, some dark, terrible part that I can’t silence no matter how hard I try, part of me enjoyed it.
What the hell am I going to do now?
Chapter Four
ROGUE
The Next Night
The boxing bag swings hard on its chain, snapping back into my fists again and again as I drive into it. Leather thuds under each hit, the metal above groaning with the force of it. My knuckles split, seal, split again, lycan healing racing to keep pace, but I don’t slow down.
The impact shudders up my forearms, into my shoulders, and settles somewhere deep inside me where the real damage lives, the damage no amount of physical punishment can reach.
Two months.
Sixty-three days since the battle. Since Viktor’s blade drove through Crave’s ribs in front of my eyes. Since Thanatos’ magic turned my body into a sculpture of useless flesh and bone, while the vampire I was born to protect bled out on the ground below me.
Sixty-three days of training harder than I ever have, running farther, lifting more, and drilling combinations until my hands shake. Trying to locate the flaw in myself, the weakness Thanatos exploited, the crack in my foundation, the thing I need to grind down and rebuild so it never happens again.
I haven’t found it.
Every session ends the same way, with sweat soaking through my shirt, blood on my knuckles, and the knowledge sitting in my gut like a stone, so much that it feels immovable, unchanged, indifferent to my efforts.
I failed him.
The bag takes another combination. Left, right, left, left, a hook deep into the center of it, and the chain snaps tautoverhead. My hands drop, my chest heaves, and I stand in the gym’s punishing silence with my forehead pressed against the leather and breathe through the thing I can’t train away.
