He reached into his pocket, flicked out a hundred-dollar bill, and let it flutter down to the puddled concrete at her feet.
“Don’t spend it all at once,” he muttered.
Then he crouched, pressed two fingers to her temple, and scrubbed himself from her memory.
He shoved through the back door, and the bass hit him like a freight train. Heat, sweat, and cheap perfume crashed over him, barely masking the metallic tang coating his tongue. He wiped his mouth out of habit, though her blood was already burning through his veins, heavy with chemicals, liquor, and panic.
He hated feeding from humans like her, but hunger did not care about purity, and neither did he once it had its teeth in him. Dax, Cole, and Malakai chose their donors as though clean blood made them different from the creatures they hunted.
Rhen had no use for the distinction.
He fed, fucked, and destroyed because appetite demanded an outlet, and control meant deciding when the damage began and where it ended.
Red neon flickered through the haze as he crossed the sticky floor, catching on the damp edge of his jaw where rain clung like sweat. Then something fouler moved beneath the club’s familiar stench.
The trace was thin but unmistakable, ancient rot threading through blood, perfume, and the faint ozone scent of their kind. Heretic magic already clung to Bar X, but one strand stretched away from the building and into the rain, drawing a path beyond the Quarter as though something wanted to be followed.
Rhen stopped long enough to fix its direction in his mind.
His mouth curved without humor.
Let it try.
He spotted his brothers lounging in the back booth—always the same booth, deep in the corner where the light barely reached and no one dared sit unless invited.
The table was littered with empty glasses, the sharp tang of liquor mingling with the faint ozone scent that always followed their kind.
He reached the booth and caught Cole’s eye across the low table. His voice was rough as gravel, low enough to be missed by the crowd.
“I’m taking the back roads,” he said. “Gonna circle. Don’t wait up.”
Cole looked up slowly, the ghost of a smirk dancing across his mouth, but he didn’t push. He never pushed. You didn’t leash Rhen. You let him burn and prayed he didn’t burn everything else down with him.
“You good?”
He was never good.
Not in this life.
Not in this body.
But he’d be damned if he let anyone name it for him.
Chapter 2
Dax watched Rhen vanish into the shifting mass of bodies from the shadowed alcove of their booth, his fingers absently swirling amber liquor around the bottom of his glass as neon bled across the surface like a fresh bruise. A sly, dry smile tugged at his mouth as he leaned back into the leather seat, the bass thrumming low and hard beneath his ribs.
“Well,” he muttered, his voice a low scrape over the pounding music, “there goes diplomacy.”
Malakai snorted, a sharp, dismissive sound, though his attention never lingered on the mortals writhing beneath the fractured strobe lights. His silver gaze continued to sweep the room methodically, sharp and unblinking, cataloging exits, faces, and every potential threat that dared to breathe the same air.
You wanted diplomacy,he signed, his movements clipped and cold.You should’ve left the Charon at the compound.
Cole remained silent beside them, his broad shoulders half-shadowed beneath the sickly crimson glow overhead as he studied the club with increasing focus.
Something about tonight pulled the air too tight.
Bar X always reeked of violence, lust, and the metallic tang of blood, but tonight there was another layer beneath the filth—something tighter, stranger, woven through the French Quarter like wire stretched too close to the void.
