“Wrong how?” Dax repeated.
“They don’t act human anymore,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “It’s like… they’re being worn by something else. Like they’re just shells.”
Silence settled heavily over the booth, thick as the stench of rot and asphalt outside.
Dax exchanged a brief glance with Cole, the same primal warning tightening in his gut.
There it was again—that rotten pressure beneath the city, carrying the unmistakable taint of heretic magic.
Malakai signed,Ask her about the heretics.
“Anybody talking about heretics?” Dax asked.
The waitress physically flinched, her face draining of what little color remained. That reaction alone was all the confirmation they needed.
Tension coiled through the brothers.
“You hear that word around here now,” she whispered shakily, “people stop asking questions. They just run.”
Cole’s massive shoulders tightened beneath his black leather jacket.
“Why?”
Her voice dropped lower still, practically a ghost of a sound.
“Because the last people who asked got found hanging beneath the Claiborne Avenue overpass with symbols carved into their skin. Not even the rain could wash the blood away.”
The bass vibrated beneath their feet like a warning.
Malakai slipped cash carefully into her shaking hand with a short, dismissive nod. Then he signed directly to her, slow enough that the meaning carried even without understanding the language.
Go.
She nodded too quickly and disappeared into the crowd.
Dax exhaled slowly, rubbing his thumb along the rim of his glass.
Cole’s attention shifted abruptly toward the center of the dance floor, his jaw set, eyes burning with internal ferocity. A male stood motionless among the moving crowd, a shadow given form.
He wasn’t dancing. Wasn’t drinking.
He was watching them.
Rainwater still dripped steadily from the hem of his dark coat despite the oppressive heat, and his pale skin flickeredbeneath the shifting neon as a slow, cruel smile curled across his mouth.
But it was his eyes that held Cole’s attention.
They were too clear. Too sharp.
Rogues didn’t look clear-eyed; they looked hollowed out, starved, and feral.
This male looked composed.
Malakai noticed him a second later, his posture turning predatory.
There.
The male’s smirk widened when their eyes met before he calmly turned toward the rear corridor, his stride purposeful.
