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Rain-soaked, concussed, stubborn as hell. Snapping at me with that smart mouth, looking at me like she didn’t know whether to run or punch me.

I exhaled slowly, the hum dipping into something almost contemplative.

What would she think if she knew her future boyfriend was a serial killer?

I didn’t sleep—not for a second.

The hours after a kill were always the same. My blood ran too hot. My mind wouldn’t shut off. Adrenaline threaded through me long after the incinerator finished its job, thrumming in my veins like a second heartbeat.

I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling, the room dark except for the thin blade of moonlight cutting through the curtains. The hum still lingered in my chest, faint but steady.

My mother used to say that was normal.

I was ten years old the first time she caught me…

I stood in the barn with a knife.

The ranch hand was across the aisle, laughing with another man about something I’d done wrong that morning. The sound of it had crawled under my skin until everything in my chest felt tight and bright and certain.

I remembered staring at him and thinking how easy it would be…

“Sterling.” My mother’s voice cut through the barn.

I turned and saw her in the doorway, watching me. With the knife. For a long moment neither of us moved.

Then she crept toward me and crouched in the straw, her dress brushing the dirt floor. She unfolded my fingers from the handle, one by one. “It’s just a feeling,” she said softly.

Her hand pressed against the center of my chest. “Feel that? It gets loud sometimes. It tells you to do cruel things. But feelings aren’t orders. You let them pass through you.”

“What if they don’t go away?” I asked.

“They won’t,” she said with a sad smile. “That’s why you practice ignoring them.”

It was much easier to not ignore them.

I ran a hand over my face, hoping it might clear something out of my head…but it didn’t. Because the first thing that rose behind my eyelids wasn’t the man I’d just murdered.

It was Sienna.

I exhaled slowly, pushing myself to my feet. Lying here wasn’t going to trick my body into calm, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to get her out from under my skin.

I pulled on a shirt and headed for the door.

Dawn was spreading over the pastures in thin streaks of lavender and gray, and even before the color fully settled, I felt it, that shift in the air…an undeniable wrongness threading through the cold morning and raising the hairs at the back of my neck.

The horses felt it, too.

They stood alert in the paddock, heads up, ears pricked toward the tree line, their bodies held in that taut, listening stillness that animals slipped into long before a human sensed danger. They weren’t acting panicked. They were just…watchful.

“Easy,” I murmured, resting my hand on the fence rail.

A horse shuddered out a breath, hooves scraping at the dirt. Another rolled an eye toward the ridge, unsettled but steady. Whatever they sensed wasn’t close.

But it was there.

I frowned and lifted my chin to the wind, letting the cold slide into my lungs. The scent carried the way it always did when something had crossed a line it shouldn’t have—metallic under the pine, faint, a thread of something wrong woven through familiar ground.

“There it is,” I muttered.