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“I’m not afraid of you,” she lies as I watch her pulse throb wildly in the valley of her throat.

With a dangerous, velvety thread in my tone, I say, “You should be. Because I’ve spent a very long time waiting to get you all to myself, Harmony. And now that you’ve let me into your car... I have no intention of ever letting you go.”

Harmony shifts restlessly in the driver’s seat.

But she doesn’t scream. She doesn’t slam on the brakes or pull over to demand I get out. She just locks her jaw, her skin taut over her delicate cheekbones, calculating her options with the cold, ruthless logic of an apex predator evaluating a sudden threat.

I can almost see the gears turning behind her stare, assessing my size, measuring the distance between my chest and the door, trying to figure out how to put me in the ground before I can hurt her.

“You shouldn’t have stopped the car.” I let my gaze slide slowly from her eyes down to the quick, shallow pulse fluttering in her throat. “A smart girl keeps driving. A smart girl knows that picking up a stranger on an empty highway is a quick way to end up as a local legend.”

“I’m not afraid of local legends.” Her tone drops into an icy, deadly register, and my dick responds, pushing against my jeans.

Up ahead, through the windshield, more faint, flickering orange glow of carved jack-o’-lanterns appears along the wooden fence posts marking the border of Blackwood. Jagged, glowing grins cast bloody, shifting shadows across her skin.

Fuck, this town loves their dumbass carved pumpkins.

She glances at me from the corner of her eye, and I catch the flecks of brown, the color of Hennessy, burning with a hidden, dangerous threat.

I imagine she thinks she’s trapped in this small space with a nightmare. That she’s sitting next to a dangerous man who came back to Blackwood to hurt her.

And maybe I am those things.

Because every single Halloween, like clockwork, someone vanishes along this stretch of road. A runaway here. A transient there. Drifters passing through town who nobody ever files a missing persons report for.

The police never put the pieces together because the victims are invisible—the exact kind of vulnerable, forgotten people who slip through the cracks of society without making a sound.

And when the blood starts spilling tonight, I plan on being the one riding shotgun until the last drop falls.

Three

Twisted Thrill

HARMONY

6:50 PM

Asingle bead of sweat breaks from my hairline, trailing a slow, agonizing path down the side of my neck before slipping beneath the collar of my sweater and disappearing into my cleavage.

It isn’t just fear.

Fear is a cold, shallow thing that lives in the back of the throat.

This is an electric thread of heat-coil winding tight in my gut—fear laced with a jagged spike of raw intrigue.

A dark, twisted thrill.

I don’t scare easily. I never have.

People used to fear me, once. I was the one who lived on the thrill of these dark roads, who found solace in those quiet midnight drives that inevitably turned into living nightmares.

As I continue our drive down Blackwood Highway, the shadows blanketing me and the handsome, yet terrifying stranger in an ominous darkness, the car’s interior becomes stiflingly hot and dense, weighed down by his presence alone.

My hands relax slightly on the steering wheel, but the need to flex my fingers every now and then helps relieve some of the tension. Ever since he entered my car, my body tensed with adrenaline, every nerve on edge as if ready to fight or run. Yet, my eyes keep betraying me, darting to the attractive stranger mere inches away to drink him in.

He’s massive, like a linebacker. And there’s a dark, predatory air of grace that makes my stomach flip in a way that has nothing to do with self-preservation.

He radiates a magnetic, dangerous charm—a quiet confidence that tells me he isn’t just surviving on this dark highway; he’s here to own it.