The second body was colder than the first, though the room was the same—the same length of stainless steel tables, the same overhead fluorescents that buzzed faintly like insects trapped behind glass, the same subtle antiseptic sting that could never quite mask the underlying truth of death. The time of expiration had not been far removed from the last, perhaps a day or two at most, but there was a finality to this corpse that the previous one had not yet learned to carry. Cold in the way a thing becomes when the soul has not drifted but been ripped, violently, prematurely, without warning or mercy, wrenched from the body like roots torn from soil, forced into stillness before it had finished speaking.
He had not gone quiet. That much was obvious.
Addie stood over the body in the same posture she had assumed before—her shoulders drawn back, gloved hands poised, face unreadable in the way only someone very bright and very guarded can manage—but there was something tauter in her frame now, some internal weight that had pulled her an inch closer to the corpse as though the dead man had whispered something to her that I had not heard. Her gaze remained fixed on the chest, her eyes sharp and glassy and still, yet her breath had changed. It no longer flowed with the calm rhythm of ritual and science. It faltered. Slowed. Shallowed.
The chest had been opened—not by her, not yet—but by the killer himself, a crude mockery of autopsy, a performance for an audience he believed might understand. Thread black as rot had been sewn through split skin, embedded not to close a wound but to leave a message open for all to see. Truth bleeds. The words sprawled across the sternum like a confession no one had asked for but which now could not be ignored. The stitching was uneven, brutal in its pull, but not without control. Each letter was legible. Each curve of thread intentional. There had been no hesitation in the carving, only the trembling that comes after resolve, the kind of hand that shakes once the job is done and the echo of the act catches up to the flesh.
She didn't speak.
She hovered over the message like it was sacred, not desecration but scripture. Her fingertips ghosted in the air just above the letters, close enough to feel the texture of the thread without making contact, as if she feared touching it would strip away something she needed to preserve. Her expression did not falter, not outwardly, but the silence that gathered in her face was not the sterile quiet of concentration. It was communion.
And I knew—I knew without needing her to say a word—that she had heard something.
Not sound. Not a voice, not truly. But something had spoken to her in the rawness of that wound. Something had crawled out of the black-threaded truth and curled up behind her ribs. She did not blink. Her lips did not move. But her whole body tilted toward the dead, toward the opened chest and the brutal confession stitched there with shaking hands and unyielding purpose, toward the cavity and its awful honesty that could not be scrubbed clean or rationalized into silence. She leaned forward as if caught in gravity that belonged not to the earth but to something older, something buried beneath language, something that smelled like iron and rot and memory.
And the room around her responded.
The fluorescent lights did not dim, the temperature did not drop, and no breath of the supernatural passed visibly between us. Yet I could feel it, the unmistakable shift in the air as though the very space had been forced to listen, forced to bow to the intensity of her stillness. Not reverence. Not fear. Recognition. A hush that belonged not to the morgue, but to her.
It was always like that with her.
Addie Quinn did not dominate space in the way I had grown used to from those who survived by volume or violence. She did not wield her body like a weapon or her intellect like a blade, did not bury herself behind cynicism or sharpen her presence into armor. She did not command silence with the heaviness of pain, nor demand attention with the arrogance of pride. Her power was stranger than all of that—quieter, subtler, and therefore infinitely more dangerous. She existed like a tuning fork, vibrating at a frequency few could hear, but those who could were never able to forget the sound.
She stood beside the dead like she belonged among them. And they looked back.
Not with terror. Not with mourning. But with the eerie stillness of creatures who knew they had finally been seen.
I, who had outlived nations and empires and belief itself, who had studied the dead not as victims but as remnants of stories no longer told, found myself watching not the body she examined, but the slow, deliberate cadence of her breathing. I watched the way the tremble in her fingers gave way to stillness, not because the fear had passed, but because she had let it settle inside her like sediment, allowed it to layer itself between thought and action without ever interrupting either. She did not move quickly. She did not move carelessly. She listened. Not to me. Not to science. But to something ancient and invisible, something even I could not name, though I had hunted it more times than I cared to admit.
And in that moment, standing behind her with my hands curled uselessly at my sides and my hunger rising like smoke behind my ribs, I understood what I had not allowed myself to say aloud.
The killer had not stitched that message for authority. He had not meant it for press coverage or police reports or the clinical eyes of the forensic pathologists who would eventually dissect his cruelty into digestible data. He had stitched it for her. For the woman who spoke softly to the dead and listened when they spoke back. Whether the killer knew it or not—whether he had seen her or only sensed her—he had made the offering with a hand that hoped to be understood.
And Addie, fragile as she appeared and stronger than anyone in that building would ever comprehend, had understood him.
"I talk to them sometimes," she said quietly, her voice slipping across the sterile tile in a tone so light it nearly passed for humor, though it cracked at the edges like something more brittle underneath. "The dead. I mean. Not really. Not out loud. I just… say things, sometimes. Pretend they're listening."
She did not face me when she spoke, not right away. She stared down at the body with a look I had seen only in the oldest kinds of mourners, those who do not cry anymore, not because they no longer feel, but because they have become too intimate with the shape of loss to ever again be surprised by it. Her smile—when it came—was a pale thing, a crooked ghost barely formed at the corners of her lips, the kind that tried to pass itself off as self-deprecating but bore the unmistakable weight of loneliness.
"I know it sounds weird. I probably need more sleep. Or a therapist."
I stepped closer before I made the decision to move. It was not her words that drew me, though they echoed in places I had long ago sealed shut. It was the way her voice had trembled when she spoke, the subtle hitch of breath that followed the confession, the staccato pulse I could now feel fluttering just beneath the skin of her throat. Her scent reached me fully in that moment—clean and unguarded and unbearably human, the smell of skin warmed by nerves and sterile soap and the shadow of adrenaline. It was intoxicating in a way I had not allowed myself to feel in years.
"They talk back more often than you'd like to know," I said, my voice low, tempered by the centuries I carried in my chest, spoken not as threat, not as seduction, but as a warning only I understood the depth of.
She did not laugh.
She did not flinch.
She turned toward me slowly, deliberately, without fear, without pretense, and stepped into the hollow of my shadow as if her body knew the shape of it before her mind ever caught up. Her arm brushed mine, barely a touch, but I felt it like a shock across every nerve, a live current that arced straight into my gut and settled behind my ribs like a match waiting to be struck. Her pulse jumped again, this time harder, and I could hear the way her blood rose in response, could feel the heat of it rushing beneath her skin as if her body knew the danger but refused to flee.
Her breath caught, but her eyes did not waver. She looked up at me with curiosity, not fear, and I could feel the hunger inside me splinter against the restraint I had wrapped around it for so long.
She did not fear me.
Not yet.
And that, above all else, was the most dangerous thing of all.
Because I could feel my hunger uncoiling again, slower this time, less like fire and more like rot, patient and cruel and old enough to know how to wait. My gaze drifted to her neck, to the place where her jugular beat strong beneath a curtain of pale hair. I could have taken her in that moment, pressed my mouth to her throat, tasted her before she had time to gasp, before she could feel the change in me—but I didn't.
I forced myself to move away. I stepped back one inch, two inches, farther than comfort allowed, until the hum of her body dimmed and the scent of her skin no longer overruled every other instinct I possessed.
She tilted her head slightly, curious but not wounded by my withdrawal, as if she sensed that something had cracked beneath the surface but didn't yet understand what it meant. She turned back to the table, resumed her work as if her body had not betrayed her, as if mine had not answered in kind.
I waited long enough for her attention to drift, long enough to be certain she would not turn and find me still there, still watching her with eyes that no longer felt like my own. She leaned into the silence, murmuring something to the body too soft for even my ears to catch, her fingers poised in delicate suspension above flesh that could no longer feel, and I let myself pretend—for the span of a single, stolen breath—that her softness was mine to keep.
And then I left.
The air outside was colder than I expected, not by temperature but by sensation, the way old wounds feel the rain before it falls. The night pressed too tightly against my shoulders, not heavy, but intimate in its closeness, as if the city itself had drawn a breath and held it, watching. The streetlights burned too steady, too yellow, staring down from their high perches with a kind of mechanical judgment I had never minded until now. Even the moon, bloated and pale above the rooftops, refused to look away—hung low in the sky like a verdict, unfeeling and eternal, the same as it had been on the night the last one died.
I didn't speak to Gio. He was parked where I'd left him, silent, reading something by the glow of his phone screen, and he looked up as I passed but didn't ask. He didn't need to. My silence was its own answer.
I didn't check the precinct logs or the case files. Didn't scan the photos. Didn't go back to the compound where the hunger could be buried beneath routine and order and decades of habit.
I didn't feed.
Instead, I walked.
Past the hospital. Past the neon signs and the flickering security cameras. Past the places where the city pretended to be safe and the places where it didn't bother trying. I walked until the buildings grew fewer and smaller, until the noise peeled away layer by layer, until only the wind and the click of my boots and the slow, deliberate rhythm of breath remained. I walked until I found a stretch of wall that bore no name, no history, no windows to witness what I would not say aloud.
And I struck it. Once, twice, three times.
Not with rage. Not with ritual. But with need.
Not enough to shatter the concrete. Not enough to fracture bone. But enough to split skin, enough to feel the dull shock of pain ripple through the cartilage of my hand and bloom along my knuckles like something blooming too late in winter. My blood smeared across the concrete in muted streaks, not fast, not thick—slow and shallow, insignificant by any measure but mine.
The pain was a tether. The blood was a reminder.
Of what I was.
Of what I would become, if I let her near the parts of me that still remembered how to want.
Because that was the real danger. Not the feeding. Not the fire that curled in my gut when she stepped close enough to feel. It was the wanting—the need to stay close long enough to learn what kind of laugh she made when she was off-guard, what songs she played in her car, what dreams she kept buried beneath her clinical detachment and careful gloves.
It was the image I couldn't shake: sunlight on her skin that had never been touched by war or time, and a tiny black tattoo behind her ear like a secret she had stopped trying to keep.
It was the way she hummed while she worked, completely unaware that the dead had started to hush when she entered the room.
It was her. And I could not afford her.
So I stood there bleeding beneath a sky that would never be mine, beneath stars that had seen too many deaths to mourn another, and I let the ache sit in my hand, pulsing in time with a heart I had long since stopped trusting.
I did not sleep that night. I would not have even if I could.
But somewhere across the city, in a room far too human for the kind of shadow she had stepped into, beneath white cotton sheets and a ceiling fan that spun slowly above her like the passage of time made visible, Addie Quinn dreamed.
She dreamed of hands. Not touching.
Undoing her inch by inch without ever laying a finger on her skin.
And I knew they were mine. Not in the crude sense that would have reduced the feeling to carnality. Not in the way predators stalk or lovers claim. But in the way a lock recognizes the key carved perfectly to undo it.
And that was what she had become.
A lock I could no longer stop myself from turning.