The night air cooled Elena's skin, a relief from the hot greasy air inside the diner. She walked with her head down, her keys threaded through her fingers, the little brass teeth a thin but sufficient deterrent. The twelve blocks to her apartment were a familiar gauntlet. She knew the flickering streetlights, the alleys to be avoided at all costs, and the shadows that played tricks on the eye. Tonight, however, one of the shadows broke free of the landscape and started stalking her.
It began as a hum, low and a vibration that she felt more in the soles of her scuffed sneakers than in her ears. It was the noise of great, contained power. She looked over her shoulder. A block back, a car was creeping along the curb, its headlights out. It wasn't a car; it was an absence. Long, black, and impossibly streamlined, it sucked in the orange light of the streetlamps, its tinted windows reflecting nothing. It glided with the silent, fluid grace of a shark in a school of minnows, completely alien to the cracked asphalt and graffiti-scrawled walls of the neighborhood.
Elena's heart was pounding against her ribcage, a frantic caged bird. She reassured herself it was a coincidence. A lost person. But the car kept pace, a stalking predator. She hurried her steps, her breath caught in her throat. The pounding of her own footsteps sounded like thunder in the deserted street. The car kept pace with her with ease. This was no coincidence. This was a chase.
Panic, cold and stinging, began to gnaw at the edges of her control. She risked glancing again. The car was closer now. The roar of its engine was a weight against her back. That strange, wild odor from the diner—pine and rain and something wild—was drifting towards her, more strongly than before. It was coming from the car. The realization brought a fresh jolt of fear, because it didn't make sense. It was an impossible, terrifying detail in an already terrifying situation.
She was two blocks from her apartment complex when the car accelerated smoothly, not roaring but rushing, and cut into the road in front of her, cutting her off. It came to a silent stop, its sleek black body filling the sidewalk, trapping her. The engine purred, humming deep in her bones. Nothing stirred for a moment. The world came to a halt. Elena stood stock still, her mind racing through a dozen awful scenarios.
And then the back passenger door opened.
He didn't step out so much as unfurl from the opulent interior, a man of unobtainable height and loveliness encased in shadow. The streetlight glinted off the clean lines of a perfectly tailored suit that had probably cost more than she made in a year. Tall, broad-shouldered, and moving with a lethal confidence that seemed to suck all the air out of the street, he moved from the relative darkness of the car into the light. When he moved fully into the light, she got a look at his face, and the breath she'd been holding seeped out in a strangled gasp. He was devastatingly handsome, but it was a cruel, predatory beauty. Sharp cheekbones, a strong jaw, and a mouth that looked like it had never formed a genuine smile. But his eyes… his eyes were impossible. They were not brown or hazel. They were the color of molten gold, and they burned into her as if they had been starving for the sight of her. In their depths, a feral light swirled, and Elena felt a dizzying, terrifying sense of recognition, as if she had seen those eyes in her dreams.
He moved slowly towards her. Elena instinctively took a step back, her hand flying up to her throat.
Who are you? What do you want?" she was able to get out, her voice shaking but with a rebellious tone she was unable to hide.
He halted, his eyes raking over her, not lecherously, but with an almost tactile fierceness, as if he committed each frayed thread of her jacket, each lock of her black hair to memory. His smell surrounded her now—the fresh, wild smell of a storm, overlaying the grime of the city. It should have been frightening, but some twisted, dangerous part of her discovered that it was sensual.
He did not reply to her. Instead, low and menacing as it sounded from the depths of his very being, his voice spoke but one, plain word.
"Mine." The one word hung between them, absolute and possessive. It wasn't a warning or an offer; it was a statement, a branding iron on the soul. All of the logic in Elena's head cried to her to run, but her legs were cemented to the pavement, held by the power of his statement. He had spoken a single word, a word that meant nothing, but it shattered the stillness of the deserted street, leaving behind a query that wailed in the new silence: who was this man, and why did part of her, part of her that was afraid, feel as though he was correct?