The city never truly slept. It dozed in restless fits, twitching with the buzz of neon and the rumble of subway trains far beneath the pavement. Tonight, rain had slicked the streets into mirrors, the kind that showed you too much if you stared long enough.
Elena Dusk crouched over the body in the alley, ignoring the sirens somewhere in the distance. The victim's face was swollen, half-hidden by shadows, but the staging was deliberate. A cigarette tucked behind the ear. Fingers bent into unnatural angles. A tie arranged like a noose but loosened just enough to whisper irony.
She didn't need the police to tell her what this was. It wasn't murder—it was a message.
Her gloved hand hovered inches above the corpse. The pattern is wrong. No—reversed. Whoever had done this knew her language. The same codes she'd spent years building in the safety of research labs, the same patterns she'd buried when the syndicate burned her world to ash.
Her throat tightened. They found me.
"Step away from the crime scene," a voice drawled behind her, smooth as smoke, cocky as ever.
Elena's breath hitched. Slowly, she rose, the rain dripping from her dark hair as she turned.
Damian Veyr leaned against the alley wall like he'd been waiting for her, his press badge dangling from his neck, his grin infuriatingly familiar. The last time she'd seen him was through a blur of tears and firelight—the night everything collapsed.
"You," she said, low and venomous.
"Me," he replied easily, as though they were strangers meeting at a bar, not ghosts colliding in a graveyard. "Still chasing ghosts, Elena?"
Her pulse spiked. She considered the knife strapped to her thigh, the weight of it grounding her. Instead, she straightened, her voice sharp as glass.
"Still making a living off corpses?"
He tilted his head, letting her words roll off him with practiced charm. But then his gaze flicked—quick, sharp—to the body. And for a fraction of a second, she saw the mask slip. Recognition.
"You know what this means," she said, her eyes narrowing.
His smile dimmed, just slightly. "I know it means you should walk away before you drown in it."
Her laugh was humorless. "I don't walk away. Not anymore."
For a beat, they stood there, rain dripping, city noise fading into silence. A battlefield reborn.
Then—footsteps. Quick, heavy. More than one pair.
Damian's expression shifted, the cocky veneer snapping into something hard, urgent. "Elena," he murmured, stepping closer than she wanted him to, "you need to move. Now."
"Why?" she demanded.
A shadow fell across the alley mouth. Men, their faces obscured by hoods, closing in with mechanical precision.
Elena's grip slid to her knife. Damian's hand brushed his jacket where she knew he kept a gun. For one treacherous moment, they were aligned again—two predators braced for the same storm.
The rain hammered harder. The men advanced. And in that instant, Elena realized something chilling.
The message wasn't for her.It was for them.