The shrill cry of a nighthawk echoed between the high walls of the alley, a sharp sound that seemed to slice through Elena's fog of exhaustion.
She'd been walking for twenty-five minutes, her chosen path a grim network of service roads and delivery lanes that ran behind the glittering facades of Nocturne City's financial district.
Here, the city's glamour was stripped away, revealing the gritty, functional veins that kept its heart pumping. The air smelled of sour garbage from overflowing dumpsters and the acrid tang of industrial cleaner, a far cry from the sterile scent of the hospital.
Her feet, clad in the same worn clogs, protested each step with a deep, throbbing ache. The thought of her narrow bed was a powerful lure, pulling her forward through the pools of shadow between the dim security lights.
She was calculating again—if she cut through the old textile district alley, she could shave another seven minutes off the journey.
A new scent invaded the alley's familiar stench. Metallic, coppery—the unmistakable smell of blood. But it was wrong.
Underneath it was a strange, sharp note, like ozone after a lightning strike mixed with something sweetly cloying, like burnt cloves. Her Nurse's instincts, honed to diagnose from the slightest clues, pricked to attention. This wasn't just a nosebleed or a scraped knee. This was something worse.
She slowed, her senses straining against the darkness. A primal part of her, the part that listened to the city's whispers about these lonely places, screamed at her to run, to keep her head down and get home. But the healer in her, the part that had just spent sixteen hours fighting death, couldn't ignore it.
Then she heard it. Not a cry for help, but a low, guttural exhalation of pure agony, so raw it seemed to vibrate in the cold, still air. It came from a deep loading bay, shrouded in impenetrable shadow.
Fear clenched her stomach. Walk away, she commanded herself. This is not your emergency.
Another wet, ragged gasp.
Cursing under her breath, Elena fumbled in her bag. Her fingers closed around the small, powerful penlight she carried for work.
Its beam was a narrow blade of white, cutting into the darkness as she aimed it toward the source of the sound.
The light fell first on a shoe. A man's dress shoe, of leather so fine it gleamed even in the grime, polished to a mirror shine.
It was attached to a leg clad in trousers of a dark, exquisite wool, now torn and stained with something dark. Her beam traveled upward, her breath catching in her throat.
A man was slumped against the rusted steel of a dumpster, his body at a sickening angle. Even in his collapsed state, she could tell he was tall, his frame powerful beneath the ruined layers of a suit that spoke of impossible wealth—a jacket tailored to perfection, a silk shirt now soaked and clinging.
His head was lolled to the side, revealing a profile of sharp, aristocratic lines, pale as moonlight against the dark hair that fell across his forehead. He was, in a terrifying, surreal way, beautiful.
But it was the wound that captured and held her light. High on his chest, just left of the sternum, his shirt was a mess of torn fabric and a dark, wet stain.
A gunshot. At that proximity, to that area… There should have been carnage, a pulsing fountain of life leaving his body.
Yet the bleeding was minimal, sluggish, more like a seep. And there, glittering faintly in her penlight like malicious fairy dust, were flecks of something silver embedded in the fabric and the torn flesh beneath.
"Oh, god," she whispered, the sound swallowed by the alley.
Protocol took over. Scene safety? The attacker was likely gone. ABCs. Airway, Breathing, Circulation.
She dropped her bag and knelt beside him, the alley filth immediately soaking into her scrubs. Ignoring the cold radiating from his skin—a deep, unsettling cold that felt more like a statue than a living man—she pressed two fingers to the side of his neck, searching for a carotid pulse.
Nothing.
A spike of pure panic.
Then, a beat. Slow. So impossibly slow. Thump… … … thump… … … thump. It was the steady, resting rhythm of a man asleep, not one bleeding out in an alley. It was wrong.
"Sir? Can you hear me?" She gently tried to turn his head toward her.
His eyelids fluttered. For a fraction of a second, they opened. In the stark beam of her penlight, his eyes were a depthless dark grey. Still, as the light hit them, a ring of luminous, molten gold flashed around the pupils—a brief, stunning explosion of color that vanished as quickly as it had appeared, leaving her to doubt her own senses.
His lips moved, forming a silent word she couldn't decipher. Then awareness fled, and he was unconscious once more, sinking back into that eerie, cold stillness.
The glittering powder in the wound caught her eye again. Where it touched the raw flesh, a faint, almost invisible wisp of smoke seemed to curl upward, carrying that ozone-clove scent.
Her mind raced, rejecting and analyzing at once. Silver? Poison? An allergy? Nothing fit. Nothing in her medical training explained this.
But he was dying. The slow pulse, the profound cold, the strange, inhibiting wound—they were a countdown. She was a nurse. He was a patient. Theories could wait.
Acting on pure instinct, she yanked the knitted scarf from around her neck—a cheap, soft thing—and folded it into a thick pad. Pressing it firmly against the gruesome injury, she applied pressure with both hands. "Hold on," she murmured, to him or to herself, she didn't know. "Just hold on."
With one hand keeping pressure, she used the other to dig her phone from her pocket. Her fingers, slick with cold sweat, struggled to dial 911.
"911, what's your emergency?" The dispatcher's voice was a lifeline to the everyday world.
"I need an ambulance. Male, approximately thirties, gunshot wound to the upper left chest. He's unconscious. Pulse is slow, maybe 40. Breathing is shallow. He's… he's very cold. Significant blood loss, but it's… It's not active bleeding." She rattled off the cross streets, her voice surprisingly steady. "Please hurry."
"Units are responding. Stay on the line if you can."
"I can't. I need to maintain pressure. I'll be with him." She ended the call and stuffed the phone away, focusing entirely on the man beneath her hand.
In the stark silence of the alley, broken only by his shallow, ragged breaths and the distant, growing wail of sirens, Elena Hart knelt in the filth.
The weight of her own debts, her stepmother's demands, the exhaustion—all of it receded, replaced by the immediate, terrifying reality of the mysterious, beautiful man bleeding silver in the dark. Her night of quiet despair was over. The absolute darkness had found her.