Raven was not in the kitchen.
His body was in the kitchen — his hands, his cock, the warm tension in his thighs as he stood over her — but the rest of him had gone somewhere else.
Gone backward.
The image arrived the way the bad ones always arrive: without invitation, without sequence, without the courtesy of a frame. Just the garden.
The moonlight. The specific, cold weight of Gareth's fist hitting his gut with the casual, comprehensive force of a man who did not know yet what he was.
The way the air had displaced.
The grass flattening.
The blood in his mouth tasting like copper and like information.
''Y-you... motherfucker.''
He had said those words with his face in the grass and his ears ringing and the humiliating, precise awareness that the young man standing over him had hit him like he weighed nothing — like Raven was an 'obstacle', a mild inconvenience to be removed from the garden so that the real evening could continue.
''Weak.''
''Still.''
The copper taste.
