Chapter Two
Rick didn’t like being told what to do. Least of all by Jack Mallory.
And sure as hell not at two in the morning on a goddamn Saturday.
It wasn’t just a matter of pride, though he had that in spades—it was the nature of the beast: older, wilder, harder to ignore.
Orders prickled at his skin the way wet ropes did, constricting, maddening.
The tighter they pulled, the more he wanted to tear free.
Some men were built for hierarchy, for clean lines and regulations and uniforms pressed so crisp they could slice your wrist. Rick had never been one of them.
He didn’t follow the rulebook so much as circle it, a wolf testing a fence.
He trusted instinct more than protocol, the kind of gut feeling that surged up from the marrow and didn’t give a damn about standard procedure.
That’s what made him such a good detective, the best the Calgrave Metropolitan Police Department had.
Tenacious. Unshakable. Sharp enough to cut through bullshit and lies alike.
There were bounds in his job, he’d never deny that, but his talent lay in crossing the right ones at the right time, reading a crime scene the way others read tea leaves.
The last thing he needed was some paper-pusher barking at him from behind a slab of executive-grade walnut.
The captain’s office reeked of stale coffee, cigarette tar, and the sour hint of sweat beneath too much cologne.
Papers lay sprawled across the desk, case files bleeding ink, stab wounds no one had stitched.
Behind it, Captain Mallory was a fuming statue sculpted from old rage and bureaucratic rot, jabbing a fat, nicotine-stained finger at Rick and his partner, chipping away at their dignity one threat at a time.
“You two bring in the suspect with blood literally on his fucking hands,” Mallory snarled, “and somehow he lawyers up before we can get so much as a goddamn word out of him?”
Rick didn’t answer. He didn’t trust himself to.
His fists twitched in his pockets, jaw ticking.
One wrong word and the thing in him—that thing—might slip.
Rage came easily these days. Hot, sharp, and dangerous, a blade tucked under the tongue.
Instead of meeting Mallory’s gaze, he turned his head toward the window, where rain threaded down the glass in the pattern of veins, watching the city drown in its own decay.
Outside, Calgrave looked like a wet cigarette left burning on the sidewalk.
Streetlamps bleeding into puddles. Lightning burning the skyline into negative space, each burst revealing its bones against the night.
Frank Burton leaned on the doorframe, arms crossed over his chest, impassive as ever. There was a stillness to him Rick had always envied—nothing could touch him, not even this. “He knew his rights,” Frank said, tone calm but firm, a man used to navigating other men’s tempers.
Mallory’s face reddened. “Knew his rights? I got a commissioner breathing down my neck, a mayor who wants the ‘Sculptor’ headlines buried before the next goddamn election, and you two bringing me jack shit but attitude and a half-naked twink with a smart mouth. You want to talk rights?” He slammed his palm on the desk, making the papers flutter.
“You make that little shit talk, Detective. I don’t give a fuck how. ”
Rick didn’t flinch, but he felt the ripple of heat climb up his spine.
That word—twink—hung in the air like a slap.
Something about the casual dismissal, the venom soaked into it, made him want to growl.
His hands stayed plunged in his pockets, nails digging deep enough to leave crescents in his palms. He had too many memories of broken noses, split knuckles, things said in anger that couldn’t be taken back.
He wasn’t going there again. Frank could do the talking. It was safer that way. For everyone.
“Captain,” Frank said, voice hardening, “you want us to break protocol, say it out loud. Otherwise, let us do our jobs.”
Mallory’s glare could’ve cracked the plaster behind them.
His lip curled, but he didn’t say the thing they all knew he wanted to.
Didn’t dare put it on the record. Instead, he sneered and waved them off with a dismissive flick of his hand.
“I want this motherfucking case wrapped. Got it? Wrapped. Clean. No leaks to the press, no panic in the streets. We’ve got five bodies and no official suspect.
Media’s sniffing around, but they don’t have the full story yet—and I’ll make sure it stays that way, unless one of you two fucks it up.
Last thing I need is the word serial on the front page with Halloween coming up. ”
The implication sat heavy between them: the murders hadn’t been announced as connected. Not officially. But the silence wouldn’t last forever. Sooner or later, the city would start to put it together—the pattern, the bodies, the way each face had been left a blank canvas of naked bone.
“Now get the hell out of my office,” Mallory barked.
Rick moved first, the heels of his shoes thudding against the dark granite tiles as he turned. Frank followed, close and quiet. The captain’s door slammed behind them, the sound echoing across the bullpen like a gunshot held between teeth.
(1:56 a.m.)
Calgrave Central, the beating heart of CMPD, felt colder than usual at this hour. Not in temperature, but in temperament: a chill that sank into the marrow and lingered, no matter how long you paced the halls or how much burnt coffee you slurped trying to chase it off.
Rick strode like a tempest in a suit, all muscles and quiet menace.
At six foot five and thirty-eight, he didn’t just walk through the station—he dominated it.
He didn’t say much, but then again, he didn’t have to; people always made room when he showed up.
Big, broad, as if the world had sculpted him from granite, with dark brown hair, eyes like clouds over a storm-tossed sea, and the mood to match: gray, sullen, always on the verge of thunder.
Frank fell in step beside him, matching Rick’s longer stride with the quiet confidence of someone who’d seen enough bullshit to know when to ignore it. “Guy’s one stress ball away from a stroke,” he said, voice low, shoes echoing off the tiles.
Rick grunted. “He wants blood. Doesn’t care whose.”
They passed a uniform wheeling a coffee-stained chair, its busted wheels shrieking in protest. Somewhere, a phone rang and rang and rang.
Around them, officers on duty hunched over ancient desktops, their screens fat and flickering, stubborn relics in a world that had long since gone flat.
The glow painted tired faces in sallow shades, eyes bleary from too many hours and too little sleep.
“You think the kid did it?” Frank asked.
Rick exhaled through his nose. “I think he’s not telling us everything.”
Frank glanced at him sidelong, unreadable behind the armor of experience.
Forty-six, with just a hint of silver at the temples and the kind of lines that sharpened a man rather than softened him, his dark face strong, his presence bedrock-solid.
He was the calm to Rick’s volatility, the balance that kept the scale from tipping too far into recklessness.
“Doesn’t mean he killed anyone,” he said.
“People hide things for all kinds of reasons.”
Rick didn’t answer right away. Hiding was something he’d mastered early. Hell, Frank might be the only one who really knew him, and that was after a decade as partners. He stared straight ahead, jaw ticking again. “What do we got on him?”
“Riggs is digging through his priors, seeing if any known associates pop,” Frank said. “Nothing from Forensics until Gloria comes in the morning. The vic’s face was carved off clean—no prints, no ID, no surveillance. Ghost job, same as the other four.”
He swore under his breath. “Always the fucking clean ones.”
“Yeah, well, nobody dumps a body in a blind alley by accident.” Frank’s tone sharpened. “And our guy was caught kneeling in the blood with no alibi and a look on his face as if the devil kissed him goodbye.”
Rick’s jaw flexed harder. He didn’t like coincidences. Coincidences meant someone was playing them.
“Let me see if anything’s come up while you take another shot at cracking him,” Frank added. “I’ll try to hamper his lawyer, buy you as much time as I can.”
He nodded.
“Just don’t shove him off the ledge before he talks, all right?”
“No promises,” he muttered, pushing open the door to the interrogation corridor.
Frank peeled off down the hallway with a low chuckle and a shake of his head, steps fading into the buzz of the bullpen.
Rick proceeded straight ahead. He came to a halt in front of the interrogation room’s two-way mirror, arms folded tight, shoulders coiled with tension.
He caught his reflection in the glass: scruff thickening along his jaw, eyes shaded beneath the harsh cone of the overhead bulb.
No sleep. No answers. Only the same tall silhouette, pacing through a place that never thawed.
The room beyond receded into shadow, bleak and bare, a concrete oubliette built to break you down.
A single low-hanging lamp illuminated it, casting a hard white cone of light that offered no warmth, only definition.
Everything outside that circle dissolved into black.
And at its center, as if conjured from smoke and sighs, sat the boy.
Chained to the table, head bowed slightly, he looked carved from chiaroscuro—the kind of beauty too striking to be trusted, too luminous to forget.
Bloodstains dried crusty around his wrists, crimson shackles more vivid than the cuffs themselves.
But his face? Clean. Too clean. No sign of fatigue in it, no exhaustion.
He was a secret never meant for daylight, kissed into being by lust alone.
Rick let his gaze roam, unhurried. No one was watching now.
The boy lounged like sin in a church pew, legs spread in lazy arrogance, damp curls clinging to his forehead, dark laurels of a fallen angel.
Shadows sculpted his cheekbones to cold perfection, pooled gently under his eyes, and caressed the bow of his full mouth.
A faint furrow creased his brow—an almost tender expression of confusion, or defiance, or hurt.
His leather jacket hung open, the light catching on the harness that caged his chest, glinting along the hollows and ridges of firm muscle.
Glitter clung to ivory skin, stardust scattered across marble.
He was the most beautiful creature Rick had ever seen.
Now, alone, he could finally admit it.
Ashton Hunter, twenty-five, five foot ten. Born October 31st. Occupation: exotic dancer. Adopted as an infant by the Hunters. Entered foster care at sixteen after they died in a car accident. No criminal record. Rick knew the file by heart. But it told him nothing of this.
He could sense there was something wrong about him.
Not morally—no, that had stopped mattering the second Ash glanced up at him with those amethyst eyes—but existentially.
His beauty didn’t sit right with the world around it.
It didn’t belong in this room, in this time, under this lamp.
His melancholy lit a raw nerve in Rick’s chest; a need to shield him, guard him from hurt.
That was the trick, wasn’t it? The urge to protect could be a powerful blind spot. He wouldn’t let himself fall for it.
He stepped closer to the glass, frowning. With that face and body, the kid could’ve been a supermodel in New York, a movie star in LA. But in Calgrave, he was a fucking stripper. Adding a murder suspect to the resume.
Inside, the boy lifted his head and looked.
Not at the mirror but through it, with the sharp, unerring certainty of a creature that knew it was being watched.
His eyes, shining and clear, locked with Rick’s across the unseen divide, as if the barrier between them didn’t exist. As if he saw Rick standing there, saw right into his soul. But he couldn’t… could he?
For a heartbeat, Rick forgot how to breathe.
The boy’s gaze pinned him there, stripped him bare in a way no human should have been able to.
There was no challenge in that stare. No plea.
No anger. Just a terrible, quiet knowing, as if the boy had peeled back the layers of him with a glance and was waiting to see what he would do next.
Rick swallowed against the sudden dryness in his throat. What are you?
When he inhaled, the scent hit him even through the closed door: sandalwood-sweet and pheromone-rich, laced with darker things underneath, raw musk and rain-slick asphalt, a summer storm waiting to break.
It roused something primal in him, that thing that howled and clawed and craved, and he fought the irrational impulse to bare his teeth.
His shoulders squared. Whatever was waiting for him in that room, whatever this boy was, he was far from harmless.
But God help him, Rick didn’t want to be saved.