Chapter Fourteen #2
The apartment smelled of pine cleaner and old books, though he hadn’t touched either in ages.
The couch still had the indent where he’d passed out three nights ago in his clothes, a whiskey tumbler on the floor beside it, dust clinging to the rim.
On the wall, a photograph of the station’s softball team leaned crooked in its frame.
Vivian had hated that picture. Said it made the place look like a locker room. Now she was gone, and the photo stayed.
He tossed the fedora, damp from the drizzle, onto the counter. Next came the coat and gun holster, both dropped onto the lone kitchen chair. His badge followed, set face down, then his shoes, hitting the scuffed floorboards with a dull thud as he kicked them off.
He tugged his tie loose in one practiced flick and shrugged out of the suspenders.
One by one, he unfastened the shirt buttons until the fabric slipped from his shoulders in a cotton-white whisper.
He pulled off the ribbed A-shirt in a single motion, the stretch and snap of it clinging to his skin.
Each movement felt like shedding layers of himself that had lost their meaning.
A grunt escaped him as he peeled down his trousers and stepped out of them. Socks next. Then the briefs. And beneath it all: the ache of his spine, the sandpaper grind behind his eyes, the dogged weight of too many sleepless nights strung together like barbed wire.
The bathroom light buzzed and flickered when he turned it on. The mirror greeted him with a face he barely recognized: his jaw lost under a scruffy beard, his hair tousled, his eyes hollowed by too many years chasing monsters. But there was no defeat staring back just yet. No surrender.
He straightened at the sink, squaring up to his reflection the way a boxer might before a fight.
Broad shoulders. A powerful chest dusted with dark fur, the kind that once made lovers drag their fingers through it without asking.
His muscles hadn’t softened with age; they remained, solid and heavy, earned inch by inch over decades of hard labor. He was still standing. Still dangerous.
He stepped into the shower and turned the knob until the pipes shuddered and the water hissed to life.
The first blast struck cold, a gasp against overheated skin.
He didn’t flinch. Didn’t chase warmth. Let the chill bite into his flesh, the cords of muscle shifting with each breath.
Water coursed down the hard lines of his frame, washing the sweat and city grime down the drain.
Steam rose slow and ghostly, blurring the corners of the tiled box until it felt like standing in fog. He closed his eyes.
Schreck’s words lingered in his head, whispery, sepulchral, full of implications he couldn’t quite discern.
‘You trespass in the sleep of unspeakable things. You may live to regret it.’
A smarter man might’ve walked away after hearing a warning like that—turned his back, forgotten the whole damn thing, kept living in blissful ignorance. But Rick wasn’t that kind of man. He’d keep digging until he hit bedrock, even if it buried him. It’s not like he had much left to lose.
Schreck’s rat-like face still made his skin crawl. That predatory stillness, like moonlight frozen on grave dirt, never stopped being unnerving. A part of him wanted nothing more than to drag the bastard into the daylight, drive a stake through his heart, and be done with it.
But they had a pact, a truce forged in necessity.
Rick looked the other way when Schreck’s nest needed hiding.
In return, Schreck fed only on the damned—rapists, killers, men with blood already on their hands.
Rick had watched it happen. Had cleaned up afterward.
The blind spots of justice filled in by a monster who kept his word.
It didn’t sit right. But it sat. And right now, there were worse things prowling Calgrave’s streets.
Another image bloomed in his mind, worming its way into his thoughts like a prophecy of doom.
Ash Hunter, sitting in his car, divine and diabolical.
The curve of his lips when he smiled. That slow, feline grace when he stepped into his clothes, half aware of the man watching him, half playing it up.
Those impossible eyes. That voice, a low hum wrapped in velvet thorns.
‘I think you’re afraid of what I make you feel.’
If he had nothing more than his voice, he could break your heart with it.
Rick’s hand drifted downward, closing around the base of his cock.
It surged to life, huge, hard, pulsing. He told himself it was just release.
Just tension. Just too damn long since he’d had someone, anyone, below him, panting into his mouth, clutching at his shoulders, wanting what he had to give. A man had needs. Even a man like him.
A lie, and he knew it.
His grip tightened. His hand moved faster.
Water slicked over him like oil. In his mind, Ash tilted his head, smirked.
Said something teasing that made Rick’s gut clench.
The image flared too easily—Ash’s mouth against his, those clever fingers making him undone, that lean, perfect body laid bare beneath him, hot and pliant.
Fantasy burned bright behind his eyes as Ash sank to his knees and leaned in, that ripe mouth wrapping around his cock, sliding down his shaft with hungry precision.
Rick gasped, sharp and guttural, and came with a strangled moan, forehead pressed to the tiles. It wasn’t loud or glorious. It felt raw. Messy. A scab ripped from a wound.
He stayed like that for a long time, breath shuddering, skin burning under the too-warm water. When he finally reached to shut it off, the silence that followed was deafening.
He toweled off and wiped the steam from the mirror with his hand. The glass threw his reflection back at him, blurred at the edges but looking better than it had moments ago. Was it the shower or the orgasm that helped?
Only one more thing left. He ran the tap again, filled the basin, and lathered soap in his palm.
With steady hands, he drew the razor along his jawline, each pass revealing sharp angles and quiet resolve.
The stubble would be back by the next evening—there was no escaping that—but for now, he could feel clean. Whole.
When he finished, he stepped naked into the cool hush of the apartment, still damp and aching.
The television blinked its red standby light in the corner, the only sign of life.
The walls felt too far apart and too close all at once.
There were no family photos. His brother’s ashes sat in an urn at a cemetery he hadn’t visited in weeks.
His ex-wife had taken the last of her things months ago and never looked back.
Outside the window, the moon emerged from behind the clouds—a waxing gibbous. Almost time; in three nights it would be full. He touched the glass, the hair on his forearm rising. Soon, the hunger would come. The change. But for now, at least, it was quiet. And he could rest. If only for a night.