Chapter 1
The night had teeth. It bit at my skin as I crouched lower on the rooftop ledge, the cold concrete digging into my palms. My hair, honey gold, the exact shade my father used to say looked like sunlight spun into silk, was pulled back beneath a dark cap, but one loose strand had escaped, clinging stubbornly to my cheek, damp with the mist rising from the alley below.
My breath fogged in the air, clashing against the warmth still clinging to my twenty-four-year-old body, too restless, too alive to be swallowed whole by shadows.
I knew how I looked tonight with an oversized hoodie layered under a black jacket, leggings tucked into scuffed boots, not exactly the picture of grace.
But even stripped down, even hidden beneath the camouflage of black fabric and grit, I couldn’t escape the things people always noticed first, the honey-coloured hair, the wide amber-brown eyes that matched, a face that had always been a little too soft, a little too open for the hard-edged world I was now trying to survive in.
I was Clumsy, awkward, the girl who spilled her coffee or tripped over her own boots, that was me in daylight.
But right now, crouched in the dark, twenty-four years of living as her father’s daughter burned in my veins.
Reckless, maybe. Brave, definitely. Every ounce of me honed on the one thing that mattered… finding him.
Eight months. That was how long it had been since my father disappeared. Eight months since his voice had gone silent, his warmth ripped out of my life. People whispered he’d abandoned me. Others said he’d gotten in too deep, that the gambling and debts finally caught up.
They didn’t know him. They didn’t know the man who raised me single-handedly after my mother died when I was seven. They didn’t know the man who taught me how to fix a bike, how to swing a punch, how to spot a lie with a single glance.
My father hadn’t abandoned me. He’d been taken.
People whispered otherwise, of course. They said he’d run, that he’d cut his losses and left me behind.
But they didn’t know the nights I’d sat across from him at the kitchen table, listening to his quiet apologies while he shuffled another stack of overdue bills.
They didn’t know how many times I’d found him slumped in smoky back rooms, poker chips slipping through his fingers, and how many times I’d dragged him home before the sharks he owed money to came collecting.
Yeah, he had demons, though back then, I thought they were only the humankind.
His gambling was an addiction, a chain he never fully broke.
And I’d been the one bailing him out more times than I could count, selling off my own things, working doubles, bartering, begging, anything to buy him one more chance.
But he’d been there for me, always. He’d been the one steady thing in my life after Mom died.
When I scraped my knees, when bullies made jokes about the girl with no mother, when the world tried to convince me, I was too much of a mess to ever stand on my own, he was the one who told me different.
He was the one who never let me believe I was alone.
So maybe he wasn’t perfect. Maybe he stumbled more times than most men ever should. But he was my father. The only family I had left. And I refused to believe he’d walked away willingly.
I couldn’t lose him too.
And since the day that he had disappeared, I’d spent every hour since then piecing together where.
In the eight months since his disappearance of staring at a cold, silent phone. Eight months of pounding the pavement, of chasing scraps of rumours through dive bars and back-alley dens where men smelled of whiskey and old lies.
I’d broken into his apartment, every drawer, every notebook, every faded business card in the bottom of the junk drawer becoming a map I chased until my eyes burned from lack of sleep.
Half the time I ended up with nothing but paper cuts and another dead end.
The other half, I found men who didn’t like questions and liked women asking them even less.
I learned how to run fast. I learned how to use a broken beer bottle as a weapon. I learned how to keep my head down when I had to, and how to bluff when I couldn’t.
I’d pawned my mother’s necklace to pay for bus fare to chase a lead that led nowhere.
I’d spent nights sleeping in my car, parked outside bars he used to haunt, hoping someone would slip and mention his name.
I’d lied, manipulated, threatened, and once, even cried in the right man’s arms just long enough to get a list of warehouses where “business” happened after dark.
And now, all those threads had led me here. To this rooftop, crouched in the cold, watching the building below like it held the answers carved into its bricks.
I didn’t know if he was inside. I didn’t know if he was alive. But I knew this, every path I’d taken, every lead I’d chased, every hour of exhaustion and grief and fear had pointed me to one name.
Malakai.
And if he had anything to do with my father’s disappearance, then hopefully tonight, I’d find out. The trail led here. To this building.
It looked abandoned from the street, windows dark, the brickwork cracked and soot-stained from a fire long ago.
But the comings and goings I’d tracked for the last two weeks told a different story.
Big men in heavier coats than the weather demanded.
Vans that drove in heavy and left lighter.
No signs. No logos. And the same name whispered in the fragments I’d uncovered in pubs and back alleys; his name is Malakai.
Even saying it in my head sent a shiver down my spine. I didn’t know if Malakai was man, monster, or myth. But I knew he was connected to the demons, the same demons I’d once written off as fairy tales told to keep kids from wandering too far into the dark.
The first time I heard his name, it had been whispered, hissed really, between two men at O’Malley’s bar on the east side.
I’d been three whiskeys in, pretending not to listen while they played cards and lost money they didn’t have.
“Malakai doesn’t forgive debt,” one of them said, his voice low.
The other paled and muttered, “Better to owe the devil himself.”
I thought it was just criminal folklore, some bogeyman loan shark. But then I started hearing it again. At warehouses. In alleys. In the notes my father left behind, half scribbled, half smudged, like he’d been chasing the same ghost, and it finally caught him.
The night I stopped believing it was just a story, I was tailing a man I thought was tied to my father’s disappearance.
He ducked into a condemned building, and I followed.
What I saw… I told myself I was drunk, hallucinating, seeing shadows wrong.
But shadows don’t sprout claws. Shadows don’t peel back their jaws wide enough to swallow a man whole. Shadows don’t bleed black.
I remember the sound. Wet. Wrong. The man screamed until he didn’t, and when I stumbled back into the street, I thought I’d gone mad. I wanted to believe I was mad. Because the alternative meant the world wasn’t what I thought it was.
But the bruises on my arms from where one of them grabbed me said otherwise.
The smell of sulphur, clinging to my clothes for days, said otherwise.
And every whisper I followed after that, all the debts, all the missing people, all the blood in places it shouldn’t be, it all pointed to one name at the centre.
Malakai.
If my father was alive, he was tangled in that nightmare. And if he was dead, Malakai was the one who had the answers. Either way, I was done pretending demons weren’t real.
I adjusted my binoculars, focusing on the side entrance.
My heart pounded, my breath shallow, but my hands were steady.
Clumsy, awkward, a mess in daylight, that was me.
Trip over a chair, spill my coffee, make strangers stare when I knocked over displays in shops.
But here, in the dark, when it was about finding my father?
I was sharper because I can’t mess this up.
A figure shifted below, the door opening just wide enough to spill light into the alley.
My chest tightened, the faint glow catching on mist and turning it into something almost otherworldly.
The silhouette moved with confidence, too steady, too sure of itself to be some junkie looking for shelter.
Broad shoulders, a deliberate step, like a man who feared nothing because he had reason to fear nothing.
My nails dug into the rough concrete as I leaned forward, forcing myself to breathe evenly, though my heart was sprinting a marathon.
Every instinct screamed at me to move back, to blend deeper into the shadows, but I couldn’t.
If I looked away, if I missed something, then eight months of clawing through scraps of paper and whispered rumours would mean nothing.
The man paused just beyond the door, a cigarette ember flaring to life as he lit it. The tiny flame burned too bright in the dark, and for a second, I thought I saw the unnatural gleam of eyes catching the light. Not normal eyes. Predatory. My throat went dry, the chill of the night biting deeper.
This was it, the closest I’d been to anyone connected to Malakai. One wrong move and I was dead, but one right move could mean answers.
My chest rose and fell shallowly, adrenaline flooding me with heat that had nothing to do with the cold mist curling around the rooftops. I pressed closer to the ledge, forcing myself to stillness, to silence. I couldn’t blink. Couldn’t breathe too loud.
Because whatever stepped out of that building didn’t move like a man. And I had the sinking feeling that if I was caught, there wouldn’t even be enough of me left to bury.
And then…
“Not the smartest hiding spot,” a low voice murmured behind me.
I nearly screamed. My body jerked, almost slipping off the ledge, but a hand clamped around my wrist, steadying me with a grip like steel. My breath caught as I spun toward him.
The man was tall, his hair dark as midnight, his eyes…
God, his eyes were like shards of ice glowing faintly behind his tinted glasses under the moonlight.
It wasn’t just their colour, it was the way they pinned me, cold, calculating, like he was dissecting me without a single touch.
He wore black, every line of his body carved into the kind of stillness that didn’t come from training but from instinct, from being born to hunt.
He wasn’t simply dressed to disappear into shadow… he was the shadow.
Another man stood a pace behind him, broader, heavier, his frame built like a wall of muscle and menace.
Where the first radiated sharp-edged control, this one burned low and steady, eyes the colour of smouldering embers that seemed to strip the night down to nothing.
His silence wasn’t emptiness, it was warning.
He didn’t need to move to prove what he could do.
The weight of his presence was enough to make the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.
I swallowed hard, the sound loud in my ears. “Who the hell…”
The first man didn’t release me, not physically, but with his gaze, holding mine in a grip stronger than any chain.
Cold. Unblinking. And for a heartbeat, I swore I felt something snap through me, like a live wire catching flame.
The world tilted sideways, all the noise of the alley and the sting of the night air dimming, until there was nothing left but those glacial eyes locking me in place.
Whoever he was, he wasn’t ordinary. Was he also a Demon? He was a predator disguised in human skin, carved out of danger itself.
And worse, deep down, part of me wasn’t afraid. Not nearly enough. Heat curled low in my chest, something reckless and terrifying. Because standing there in the moonlight, with his eyes pinning me like prey…somehow, I didn’t want to run.
His head tilted slightly, a movement so subtle it was more animal than human, as though he were cataloguing me, measuring the exact shape of my breath, the pound of my pulse.
And then he moved. One step, soundless, and then another, until the shadows peeled back enough to reveal the hard lines of his jaw, the cut of his mouth, the breadth of his shoulders beneath the black clothes.
“You’re careless,” his voice cut through the night, low and rough, threaded with command. “Spying on Malakai alone. Do you have a death wish, or are you just reckless?”
My throat tightened. “I…I don’t even know who you are.”
“You don’t need to.” His gaze swept over me once, sharp as a blade, before snapping back to my face. “All you need to know is that you’re mine now.”
The word cracked something inside me, as impossible as it was infuriating. “Yours?” My voice shook, but not with fear…at least, not the kind I expected.
“Yes.” There was no hesitation, no flicker of doubt. The certainty in his tone sent another rush of fire through my veins. “You don’t belong here. You don’t belong to anyone else. From this moment onwards…” His jaw flexed, his nostrils flaring as though scenting the air. “…you are mine.”
Possessiveness burned in those ice-blue eyes, not the surface kind of a man staking a claim, but something deeper, more primal, as though every instinct in him had snapped awake.
I should have been outraged. I should have slapped him, or at least laughed in his face. But my lips wouldn’t move. My body wouldn’t obey. Instead, I stood there, heat flooding through me, every cell whispering the same treacherous truth.
I didn’t want to run.