Chapter 2
chapter two
SAINT SHADE
The thing about dangling forty feet in the air by a strip of fabric as thin as a shoelace is this: the crowd loves this part a hell of a lot more than I do.
They see danger. They see mystery. They see Saint Shade, the untouchable god of Vegas acrobatics and magic, the devil with the black halo.
Me? I feel my balls trying to crawl back into my body as I swing upside down and let go with one hand.
The audience gasps. Music booms. The spotlight follows me with exact precision, making me look otherworldly.
I grin under the mask. They can’t see it, not with the black gaiter pulled up over my jaw, but they feel it. It’s in the way I hold my body, the way I flex as if every move is calculated foreplay. The mask makes everything sexier—because the imagination does half the work.
And damn, do they imagine.
The silks burn against my palm as I drop three loops and catch myself a heartbeat before splattering into the orchestra pit. Pyro bursts at the stage edges—blue flame, hot and sharp. The front row screams like they’re watching me combust.
They eat this shit up.
I walk across the stage, setting off pyrotechnics as I go. I reach the black silks in the corner and climb again, every muscle burning, my shoulders screaming, abs tight. At the top, I twist, let the fabric coil me like a python. And then I release.
For half a second, I’m weightless. Spinning. Nothing but gravity and trust in my own masochism.
Then the silks catch, jerking me to a stop, and the crowd loses its mind.
Cards erupt around me, pulled from the deck strapped to my wrist. With a twist of my free hand, they spin in a cyclone, catching fire mid-air. Sleight of hand? Sure. But with enough flex, enough sweat, and the right lighting, it looks like I conjured flames from my veins.
The last card—the Ace of Clubs—flickers out of the air and lands neatly between my teeth. I flip down, drop into a controlled fall, and land center stage with one knee down, one fist planted on the floor—superhero landing style, and a thud that echoes through the floorboards.
The music cuts.
Silence for one breathtaking beat.
And then the theater explodes.
Every seat filled, every person on their feet, clapping, screaming, hollering like they’ve just been blessed by something unholy. A woman in the second row is openly crying. A guy in the balcony flashes me his tits, which I did not need tonight, but hey—Vegas.
As the curtain begins to close, I saunter forward. When I reach the edge, I hook my thumb under the black fabric that covers the lower part of my face, and lift. With only my mouth exposed, I drag my tongue across my upper teeth, and flash them a wicked grin. And the crowd loses their damn minds.
It’s my signature. My sign off. The little tease I use to end every show. The mask glints in the light—horns, halo, gold etchings. And they eat up every inch of Saint Shade.
They don’t know me. They’ll never know me. But they’ll remember this.
And me? I’ll remember the sound.
The sound of five thousand people worshiping my mask.
The curtain swallows me whole as I step back, and I suck in air like I’ve just outrun death itself. Sweat drips down my spine. My chest heaves. My legs are shaking so hard I almost stumble when I step into the wings.
Back here, it smells like lighter fluid, singed hair, and spilled Gatorade—less glamorous than the firestorm on stage. Stagehands clap me on the shoulder, grinning, shouting congratulations. One of my flyers, a girl with shoulders carved like marble, tosses me a water bottle.
“Fucking killed it, Shade,” Shayla beams.
“Always do,” I say as I pull down the lower half of my mask to guzzle.
The thing is—out there, in the light, I am Saint Shade, Vegas’s dirtiest little secret. Back here? I’m just a guy trying not to throw up from adrenaline overdose.
I tug the mask the rest of the way off, feel the cool air hit my slick skin. My hair sticks to my temples. My lungs are still dragging in breaths like I haven’t been doing this five nights a week for years.
Then Eddie, my lighting guy, waves a hand. “Yo, your phone’s been blowing up the last fifteen minutes. Thought maybe your dick pics finally leaked.”
“I charge for those, nothing you could afford,” I say as I toss him a middle finger and grab my phone from the crate where I left it charging. The screen lights up, and I find sixty-nine notifications from TikTok. I only have one kind of notification for that app.
My stomach knots before I even open it.
I swipe. And there she is.
Willow Vale. Sitting pretty at her tarot table, her damn velvet cloth making everything look like witchy temptation, those blue eyes glinting like she can see straight through the camera—straight through me.
And my blood runs cold.
Because she’s talking about me again.
Saint Shade.
Her cards spill out one by one, and my whole body tenses. The Fool. The Devil reversed. Death. I never knew much about Tarot until the last few months. But I’ve been obsessively watching Willow’s videos, so I’ve learned. Which means I know it’s fucking bad before she even analyzes the cards.
She talks about running from my past, about reclaiming power, about how I’ve built a before-and-after life.
Holy shit.
Too close. Willow is way, way too fucking close.
I can’t move for a full thirty seconds. I just stare, pulse pounding in my ears, as if the video might morph into something safer if I keep watching.
It doesn’t.
Instead, her voice slips through me like a knife. “Who Saint Shade is now is not who he once was.”
I can’t breathe. She doesn’t know. She can’t know.
She doesn’t know my name. She doesn’t know what I even look like.
She can’t know. But those damn cards! I don’t know how she does it, or how those pieces of artistic paper know, but she’s circling like a hawk.
And if she keeps posting shit like this, someone out there will connect the dots.
My hard-earned escape, my freedom? It will all unravel.
Because of her.
Because I couldn’t stop myself from getting obsessed with her in the first place.
I should shut the app. Toss my phone in the dressing room sink and drown it until the screen fizzles.
But instead, my thumb scrolls to her profile like muscle memory.
Willow Vale.
Six hundred thousand followers. Tarot girl with the velvet table and the eyeliner sharp enough to open a vein.
And mine.
No, you idiot, I internally scold myself. Not yours. You’ve never even talked to her.
She doesn’t know it, but I’ve been watching her for months.
At first, it was curiosity. She’d left some thirsty comment on one of my thirst traps, and unlike the millions of others, hers actually made me laugh. Snarky. Sharp. Different. She didn’t just want Saint Shade’s body—she wanted to pick him apart, figure out who he was.
And that should’ve scared me off.
Instead, I leaned in.
I watched every video. Every smirk. Every shuffle of her deck like she was caressing a weapon. And then I dug deeper.
Because that’s what I do. Obsession isn’t a hobby. It’s a reflex. It’s a survival necessity.
Her name wasn’t hard to find. Going by @ValeTarot was on her every profile.
She’s posted enough videos from her bedroom that I could see the obvious Las Vegas skyline out her window.
What a lucky coincidence we live in the same city.
From there, a little bit of online searching turned up the Vale Tarot shop just two blocks off the Strip.
Curiosity pulled me there one day, and sure enough, the same woman I’d been stalking online walked into the shop.
A few searches through rental records turned up her first name: Willow. And if that wasn’t damn fitting for the raven-haired beauty reading tarot, I didn’t know what was.
With her full name, Willow Vale, it was easy.
Tax records. Utility bills. A few hacked files I’m not proud of.
I know where she lives. I know her schedule.
I know she closes her shop by ten most nights, and that she always buys the same iced coffee at the café on the corner before she opens at one in the afternoon.
And I know she never dates.
Not once in the three months I’ve been watching her has she gone home with anyone.
I shouldn’t be tickled fucking pink by that, but I sure fucking am.
Which is incredibly stupid and delusional on my part. Because I can’t touch her.
She can’t know who I am. Touching her would mean I can’t wear the mask, and that would mean my whole past caving in like an avalanche.
But if she keeps posting about me, I won’t have a career left.
I stare at the frozen frame of her face on my screen, cards spread in front of her like she’s already dissected me, already peeled back every layer I’ve spent a decade building.
I can’t let her keep doing this.
If she posts again, a single more clue—if the right person watches it—everything I’ve carved out of the ashes dies.
No more Saint Shade. No more Vegas throne.
And she’ll be the one who lit the match and set me ablaze.
I snag my hoodie from its hook, grab my mask, and storm out of my dressing room. I stalk past the backstage chatter. I don’t even notice if anyone calls after me. My head is ringing too loud.
I should wait. Take two seconds to think. Plan this. Hell, I should send one of my crew to “casually” talk her down. Maybe even send my lawyer with a cease and desist. But the idea of anyone else being between her and me makes my skin crawl.
No, this is mine.
I’m the one she’s obsessed with. I’m the one she taunts in her captions, the one she thirsts after in public like she already owns me.
And if I’m being honest with myself? I’m the one who can’t stop imagining what her voice would sound like whispering my name.
I slide behind the wheel of the car and peel out of the lot, city lights flashing across my windshield like strobe lights.