Chapter 6
The killer had gone silent after those words.
But he hadn’t disappeared, and that seemed more dangerous.
Predators moved when they wanted to be seen; they quieted when they were close enough not to need the chase.
Somewhere inside the noise and strobing light, Audrey felt him waiting for her to make a wrong move.
But why?
Audrey frowned, scanning the overfull club. Bodies pressed together as night bled toward morning. Still, the face she’d know anywhere was missing. Strobes and neon fractured her vision, flooding everything with light.
Her eyes twitched under the assault.
She half-closed her eyes and drifted, weightless in the chemical glow. The floor stuck to her shoes, throat burning from the last hit. She dug her nails into her hand, just enough to feel it.
Stay here.
Stay in your body.
Drugs worked too well. They shut out everyone and made the world unreal.
She wasn’t just chasing a high—she was running from a memory she couldn’t bear to remember sober.
Every time she slowed down, she saw the fire again and heard the screams. Her mother’s face, twisted with rage inside the flames, had haunted her in every sober moment.
Moving inside the club was easier during these times.
Audrey drifted through the crowd, invisible even to herself, like an apparition with lipstick and instincts.
She searched for Skyler. Even this high, Audrey kept looking back at her friend.
Skyler was alive and upright—not dead in the dressing room. That counted as good luck these days.
Audrey tipped her drink back, shaking off paranoia.
If the killer lurked nearby, he’d struggle to get her alone in this crush. Too many observers, too many witnesses. The crowd’s murmur merged into background noise, easy to tune out.
She laced fingers with her client, squeezed, and nearly toppled. Wobbly from the hit, but worth it. Bliss poured through her blood. Other people’s thoughts cut out, like a severed wire.
Her stockbroker client—Mike or Mark—smelled of cologne and spreadsheets. He breathed against her ear: “You’re so beautiful. I love your tattoo.” His fingers followed the roaring bear ink along her back across the one thing about her that still felt like power.
He paid well. She wished he’d shut up so she could pretend he was someone else.
Audrey led him to the couches, dragged him atop her.
She slipped her hand between his legs, cupping him in a brisk, practiced motion.
He pawed at her breasts, his mouth trailing down her belly.
A muted noise escaped her, more a performance than pleasure.
Her head lolled to the side, roaming the room behind heavy lids.
Everyone else was busy.
Skyler had a client bent over the couch. Tara straddled another, relentlessly. Further down, an unfamiliar couple tangled together.
She didn’t know them. New blood.
The man knelt between the woman’s thighs, shadows veiling his face.
The air around him was pressurized. Like the room itself was bracing for something it couldn’t explain—and she’d found the source.
A maelstrom churned beneath his skin, and the sense of other was so real it bordered on physical, pressing against her aura, not just her nerves.
She kept watching.
Each time the strobes flashed, his eyes seemed darker than they should. Light never reached his collar. Shadows devoured his face. Audrey ignored her client, homing in on him.
Though in darkness, she saw he was tall, lean, and strong. Tattooed forearms flexed. Black ink bands disappeared beneath his sleeves. The shape snagged her attention, drawing on memory.
She couldn’t place why.
His hands—large, veined, hair-roughened—held the woman’s thighs. Heat flushed through Audrey as he moved.
He hadn’t noticed her, but his stillness made her think he knew.
Did he?
The woman pulled him closer by his hair. He let her legs fall, fumbled his fly, freed himself, then pushed inside with a hard thrust. His hands locked on her hips, no hesitation or gentling. He stayed silent while the woman gasped. Shadows kept his face concealed.
It was impossible to stop staring. She wondered how long it would take him to notice her.
Look at me. The thought snuck in, uninvited.
His head lifted, slowly. Like he’d been aware of her the entire time and had simply decided the moment had come.
Their eyes connected through haze, smoke, and light, shocking Audrey’s system.
His eyes were wrong—black, with no iris or white. Maybe hers looked the same with her pupils enlarged from being high.
A firm pull snapped along her back when his attention landed, tingling shooting through her limbs—the same electric prickle before a fight. Something about him was disturbingly familiar.
They stared longer, and the room emptied to just him.
Her breathing kicked, not simply from fear but also from acknowledgment.
Then, something old surfaced, a feeling of dread.
The sensation of standing at the brink of what had already destroyed her.
Behind her, a known mind pressed against her awareness.
It was precise, but furious. She knew that anger.
Alex?
Was this a memory? No, it was as if her friend’s mind was passing through the crowd—familiar enough to wound, immediately wrong in a way she couldn’t name. That couldn’t be right, though. Sarai had tight security and didn’t let anyone in.
She ignored it and went back to watching the man on the couch. Before she could think better of it, her aura reached out to him.
Auras weren’t a figment of her imagination.
They were a psychic field that responded to her emotions and will.
Ever since she’d been a child, Audrey had sensed energy around her.
The doctors had called it hyperempathy, but Audrey knew it was more.
This ability was tangible. It was a physical ability that let her graze other people’s consciousness, feel their moods, even read their minds without warning.
When she was high, her aura flowed into the world even more easily, and right now, it spread forward like smoke, knotting with the strange man’s.
At first, nothing happened. But a second later, his mind opened for her.
She entered, but everything about him felt different than a normal mind. It was as if he’d known she’d reach, as if she’d just confirmed a suspicion he’d long held.
Her breathing stumbled at how good he felt.
Her hands drifted down in slow circles as she arched her back, giving the stockbroker more of what he wanted.
But her focus stayed on the stranger. Reaching deeper, she encountered layer upon layer of chaos.
Not messy chaos but rather a structure built on force.
A familiar voice in an unfamiliar language resounded in her head.
Gor ari gousi.
His emotions crashed into her, too—fear and awe. And deeper?
Recognition.
Interest.
Curiosity.
He tensed in calculation, but all she could do was admire the alien disorder of his mind. A chill wave of disdain hit hard, turning her stomach.
Then, he broke the connection. Like he decided he’d had enough. She gasped, air stuck in her lungs.
His arm shifted; the tattoos gleamed in the light. The world dropped away.
No, that couldn’t be right.
But the memory snapped into place—black bands of moving ink, sharp-angled.
He smiled. His white teeth made time stutter.
It was him.
The man from the backyard. The voice from the prison gate. The mind on the bus. He was more than a stranger; he was at the center of her nightmares, the witness to everything she’d survived and everything she still feared.
He was here.
That perfect smile he’d flashed her meant this meeting had gone exactly as he wanted, and she’d been too high, too wrapped up in hiding and denial to notice it.
Neither of them moved.
The club’s roar melted beneath the drumming in Audrey’s ears. A figure blocked the strobe. The aura that struck her was unmistakable.
Alex.
Alex towered above, eyes on her client. He didn’t spare her a glance.
A hard shove knocked Audrey off the couch. “Get away from him, Audrey,” Alex said, fury coming from his aura.
Her hands hit the tacky floor before she registered the movement. The room twirled, sound warped. At first, she thought the client pushed her. But he sat slack-jawed, dick out.
Alex had pushed her.
She scrambled upright and looked over her shoulder.
The woman had slid off the killer, and he was already on his feet.
Black eyes stared through the dark, a snarl aimed at Alex.
Before she could warn Alex, a shadow sprang.
The tattooed man grabbed him by the coat and shoved him against the wall. Mirrors trembled from the impact.
Alex didn’t flinch. Not even a little.
Did he not see those eyes?
They simply stared at each other. The look that passed between them should have been the only thing she cared about, but the drugs turned it into just another shard of panic she couldn’t yet hold.
“You shouldn’t treat her like that,” the strange man said.
The way he said those words did something to Audrey, but she couldn’t react, still frozen in shock.
Alex remained composed. “Leave,” he said. “Before I tell her everything.”
Seeing her friend was more nerve-racking than facing the killer.
The killer’s presence was horrific, but Alex’s meant answers—and answers always cost more.
If he were here now—in the middle of Sarai instead of being there when she needed him—then wherever he’d been wasn’t something he’d wanted to tell her gently.
It was something he’d waited to tell her when she had no choice but to listen.
A faint smile played at the stranger’s mouth. “Careful, Alex,” he murmured, eyes glancing at Audrey. “You’re late.”
Then he slipped into the crowd.
Her insides clenched when she looked at her friend.