Poison Me (The Poison City #1)
Chapter One — Breath and Blood
The city always smelled worse before rain.
Not the upper districts with their filtered towers and silver-lit bridges. Not the cathedral
wards where incense burned through ventilation grates twenty-four hours a day to hide
the rot beneath the stone.
Down here, in the lower veins of Poison City, rain dragged everything back to the surface.
Oil.
Blood.
Mold growing between cracked concrete.
The sweet chemical scent of expired Breath canisters leaking into alley drains.
Avery Quinnly Nimh kept her head lowered as she crossed the market corridor, black
gloves pulled tightly over her hands despite the humidity clinging to her skin. The hood of
her coat shadowed most of her face, but she still felt people looking.
They always looked.
Then they looked away.
Fast.
Nobody brushed against her in the crowd. Nobody reached too close when she passed. The
market moved around Avery like water splitting around a stone.
A curse without needing to be spoken aloud.
The overhead lights flickered green through the smogged glass ceiling, casting sickly color
over hanging meat hooks and rusted vendor cages. Somewhere deeper in the corridor,
someone coughed hard enough to bring up fluid.
Avery’s fingers tightened around the strap secured against her hip.
The bag rested where it always did.
Black leather. Worn soft with age. Silver zipper half-tarnished. Thick stitching running
along the inner seams where she’d repaired it so many times the thread no longer matched.
Inside sat a folding knife.
A bundle of black ivy tied with twine.
And the journal.
Her pulse eased slightly just feeling its weight there.
Still safe.
Still with her.
“Two filters for one canister!”
“Fresh vent masks!”
“Last shipment before ration cuts!”
The shouting blurred together beneath the constant mechanical hum of the district
ventilators overhead. Avery moved quietly between bodies, careful not to let exposed skin
show even once.
A child darted through the crowd chasing something metallic across the ground.
He slammed directly into her shoulder.
The world stopped.
The boy froze.
His mother went pale instantly.
“Oh God—”
Avery stepped back so fast her heel caught broken pavement.
“I’m sorry,” she said immediately. “I had gloves on.”
The woman yanked the child behind her hard enough to make him cry.
People nearby stared now.
Watching.
Measuring.
Avery felt it spreading through the corridor already — recognition moving faster than
sound.
Poison Girl.
Her throat tightened.
“It was an accident,” she whispered.
The woman didn’t answer.
She just dragged the boy away.
Avery stood motionless for one terrible second longer before forcing herself forward again,
deeper into the crowd, deeper into the noise, pretending her chest didn’t ache.
She shouldn’t care anymore.
That was the humiliating part.
After years of this, she should’ve stopped caring.
Instead, every recoil still cut open something soft inside her.
Rain began tapping faintly against the fractured ceiling overhead.
Avery exhaled slowly and turned into a narrower side corridor lined with dying fluorescent
lights and old religious murals stained black from moisture.
Quieter here.
Better.
She reached into her pocket, pulling free a tiny silver pill case.
One Breath tablet remained inside.
Just one.
Her stomach twisted.
The next ration cycle wasn’t for four more days.
Too long.
Especially with the air quality worsening again.
The city’s air wouldn’t kill her in four days. That was the thing people from the upper
districts never quite understood — immediate suffocation wasn’t the mechanism.
Unfiltered air just worked on you slowly, like debt. The chemical compounds accumulated
in lung tissue year by year, the body working harder and harder to process each breath
until one day a flight of stairs felt like drowning. Lower district residents died at fifty of
things that shouldn’t kill anyone. Upper district residents died at eighty wondering why the
poor couldn’t manage their health better.
Four days without a tablet wouldn’t stop her breathing.
But it would make every breath feel like working against something. The burning started
mild — a tightness in the chest that sharpened over hours into a persistent ache, headaches
settling behind the eyes and staying. By day three it was fog and effort and the specific
misery of a body running at twice the cost for half the result.
For Avery the stakes were different anyway. The tablets didn’t only help her breathe. She’d
worked that out herself over years of quiet trial and error she’d never told anyone about —
the compounds in Breath did something to her contamination, suppressed it, kept the black
veins from climbing when her emotions spiked. She’d been taking one extra per cycle for as
long as she could manage it, staying just ahead of the threshold where the poison started
waking up.
Four days without meant four days of burning lungs and four days of whatever lived under
her skin paying closer attention.
Both things were problems.
The second one more than the first.
She slipped the case away carefully.
Then stopped walking.
Someone was behind her.
Not close.
But steady.
Boot steps.
Unhurried.
Avery’s pulse slowed instead of quickening.
Because she knew those footsteps.
Knew the rhythm.
Knew the deliberate pause between strides like he never rushed for anyone in the world.
A smile almost reached her mouth before she could stop it.
“You’re getting worse at sneaking up on me,” she murmured without turning.
Warm laughter answered behind her.
“Cruel,” Vince Moretti said. “I practiced that entrance.”
Vinny stood beneath the flickering corridor light with rain caught in the dark curls falling
over his forehead, one hand tucked into the pocket of an expensive black coat that
definitely did not belong in the lower districts.
Everything about him looked wrong here.
Too clean.
Too expensive.
Too alive.
And still, somehow, he fit the ruins better than most people Avery knew.
“You cut your hair,” she said softly.
Vinny blinked once. “That’s the first thing you noticed?”
“It looks shorter.”
“You’re devastating my ego.”
Despite herself, Avery smiled.
The expression came easier around him. Less foreign.
Vinny watched it appear like it was something precious instead of accidental.
That look in his eyes always made her nervous.
Not because it frightened her.
Because it didn’t.
That was worse.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she murmured, glancing toward the corridor entrance. “Someone
could recognize you.”
“They usually do.”
“That isn’t comforting.”
“Wasn’t meant to be.”
He stepped closer.
Not enough to touch.
Never enough to touch.
But close enough that Avery could smell rainwater and smoke clinging to his coat beneath
the expensive spice-heavy cologne he wore.
Upper district scent.
Warm.
Dangerously familiar.
“You missed last week,” she said quietly.
Vinny’s expression shifted for only a second.
Too fast for most people to notice.
Avery always noticed.
“Family business,” he said.
Lie.
Not a full one.
But not truth either.
She let it go anyway.
The city taught people quickly that survival and honesty rarely lived together.
A train screamed somewhere above them through rusted transit rails. Dust drifted from the
ceiling overhead in soft gray clouds.
Vinny’s gaze lowered briefly toward the silver pill case partially visible inside Avery’s coat
pocket.
“One left?”
She instinctively covered it with her sleeve.
His jaw tightened slightly.
“That bad?”
“The rations were cut again.”
“They cut Lower Vein too?”
“They cut everyone except the towers.”
Something dark crossed his face then.
Not surprise.
Anger.
The kind he tried to hide from her.
Avery hated when he looked like that. Like someone carrying around a violence too large
for their own skin.
Vinny reached slowly into his coat pocket.
“No.”
Her voice came instantly sharper.
He ignored it and pulled out a small black packet stamped with the Moretti serpent crest in
silver foil.
Military-grade Breath tablets.
Not district issue.
Upper-tier.
Rare.
Avery stared at it.
“Vinny—”
“Take them.”
“I can’t.”
“You can spend four days with your chest on fire or you can take the tablets. Pick one.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
He held the packet out farther.
Rain tapped harder overhead now, soft static against fractured glass.
Avery looked at the silver serpent seal.
House Moretti controlled nearly forty percent of the city’s purified oxygen filtration
systems. Their warehouses held enough Breath reserves to keep entire districts alive for
months.
Meanwhile people down here traded heirlooms for expired pills and prayed their lungs
lasted through winter.
She could already feel the start of it — a faint tightness beginning in her chest that wasn’t
grief, just her body registering the depleted supply and beginning to compensate. By
tomorrow it would be a proper burn. By day three she’d have the headache that sat behind
her left eye like a nail.
“You shouldn’t steal from your family for me,” she whispered.
Something almost amused flickered through his expression.
“Who said I stole them?”
“That somehow feels worse.”
Vinny laughed quietly.
God, she loved that sound.
The realization hit Avery hard enough she physically stiffened.
Loved.
Not wanted.
Not trusted.
Loved.
The word sat like broken glass inside her ribs.
Dangerous.
Impossible.
Vinny noticed the shift immediately.
He always did.
His voice softened.
“Aves.”
Nobody else called her that.
Nobody else could.
“You’re doing it again,” he murmured.
“Doing what?”
“Looking at me like I’m already dead.”
Her throat tightened.
Because sometimes she did.
Sometimes every person she cared about already looked halfway buried in her mind.
It was easier that way.
Safer.
“I don’t want those,” Avery admitted quietly, staring at the Breath packet instead of him.
“Why?”
“Because then I owe you.”
Vinny went still for one long second.
Then he stepped forward.
Closer than before.
Close enough that Avery stopped breathing entirely.
People didn’t understand what proximity felt like for her.
The constant awareness.
The calculations.
Skin.