Shifting Rage (Monsters of New York #22)

Chapter One

Broken Glass and Bullshit

Briana

Everyone at The Gin Room treats me like I am made of glass.

Not cheap glass. Not the kind that shatters in an alley and gets swept into a dustpan while someone curses about cutting their hand. That would almost be better. Cheap glass breaks, bleeds someone, and gets thrown away.

No, they treat me like expensive glass. The kind kept behind locked cabinets. The kind people admire from a distance and never touch unless their hands are clean and their voices are soft. The kind everyone watches too closely because one wrong move might send it crashing to the floor.

I hate it.

I hate the careful smiles.

I hate the gentle voices.

I hate the way conversations snap to an end when I walk into a room, like everyone is hiding the sharp parts of the world from me as if I haven’t already seen them. As if I don’t still feel them in my sleep, in my skin, in the phantom ache at my throat where teeth once sank too deep.

The bruises are gone. The bite marks are gone. The nightmares aren’t. And to me, that seems like a cruel trade.

I stare at the ceiling above my bed and count the cracks in the old plaster. There are seven. Eight, if I count the tiny one above the window that branches like lightning. I have counted them every night since Aldron moved me into this apartment a couple of blocks from The Gin Room.

The apartment is beautiful.

I resent that too.

Polished wood floors. Soft gray walls. A bed big enough for someone who doesn’t wake up swinging at ghosts.

A couch that swallows me whole if I let it.

Fresh flowers on the kitchen counter because Ari says flowers are “emotionally supportive,” and a basket of snacks beside them because Korvin apparently believes trauma can be bullied into submission with protein bars.

I laughed when he handed them to me. Then I cried in the shower for twenty minutes. Healing is humiliating, and no one warns you about that part.

They tell you surviving is brave. They tell you that you are strong. They tell you the worst is over as if your body gets the message just because the door is open and the monsters are gone.

But my body is a stupid, stubborn thing.

It still remembers cold hands. Sharp teeth. The metallic stink of blood drying on my skin. It remembers being hungry, weak, and too tired to scream. It remembers the sound of my own pulse becoming dinner music for creatures who smiled while they hurt me.

So, no, I am not sleeping... Again. At 2:17 in the morning, I give up pretending and shove the blankets off my legs.

“Fuck this,” I whisper.

My voice sounds rough. Small. And I hate that too.

I pull on leggings, an oversized black sweater, and boots. My blonde hair is a mess around my face, tangled from hours of pretending to rest. In the mirror beside the door, I look almost normal.

Almost.

There are shadows beneath my eyes and a hollowness in my cheeks that was not there before. My mouth is pressed into a line I don’t recognize. My throat is bare, the skin smooth again, and somehow that makes me angrier than the bruises did.

At least the bruises told the truth. I touch two fingers to the side of my neck. Nothing. No marks. No proof. Just memory.

My stomach twists, and before I can think better of it, I grab my keys and leave the apartment.

The hallway is dim and still. Most of the staff apartments are occupied by creatures that could rip me apart with little effort.

Witches. Shifters. A half-fae dragon queen.

A bear who looks like he could bench press a truck and probably has.

The bar’s owner is an ancient vampire with more secrets than furniture.

And me? The human blood bag they dragged out of hell.

My fingers tighten around my keys until the metal bites into my palm. “Not anymore,” I murmur.

The elevator opens with a soft ding, and I flinch anyway. Anger follows immediately, hot and welcome. I step inside and press the ground-floor button harder than necessary. My reflection stares back from the polished metal doors. For a second, the shadows behind me move wrong.

My breath stops.

Dark walls. Red velvet. A hand in my hair.

I blink, and the vision is gone, and it’s just me. Just the elevator. Just my heart trying to break itself against my ribs.

When the doors open, I step out before fear can change its mind and crawl up my spine. I walk a few blocks to The Gin Room. The side entrance is locked, but Aldron gave me a key after I got tired of pretending I liked being trapped upstairs.

He called it freedom. Ari called it progress. Knox said nothing.

Knox rarely says anything. He watches instead. From doorways. From corners. From the end of the hallways and across the main floor of the bar. He never stands too close. Never speaks too much. Never asks me questions I might not want to answer.

Somehow, that makes it worse.

Pity would be easier. Pity is familiar enough to sharpen into a weapon. If Knox looked at me the way everyone else does, I could hate him for it. I could bare my teeth, spit venom, and make him regret the softness in his eyes. But Knox doesn’t look at me like I am broken.

He looks at me like something precious was stolen, and he knows exactly where the bodies of the people who did it need to be buried.

That should scare me. It doesn’t. Which is a problem I am absolutely not prepared to deal with at 2:00 in the morning.

I let myself into the bar.

The Gin Room is different after closing.

During business hours, it’s all heat, bodies, and noise. Music throbs through the floor. Laughter spills over velvet couches. Supernatural creatures drink and flirt and threaten each other beneath amber lights while humans dance too close to monsters and call it fun.

Empty, the place feels older. Hungrier.

The long bar gleams in the low security lights, dark cherrywood polished smooth by decades of hands, elbows, and secrets.

Black-and-white photographs stare from gilded frames along the walls.

Faces I don’t know. Creatures I probably don’t want to know.

The air smells like citrus, gin, spilled desire, and old magic soaked deep into the bricks.

I breathe it in.

For some reason, the bar is easier than the apartment, maybe because no one expects peace down here.

I move behind the counter and run my fingers over the polished surface. There’s a nick near the service station, small but deep. Another scar mars the edge by the sink. Proof that beautiful things can be damaged and still remain useful.

Apparently, I am identifying with furniture tonight. Fucking great.

I crouch and open the mini fridge beneath the counter. Rows of mixers, cut fruit, and bottled water stare back at me. No alcohol. That’s a rule I made with myself.

No dulling the edges. The edges are mine. Sharp, ugly, and mine.

I grab a bottle of water and twist off the cap. My hands shake a little, but not enough to spill. Another victory no one will clap for.

The first sip is cold enough to hurt. Good. Pain I choose is easier.

“You shouldn’t be down here alone.”

The voice rolls through the dark like thunder wrapped in gravel. I don’t scream, and that feels important. I do, however, slam my shoulder into the open fridge door hard enough to send pain sparking down my arm.

“Shit.” I whirl around, clutching the water bottle like it might save me from anything worse than dehydration.

Knox stands in the hallway leading to the underground fighting level. Of course he does. Where else would a Minotaur lurk at 2:00 in the morning besides the shadows beneath a supernatural bar?

He is half-hidden in darkness, but there’s no hiding the size of him.

Knox is built like violence given a body.

Six and a half feet of muscle, broad shoulders, thick arms, and heavy chest. His black t-shirt pulls tightly across him, and gray sweatpants hang low on his hips, doing absolutely nothing to make him less distracting.

One of his hands is wrapped in white tape while the other hangs loose at his side, fingers flexing once.

His dark hair is cropped close at the sides, longer on top.

His beard frames a mouth that never smiles around me.

Maybe never smiles at all. There’s a scar cutting through his left eyebrow and another along his jaw, pale against golden-brown skin.

He looks like the kind of man mothers warn daughters about. Mine would have taken one look at him and moved to another state.

I hate that my first instinct is not to run. I hate that some traitorous part of me settles because he is here.

“I could say the same to you,” I say, because apparently fear has not killed my ability to be difficult.

His dark eyes narrow. “I work here.”

“So do I.”

“No.” His voice is quiet. “You don’t.”

The words hit wrong, and my spine snaps straight. “Excuse me?”

Something shifts in his face. Not regret, exactly. Knox doesn’t seem like a man who lets regret show where anyone can see it. But the muscle in his jaw jumps.

“That isn’t what I mean.”

“It sounds exactly like what you mean.”

“You’re healing.”

I laugh, but it’s not a pretty sound. Healing. Recovering. Resting. Such delicate words for bleeding out in places no one can see.

“I’m so glad everyone keeps telling me that,” I say, my words heavy with sarcasm. “Very helpful. I had no idea.”

Knox takes one step forward, and I take one back before I can stop myself.

He freezes, and the air between us changes instantly.

His gaze drops to my boots, then lifts back to my face.

He saw. Of course, he saw. He probably sees everything.

The tremor in my fingers. The way I keep my back close to the wall.

The fact that I measure exits before entering a room now.

Shame burns through me, bright and vicious. I hate shame most of all.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he says.

“You didn’t.”

His expression doesn’t change. Liar, his silence says.

I twist the cap off the bottle until the plastic cracks under my grip. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you know something about me.”