My body lurches forward automatically, and I step toward the mouth of the alley as if I’m about to follow the man who disappeared into its depths.
Then I freeze.
No. Why the fuck would I do that?
My gaze drops to the dirty pavement where the mugger went down, and my stomach churns at the sight of the fresh blood that spatters the ground, glinting almost black in the dim light.
Latent adrenaline and fear surge through my body as I realize how easily that could’ve been my blood. I remember the brutal sounds of the men attacking the meth-head. None of them made a noise. There were no shouts or jeers or taunts.
Just ruthless efficiency and cold violence.
A shiver wracks me, and I turn away from the alley suddenly, sprinting down the street toward a busier road a few blocks over. I need to get out of here. I need to get home.
As I reach Adams Street, I catch sight of a cab turning onto the road, and I practically hurl myself in front of it, desperate to make it stop. The driver hits the brakes and leans out the window with a shout. “What the hell is wrong with you, lady?”
I don’t answer. I just yank open the back door and slide inside, rattling off my address by rote.
He shoots me a suspicious look, like he’s thinking about telling me to get the fuck out of his cab. Then he grumbles something under his breath and pulls away from the curb.
It’s a short drive. I was more than halfway to my house when the meth-head pulled a knife on me. But my mind is buzzing as if it’s trying to receive a staticky radio signal, and my fingers drum out an erratic rhythm on the faux-leather seat beside me.
Those eyes.
One a pure, rich brown and the other a striking combination of summer blue and the same chocolate brown.
It was the dark-haired man from Club 47. And the same two men who were with him that night. All three rising up out of the darkness like ghosts from a fucking grave.
The man I saved. I know it’s him. I’m fucking sure of it.
It’s been over two years since I last saw him, but it would be impossible to forget his face.
Did he forget mine?
Does he know whose life he just saved?
My ride ends abruptly as the driver pulls up outside my apartment building. I grab several bills from my night’s tips and hand them to the driver with my shaking hand. As he pulls away, I race up the complex stairs and head to my apartment. Once inside, I immediately bolt the top lock, turn down the lights, and peek outside the window at the street below, breathing hard.
A shiver crawls up my spine as I wait in silence, wondering if I was being followed by more than just the meth-head tonight.
Wondering if I’ve been followed home.
Pain throbs at my side as I lie on the cold pavement, unable to move.
Each breath that passes my lips grows more and more shallow as I slowly bleed out from my wound.
My eyelids flutter closed and then open again at the warm sensation of someone touching me. I look up to see a man hovering over me, carefully checking my wounds. His hips settle between mine as he drapes his body over mine, cradling my face as the weight of him presses against my hips.
I know him.
I recognize him.
Two striking eyes stare back at me with a raw intensity that I’ve never forgotten. That I’ll never be able to forget.
His fingers brush away dark locks from my chest as he assesses the wreckage before him—my blood covered body, broken and destroyed.
My heart squeezes as a look of disappointment crosses his face. Beneath the gritty lights of the alley, his brown hair glows at the edges like an angelic crown fit for a king. Two men stand behind him. His sentinels. The other pieces of him.
His striking eyes search mine for answers to questions I’ll never know. He leans close and whispers in my ear, and just like I do every time, I strain to understand his words.
What is he saying? What does he want so desperately for me to know?
But the sounds travel into my mind without taking root. All I’m aware of is the feel of him speaking—the deep rumble of his voice and the way his breath stirs my hair.
He pulls back a little, and his expression shifts, a sliver of vulnerability rising to the surface, changing everything about his appearance.
When he lowers his head and claims a kiss, my whole body jolts at the warm sensation of his rough lips on mine.
The kiss begins slow like a waltz, but it quickly turns into a desperate race for something deeper. Harder.
The taste of copper fills my mouth as he slides two fingers across my bruised lips. In vain, I try to move my hips, needing something I can’t even name. Each press of his fingertips feels like an electric shock, painful and sweet at the same time.
He moans as his hand slips down my body, tracing every curve until he’s claimed all of me.
And as blood continues to pulse from my wounds in time to the fluttering beat of my heart, he thrusts inside me, splitting me open.
I wake with a jerk, sitting up so fast it makes me dizzy. Cold sweat drips down my back as I take in my surroundings. The room is dimly lit, but familiar. I’m back in my bed, in my apartment, in the shitty little complex on the west side of Halston.
Far away from that awful night so long ago.
So why the fuck doesn’t it feel like it?
Why does it feel like the past is in this fucking room with me, breathing down my neck?
My skin goes cold, and I clutch my covers to my chest, wrapping them around my body with my good arm. I drag my lower lip between my teeth, half-expecting my lips to feel bruised and swollen from kisses that aren’t even real.
Fuck.
It’s not the first time I’ve dreamed of the night I got shot. It happens all the fucking time, although sometimes the dreams are so ephemeral that I barely remember them. But it was more vivid last night than it’s been in months. I swear I could feel the weight of the stranger as he settled into the cradle of my body. I could feel his hands on my skin. I could practically breathe in the scent of him, and it filled me with a strange ache.
Attraction and revulsion.
Pleasure and pain.
Desire and fear.
My dreams of that night are always a confusing mix of polar opposites, as if I somehow crave the very thing I’m trying to flee from.
Ignoring the goose bumps that rise on my skin, I throw the covers off and pad to the bathroom. The dark ink of my tattoo stands out starkly against my pale skin, catching my gaze in the mirror as I wait for the water to heat up in the shower. I got it done almost a year ago, a month after I started working at Duke’s. The image popped into my mind fully formed, but I’m a shit artist, so I described it to the guy at the tattoo parlor and he sketched it out for me.
But he captured what was in my head perfectly. The ink covers my entire right arm—what’s left of it, anyway. Brilliant, deep red roses bloom on my skin, their petals shiny and smooth. Their stems bend delicately and gracefully, as if a wind stirs them, and a dark gray-blue ink fills the background of the image, growing lighter as it moves toward my shoulder.
The tattoo artist said it was one of the best pieces he’d ever done, but when he asked me why I picked it and where I came up with the image, I couldn’t tell him.
Just that I needed it.
Just that it felt necessary.
Steam starts to creep across the edges of the mirror, and I slip into the shower, letting hot water pelt my skin.
A face flashes in my mind as I lather my body with soap and begin to shampoo my hair. This can’t be the first time the man with mesmerizing eyes and I have crossed paths. It’s too much of a fucking coincidence that he and his friends were there to step in before the meth-head could hurt me last night.
How could they have known I needed help?
There’ve been moments over the last couple years where my skin has prickled oddly, where I’ve had the strange sensation of being watched. But the skin of my damaged arm often prickles where the nerves never healed quite right, and paranoia has been a constant companion as I’ve tried to overcome the lingering PTSD symptoms that followed in the wake of almost dying.
So I never took those odd feelings seriously. I always assumed they were products of my messed up mind, just another thing I would need to eventually overcome if I wanted to live a semi-normal life one day.
But what if it wasn’t all in my head?
What if that wasn’t the first time my path and the men from the club’s have crossed again?
What if last night was only the first time I knew about it?
The next few days are a blur as I stick to my routine: library, work, and then home. Despite my best attempt at pretending everything is fine, I can’t help but jump at every odd noise or any footsteps that seem to follow too closely. And I’m burning through money faster than I should by taking cabs to and from work and to the library.
I don’t want to be alone on the street, although it’s not a mugger I’m afraid of encountering.
It’s the man with the strange eyes.
But several more days pass, and I don’t see any sign of him or the two others who were with him. Slowly, I begin to relax back into my daily life, convincing myself that I’m probably wrong about what I think I saw. It must’ve been a trick of the light that turned the man’s eyes into the strange multi-colored ones I remember from the night I was shot.
It’s not the same guy. It can’t be.
A week after my attempted mugging, I’m back to taking the bus, ready to put the whole fucking thing behind me. I work a temp job in a wealthy neighborhood on the north side of town on Sunday, and by the time I get home, I’m exhausted.
As I walk the couple blocks to my apartment from the bus stop, I tug off my blazer and then undo the harness that secures my prosthetic arm to my body. I’ve been wearing the damn thing for hours, and taking it off feels better than taking a bra off at the end of the day.
I drape the blazer over the crook of my elbow and hold the soft silicone of my prosthesis in my hand, letting the arm dangle from my grip as I approach my building.
As I near it, I notice Natalie coming down the sidewalk from the other direction. Her strawberry blonde hair reflects the waning sunlight in gold highlights, but her sour expression when she catches sight of me ruins the effect.
She’s pretty, but only on the outside.
“Can’t you at least wear that thing like you’re supposed to?” She casts a disparaging look at the fake arm as we both head up the walkway toward our building. “Cover up your stump so the rest of us don’t have to see it?”
I roll my eyes. “Sorry if my debilitating injury makes you uncomfortable.”
She gives an irritated little huff.
I’ve known Natalie for years, since we were in our early teens. We both grew up in the foster system, and our paths crossed periodically as we went in and out of different homes. She moved into the building a little over a year ago, when she started school at the University of Halston. Somehow, she convinced her last foster family to pay for her education, and she’s taken great pleasure in rubbing it in my face ever since.
When we reach the short set of steps leading up to the front entrance of our apartment building, I glance over at her and find her grinning smugly at me.
“Where were you today?” she asks. “The library again?”
“No. Work.”
“Huh.” She laughs lightly. “Which one? The bar or the shitty temp job?”
Irritation burns inside me. “Why do you care?”
She shrugs. “I don’t. I’m just wondering what kind of career you expect to ever have with a resume that lists a diploma from a public library and previous work experience as pouring beers for frat boys and filing papers.”
My teeth grind together. Truthfully, she’s not saying anything I haven’t thought of before on my own, but I don’t want to hear this shit from her. She’s not asking out of concern, or even out of genuine curiosity. She’s asking because she wants to get a rise out of me. She wants to make me feel small so that she can feel bigger.
“I dunno, Nat.” I stop with one foot on the base of the short stairs, turning to face her. “Maybe I’ll get a job banging your mom.”
It’s a stupid fucking joke. Neither of us know who our moms even are, which is how we both ended up in the foster system in the first place. But she annoys me enough that I don’t even care about the quality of my comeback. I just want to get her out of my face so that I can go inside and relax.
Her lip curls in annoyance and disgust as she sucks in a scandalized breath. I turn to head up the stairs, but as I lift my back foot, Natalie reaches out with hers and hooks my ankle, throwing me off balance.
My single hand is already full, and I can’t catch myself on my amputated one, so I go down awkwardly on the stairs, the blazer slipping off my arm as I let out a pained grunt.
The fall didn’t even hurt that bad, but my heart beats harder anyway, anger making my cheeks grow hot. I look back over my shoulder to see Natalie grinning down at me, a cruel glint in her green eyes.
“Ouch. Are you okay, Ayla?” I could almost believe the false concern in her voice if she hadn’t been the one to trip me. “These stairs can be really dangerous. Especially for the disabled.”
All right. That’s e-fucking-nough.
I press away from the stairs, regaining my balance on the cement walkway as my grip tightens on the smooth forearm of my prosthesis. When Natalie steps forward to walk around me, I pivot in place, swinging the silicone arm up in a wide arc. It smacks against the left side of her face—hard—and she stumbles sideways, letting out a yelp of pain and shock.
By the time she regains her equilibrium and turns back to me, I’m standing straight and tall, my prosthesis dangling harmlessly from my loose grip.
There’s a bright red mark across her cheek, and I smile calmly at her as she stares at me with wrath in her eyes.
“That’s the thing about the disabled,” I drawl. “Sometimes you gotta watch the fake hand, not the real one.”
“You—you—” She sputters, obviously more picky about her comebacks than I am, since she doesn’t seem to be able to come up with an appropriate word to call me.
She finally gives up, pressing her lips together in a straight line and glaring at me before turning and stomping up the stairs and into the building. I watch the door slam shut behind her, a small, satisfied smile creeping across my lips.
Yeah, that might’ve been a little petty. But it was satisfying as fuck. Natalie has hated me ever since we were fourteen, when I got chosen by the foster parents she’d been hoping would pick her. They were rich and well-connected. Even back then, she was obsessed with getting powerful people on her side, with moving up in the world any way she could.
Joke’s on you, Nat. Those were the worst fucking years of my life.
She’ll never know the bullet she dodged. And she’ll always resent me for something I wish had never happened to me.
Shoving away the memories, I gather my shit and trudge up the short set of stairs after her. On the landing at the front entrance of the building, I set my stuff down to dig in my back pocket for my keys. But as my hand closes around the cool metal, my gaze flicks up—and I freeze.
A man is standing across the street, leaning casually against a car with one foot braced against the tire. He’s not moving. His face is impassive.
But he’s staring right at me.
