The sign for Halesford flashes by in my headlights like a warning I’m too tired to heed.
Population 4,211.
Liars, the lot of them.
The steering wheel is slick under my palms. Somewhere between mile two hundred and three hundred, my coffee went cold and my spine welded itself to the driver’s seat. I should feel relief crossing the county line, like coming home, like the prodigal daughter returning.
Instead, my skin crawls.
The town sleeps under a bowl of cloud-thick sky. No stars, no moon. Just the orange haze of streetlamps and the long, dark smudge of the forest that wraps around Halesford like a possessive hand.
I tell myself I don’t remember why that hand scares me.
I’m lying.
When Mom called last week, her voice was thin and breathless through the phone. “Emmy, I need you.”
I already had a suitcase half-packed before she added, casually, “The doctors say it’s nothing, but… it would be nice to have you here if it turns out to be something.”
Manipulative, even on low oxygen.
“Just a week,” I whisper now, rolling through the deserted main street. The bakery, the diner, the faded movie theater—it’s all exactly as I left it and somehow smaller. “You stay alive for seven days, Grace Ross, and I’m gone again. Deal?”
The forest answers with a low murmur of wind through branches, a sound that prickles the back of my neck.
I shouldn’t have taken the back road.
But the highway was closed for construction, and the GPS insisted this winding ribbon through the pines is the fastest way to our crumbling little bungalow on the far edge of town. My nervous system, on the other hand, is screaming that fast and safe are not the same thing.
Something moves at the edge of the headlights. A flicker of gray. Then nothing.
“Just a deer,” I tell myself.
I don’t believe that, either.
By the time I make the turn onto Old Quarry Road, my shoulders are up around my ears. The pavement narrows, gobbled on both sides by trees. My high beams catch their trunks in harsh slices—white bark, black shadows, the occasional flash of what looks like eyes and probably isn’t.
I roll the window a crack. Cool night air knifes in, sharp with pine and damp earth and something metallic underneath, like a nosebleed waiting to happen.
My wrist stings.
I flex my fingers, shake out my hand on the steering wheel. I’ve had this weird phantom itch there all week, right over the pulse. Stress rash, I decided. Subconscious protest at coming back here.
The sensation spikes, a sudden jab of heat beneath the skin.
“What the—”
Headlights flare in my rearview mirror.
They’re too high, too bright, bearing down on me fast. I squint, blinking against the wash of light. Gravel crunches under my tires as I edge closer to the shoulder.
The engine behind me growls.
“Okay, okay, pass me, asshole.” I lift a hand, palm out, the universal go-around gesture. The road snakes ahead, pitched on a hill. My little hatchback whines in second gear, protesting.
The truck—if it is a truck—doesn’t pass. It sits on my bumper, light pouring into my car, searing my eyes, turning everything ahead of me into an overexposed wash.
Adrenaline hits like a shot of ice water. My breathing goes shallow.
This is nothing. Some bored local playing games. You’re just tired.
The lights blink out.
We plunge into blackness so sudden I gasp. I slap at the dash for the high beams, cursing, vision full of dancing spots. The old asphalt shimmers ahead, pale and uncertain.
Movement again. Not behind me this time.
In front.
Eyes—low to the ground, too far apart to be human—catch my feeble lights. Amber, then silver as they tilt.
I don’t think. I slam the brakes.
The car fishtails. Tires scream. The world snaps sideways and then there’s only trees rushing toward me, an explosion of branches across the windshield. My seatbelt knocks the wind out of me. The engine coughs, stalls.
Silence roars in the aftermath.
My heart is a hurricane. My wrist is on fire.
“Shit. Shit.” I fumble for my phone, chest tight. No bars. Of course. The one damn stretch of road the cell towers forgot.
The headlights cut a weak path into the trees. There’s nothing in front of me now. No truck behind. Only a narrow, crooked lane and the thick press of the forest.
And yet I am not alone.
The awareness is primitive, deep in the spine. The way you know someone is standing in a dark room with you even when they haven’t spoken.
Leaves rustle to my left.
My hand closes around the keys in the ignition. The engine chokes when I twist. Once. Twice. Then catches with a reluctant growl.
I throw the car into reverse.
Something slams into the back quarter panel.
The whole vehicle shudders, metal squealing. I scream, the sound ripped out of me. The back of the car lifts a fraction, then crashes down. My head cracks the headrest.
Breathing. Don’t stop breathing. Get out or you’re a sitting duck.
I don’t remember popping the seatbelt, or kicking the door open. Cold air slams into me as I stumble out, shoes slipping in the damp leaves at the roadside. The forest looms, huge and indifferent. My breath smokes in front of me.
“Hey!” My voice comes out too high. Ridiculous, yelling at the woods. “Who’s there?”
No answer. Just the wind.
Then a low, rumbling growl rolls out of the darkness.
It’s not the sound of an engine.
Every hair on my arms lifts. I back away from the car, hands up without realizing I’ve done it.
The creature steps into the spill of my headlights.
It’s a wolf. It has to be. Four legs, massive shoulders, a pelt so dark it drinks the light, except where the fur catches silver along the ridge of its back. But no wolf I’ve ever seen in a nature documentary stands that tall. Its head is level with the hood of my car.
Saliva strings from its jaws. Its eyes fix on me—amber, intelligent, hungry.
I freeze.
Somewhere, deep in my bones, something shudders in recognition.
“Nice dog,” I whisper, the words absurd and tiny.
The wolf lowers its head. Muscles bunch in its haunches.
I don’t think I even have time to scream before it launches.
I throw myself sideways. Claws rip through the space where I was an instant before. I hit the ground hard, breath punched out. Dirt grinds into my palms. The wolf whips around with terrifying speed.
Not prey, something in me insists. You’re not prey.
I have no idea where that voice comes from.
The wolf lunges again. I roll, feeling the heat of its body as it grazes past me. Teeth snap inches from my throat. Panic flares, white and blinding.
My wrist erupts in agony.
It feels like a hot knife driven under the skin, slicing open veins. A searing pulse shoots up my arm, floods my chest. The world sharpens—every leaf, every grain of dirt, the stink of wet fur and blood and something old beneath it.
Light bursts across my vision.
Not from the car.
From the trees behind the wolf.
It’s a wrong light, too cold and too bright, like moonlight concentrated through a lens. The wolf stiffens, snarling, head snapping toward the source.
A figure steps out of the shadows.
For a heartbeat I think my brain is filling in some gothic fantasy to cope with imminent death. Because the man who emerges is not real. He looks carved out of the night itself—tall, lean, dressed in a black coat that drinks the glow around him. His hair is dark, swept back from a face that would be all sharp angles if not for the lazy, almost bored curve of his mouth.
But it’s his eyes that root me to the ground.
They are the color of fresh-spilled blood.
“Bad dog,” he says softly.
The wolf whirls on him with a roar. It launches, claws tearing furrows in the earth. The man doesn’t move until the last second. Then he’s there and not there, a blur of impossible speed.
One moment the wolf is mid-air. The next, the man has it by the scruff with a hand that looks too elegant for such violence, twisting, slamming its massive body into the ground.
The impact shakes my teeth.
The wolf scrabbles, snarling. The man’s lips peel back, revealing teeth that should not exist outside of nightmares.
Fangs.
“Vampire,” I breathe, the word ripped from some forgotten corner of my mind.
He glances at me, and the full weight of his attention is like being pinned to the forest floor. His eyes flick to my wrist. Whatever he sees there makes his expression sharpen from lazy disdain to something else. Hunger. Recognition.
“Stay back, little mortal,” he drawls. “You’re bleeding all over my forest.”
I look down. There’s a smear of red across my arm where I scraped it falling. My wrist—my damn wrist—is glowing.
Not literally. Not with light. But the veins stand out, dark and pulsing under the skin, centered around a point that looks… wrong. Angry. Bruised from the inside.
“What—”
The wolf writhes, snapping at the man’s arm. Teeth sink into the sleeve of his coat. He sighs, bored again.
“I don’t have time for this.”
He moves in a blur. There’s a crack like a branch snapping. The wolf goes limp.
I flinch back, bile rising in my throat.
The vampire straightens, shaking his sleeve as if he’s brushed off nothing more than mud. He steps over the wolf’s body, boots silent on the leaves, and walks toward me.
Every rational part of me screams to run.
My legs don’t listen.
He stops a breath away. Close enough that I can see the faint blue veins under his pale skin, the almost imperceptible flare of his nostrils when he inhales.
His gaze drifts up from my wrist, over my throat, to my face.
“Emma Ross,” he says, like he’s been tasting my name for years and has finally remembered the right occasion to say it out loud.
My heart stumbles. “How do you—”
“Know you?” His mouth curves. “I’ve been looking for you.”
Every muscle in my body knots. “I think you have the wrong girl.”
His eyes flash, briefly, a brighter, almost incandescent red. “No,” he says, and the word is a verdict. “I never have the wrong blood.”
He reaches for my wrist.
I snatch it back on instinct. “Do not touch me.” The words come out harsher than intended, edged with a steel I don’t recognize as mine.
For a second, something like amusement flickers in his expression. “You left once,” he murmurs. “And you thought you could stay gone.”
My lungs seize. “What are you talking about?”
His fingers close around my arm before I can move again. Cold. He’s so cold it burns. The second his skin touches mine, the pain in my wrist detonates.
I scream.
It’s like being branded from the inside. Heat spirals out, flooding every vein, every nerve. My vision whites out around the edges. I smell smoke, sharp and metallic, and then something else—an iron-sweet scent that hits the back of my tongue.
Blood.
Not just mine.
Images flicker behind my eyes: a forest under a fat, red moon. Hands—my hands—slick with crimson. A voice shouting my name, rough and familiar and wild with terror. Emma.
I rip my hand free.
The vampire’s grip loosens the instant I pull, like he’s letting me go on purpose. I stagger back, clutching my wrist.
A mark blooms where his fingers were. Four crescent shapes, pale at first, then sinking into the skin like ink. They form a spiral, tiny and precise and absolutely wrong, nestled right over the throbbing vein.
“What did you do to me?” My voice shakes.
He watches the mark settle with something like satisfaction. “Anchored you,” he says. “Before the wolves could finish tearing you apart.”
“I don’t—I don’t belong to anyone.” The protest sounds pathetic even to me, too thin in the cold air.
His gaze snaps to mine. “That,” he says softly, “is where you’re wrong.”
He steps back, the forest seeming to fold around him. The wind shifts, bringing with it the distant sound of an engine.
“Go home, Emma.” His voice gentles, unexpectedly. “Your alpha will be waiting.”
Alpha.
The word is a knife between my ribs. Memories press at the edges of my mind—eyes the color of storm clouds, a boy’s hand wrapped around mine, the feel of warm breath against my neck.
I shove them away.
When I look up, the vampire is already turning, melting into the shadows between the trees like he was never there.
“Wait!” I take a stumbling step after him. “Who are you?”
He pauses. Half-turned, his profile is a cut of shadow against the dim light.
“Dante,” he says. “Remember it. You will need it when they start to lie to you again.”
And then he is gone.
The engine noise grows louder, closer, flooding the narrow road with harsh white light. I stand there shaking, my wrist burning with the fresh, unnatural mark, the dead wolf a dark heap at the edge of the ditch.
Gravel spits as a black SUV skids to a stop behind my car.
The driver’s door flies open.
He steps out.
Three years have carved him into something harder, broader. The boy I knew is gone; in his place is a man with shoulders that fill the doorway and a presence that hits me like a physical thing. Dark hair, shorter than I remember, jaw shadowed with stubble, eyes the exact same gray-blue that used to undo me.
Liam Hale.
For a heartbeat, the forest falls away. There is only the echo in my chest, an old ache flaring into something raw.
He takes one look at me, at my wrist, at the dead wolf, and his whole body goes tight with fury.
“Emma,” he says, voice low and ragged, like a prayer dragged over broken glass. “What have they done to you now?”
