The Lost: A Crow City Novel

By Cole McCade

There's something wrong with Leigh.

She's known it her whole life. She knows it every time she spreads her legs. Every time she begs for the pain, the pleasure, the heat of a hard man driving deep inside. She's a slave to her own twisted lusts--and it's eating her alive. She loves it. She craves it. Sex is her drug, and she's always chasing her next fix. But nothing can satisfy her addiction, not even the nameless men she uses and tosses aside. No one's ever given her what she truly needs.

Until Gabriel Hart.

Cold. Controlled. Impenetrable. Ex-Marine Gabriel Hart isn't the kind of man to come running when Leigh crooks her pretty little finger. She loathes him. She hungers for him. He's the only one who understands how broken she is, and just what it takes to satisfy the emptiness inside. But Gabriel won't settle for just one night. He wants to claim her, keep her, make her forever his. Together they are the lost, the ruined, the darkness at the heart of Crow City.

But Leigh has a darkness of her own. A predator stalking through her past--one she'll do anything to escape.

Even if it means running from the one man who could love her...and leaving behind something more precious to her than life itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cole McCade
• Release date: Aug 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310507014

Cole McCade

Cole McCade is a New Orleans-born Southern boy without the Southern accent, currently residing somewhere in Seattle. He spends his days as a suit-and-tie corporate consultant and business writer, and his nights writing contemporary romance and erotica that flirt with the edge of taboo--when he's not being tackled by two hyperactive cats.

Book preview

TRIGGER WARNING: A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR

THIS BOOK CONTAINS MATERIAL THAT may be triggering for some readers.

That’s it. Plain and simple. There are topics in this story, graphically depicted scenes, that may be titillating to some and may be deeply harmful to others, when they detail emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, domestic violence, non-consent, and incest in both a fantasy context and as traumatic events with very real repercussions. I make no excuses for that. It is what it is, and I acknowledge it; I also acknowledge the dysfunction of many of the relationships in this book, and would never want anyone to see them as a model for a relationship or an attempt to normalize, trivialize, or glamorize acts that can be deeply scarring and extremely dangerous to people in real life.

Let this be your trigger warning. This story will not be a comfortable read. If there are scenes you can’t read because they trigger you or make you uncomfortable, that’s okay. Stop reading. Skip ahead, skip back, close the book; do whatever you need to do. You have the right to not be exposed to things that hurt you—and to not be judged for that, or have your feelings dismissed because it’s just a story, just a fantasy.

Someone else’s personal fantasy may well be your personal nightmare. If scenes in this book are hurtful to you, I’m sorry for that. And I respect that, and respect your right to walk away. Self-care is important, always.

Be good to yourselves.

-C

PROLOGUE

STATE YOUR NAME.

Cold, clipped words, blending into the noise of the police station. Leigh lifted her head from a fixed study of her clenched fingers. Colors whirled around her in a lurid carnival nightmare, too bright, too blurry. On a bench on the far side of the room, a wasted and broken scarecrow woman picked at a scab on her wrist with a certain habitual listlessness, oozing diseased red-brown blood over liver spots. Her tendons were rails under her skin, and the dull gleam of cuffs chained her to the bench. She raised her head and stared at Leigh with yellowed eyes that captured her with a sort of empty, terrifying promise.

Across the desk a policewoman waited, with that compassionate impatience only a half-step from pity and shoulder-to-shoulder with disgust. Her flat blue eyes said she’d been trained to care, but couldn’t be bothered anymore. Leigh swallowed and tugged her hoodie close against the tinny air-conditioned chill. Her mouth had dried to a tacky, sticky mess, gummy pills of lipstick beading on her lips, and her tongue was a bloated and useless organ, this swollen pink thing pushing pointlessly against her teeth.

Leigh, she ground out. Clarissa Leigh… Her married name scratched sandpaper syllables against her throat. …van Zandt.

And Miss van Zandt, do you know why you’re here?

She nodded, her neck a creaking wooden puppet-hinge. I do.

Your family’s been worried about you.

I know.

She knew what she should do here. Bow her head in shame and contrition, maybe even sniffle. But she looked for the emotions and they weren’t there; just scraps and tatters, clinging to the empty place where they belonged. She had no feeling left, hollowed out and lost and wondering how she’d ended up here. This didn’t feel real. Instead it was a dream where everyone leered in fisheye close-up, their smiles all teeth and stretched red lips and manic glee. She wanted to run, but somehow she’d gone too numb to do anything but sit here surrounded by the stink of fear-sweat, stale beer, and that particular police-station smell of urine soaked into concrete for decades on end.

What happened to you? the officer asked. Leigh didn’t answer, and the officer’s pen tapped against the forms on her desk, rat-tat-tat, rat-tat-tat, Morse code for I’d rather be anywhere but here with this spoiled little runaway princess. It’s been four years. You were declared legally dead.

That’s all right. She closed her eyes with a laugh that ripped her guts up into her mouth, and buried her face in her hands. Dead. Dead.

Yeah, that was about right.

Miss van Zandt?

Stop calling me that.

Miss van Zandt. I need you to focus on my voice.

Stop calling me that!

Leigh took a measured breath and opened her eyes. Her shoulders squared. The bolts on the back of the hard, ass-biting chair dug into her shoulder blades. I am focused. I can hear you just fine.

Eyes are dilated. The officer—her nametag read Maroni, could there be a more clichéd name for a Crow City cop—leaned across the desk, peering at her face. Then she beckoned to the aide hovering over them like a mannequin. I’ve seen this too many times. Drugs and prostitution. She talked about Leigh like she wasn’t even there. We’ll have to clean her up before her husband gets here.

I’m not on drugs. I’ve never been on drugs.

Maroni’s pen-clicking stopped. Her disbelief was a heavy thing, push-push-pushing until Leigh nearly laughed.

You’re not on drugs.

No.

Then what happened?

There it was. The first hint of exasperation. Of frustration, stitched into knitted brows and the purse of lips in just the right shade of I can’t be a woman, I’m a cop mauve. Because like anyone normal, anyone who wasn’t fucking broken to pieces and liked being that way, Maroni needed to make sense of this. Needed to quantify it in a world where the rules worked as normal and everyone wanted to chase that dream of happiness that wasn’t anything but desperation painted over a frantic tally of things. Things of plastic, things with value created by people whose upper lips curled when they looked down at little girls like Leigh, and demanded she account for herself in sane, rational ways that made proper sense.

Sorry, Officer Maroni.

I’m not the kind of thing that makes much sense.

Maroni pushed a harsh sound through her teeth. You had a job, a husband, a newborn son. You had a life other people would kill for, and we find you here on the streets. Were you pressured? Kidnapped?

No. None of that. Leigh shook her head.

You’ll have to explain, then.

I left. She trailed off, lips parted; no words came for long seconds, until she managed, I…I was afraid.

Of what? Maroni tried to catch her eye, but Leigh looked down at her hands, at her chipped pink fingernails dipped in the sparkles of shooting stars. Miss van Zandt. If someone was hurting you, you need to tell us now so we can take appropriate steps to protect you.

No. No one hurt me. Not like that.

I’m afraid you’ll need to be more clear. What were you afraid of?

Of…

She struggled for an answer. Struggled for something this woman would accept, something that would make her sigh with sympathy and pity and relieved disdain that said there, but for the Grace of God…

But again, she found nothing. Nothing but the truth, and Leigh shrugged as she looked up at the policewoman and wondered if she had daughters who might one day be like Leigh, daughters who would cut stark red lines of fingernails in the walls of flesh that caged her in the shape of pop culture’s perfect woman.

Of the inevitable monotony of it all, she said.

And smiled.

CHAPTER ONE

SHE ALWAYS LOVED THE ONES who hurt her, and the ones who threw her away.

She didn’t even know this one’s name. His hair fell over her in lank straggles of dark brown, brushing her cheeks like seaweed wafting against a drowning swimmer. That was how it felt, she thought as his cock slid deeper and the hard thick ridges of it stretched her cunt until her breaths hitched tight and the seams of her threatened to snap. Like drowning. He slammed into her, the wet slick pain of his cock head cleaving her and filling her up inside with a liquid burn, and every time his hands clutched hard at her thighs and her back dragged against the dirty damp concrete of the alley wall, she sank a little deeper into the undertow and away from the light.

And when everything inside her wound tight and her thighs quivered and her back arched, she exhaled her last gasp of air and let the tightness in her lungs carry her into the dark.

Overhead, someone’s air conditioner groaned and shuddered. Wet cold droplets of condensation fell from the coils and plunked on her, pattering little raindrops of ice soaking the shoulders of her hoodie. She opened her eyes and looked up at the tangle of electrical wires and the hard-curving edges of cheap satellite dishes scaling the side of the building, and listened to his low hoarse grunts as he finished. She’d gone numb, and his cock was just a tickling scrape, a vague irritation slithering into her, slick with the plastic feel of the condom and the soft sweet sucking sounds of her own wetness.

Fuck, baby, he gasped, and she closed her eyes and hoped he would wrap this up soon. He smelled like old pot, that sour-feet reek that got into a pothead’s hair and was as hard to get out as cigarette smoke from carpet. She hadn’t minded the smell when he’d bought her a drink, and she doubted she’d remember it when she picked herself up off his couch in the morning and moved on her way.

But right now, it was a cloying thing that curled up in her lungs and made it hard to taste the night.

He stiffened, shuddering. She felt that subtle throbbing and swelling deep inside, his pulse and rhythm in the veins of his cock; she felt the come filling him up and thickening his shaft on its way to puddle and gather in the well at the tip of the condom. It wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted the slick flooding rush of wet heat surging into her and coating her hot and dirty inside, but she didn’t know this guy—and she didn’t want his babies, or his STDs.

He slumped against her, heavy, just a sack of clay with no bones, his breaths clammy against her neck. When he went soft inside her, she squirmed her hips and pushed at him. He grunted, then pulled back and left her with that sliding empty feeling that pooled inside her and flowed down to leave her panties sticky and warm and rubbing against a delicious soreness that would be the only thing she’d want to remember about him.

He finally let go of her thighs. She shifted to stand on her own two feet and settled her little pleated skirt, then studied the round purpling marks he’d left where his fingertips had dug into her skin, livid against her paleness. She liked it, she thought. Like art. A constellation on her skin, making something beautiful out of something ugly, just like graffiti on a squatting toad of an abandoned building.

So… The rrrp of his zipper sounded like a burp. You ever gonna tell me your name?

Leigh, she answered absently, and traced a line from one bruise to another and another. These. She liked these best. The lines that connected in the same path as the constellation Leo. She was a lioness, fierce in her roar.

Leigh.

He grinned. There was that gap in his teeth. He probably wouldn’t like knowing that cute little imperfection was how she’d ended up here under his straining grunting weight, while somewhere down the street the deep bass throb of distant music mimicked what they’d just been doing. That little imperfection had won her over, and the way that hard ridge had slewed left against his jeans, sliding down the inside of his thigh. Not his cheesy lines, and not the kind of body that came from a few days of hard labor a week at a job that probably didn’t require a GED. She didn’t need perfection, or suave one-liners.

She just needed those little differences that made people real, and just as flawed as her.

He ran a hand through his hair. I’m— he started, but she cut him off with a finger pressed to his lips.

Don’t tell me, she said, and smiled. Just take me home.

*     *     *

His car was a junker. So was his apartment, a studio with a futon on the floor and stained towels draped over the stove, almost as much of a fire hazard as the wires sprouting from the electrical outlet splitter and looping to a wreck of video game systems. Dime bag on the kitchen counter. Bong on the chipped IKEA entertainment center. Predictable.

He tried to talk. She silenced him with a kiss, his mouth tasting of the White Russians he’d been sucking down like candy, the kind of milky sourness just right for man-children like him. She liked his sweetness, his stupidity, his simplicity, and she let him take her on the mattress, on her hands and knees with his fingers snared hard in her hair and her head pushed down into the lumpy pillow and her voice raised high in hard hungry screams when he did it hard enough to hurt her, just the way she liked. His cock was thick and burning, and fitted into the curve of her until she thrust her ass back toward him and begged him to spread her open.

If she’d known his name, she’d have panted it into the pillow with wet and needy lips. That was why she didn’t like to know.

She did this for herself, and didn’t like to share.

But for just a few moments, while his cock was inside her, she closed her eyes and loved him. Loved the idea of him, until her hips locked hard and her thighs drew tight. That sick wet pulling started deep inside, and she forgot he even existed as she dug her fingers into the futon cover and bit her tongue until she tasted blood.

Cooling sweat clung to her in a filmy patina, and when he stretched out next to her and tugged at her clothes, she pushed him away and curled into herself and hurt, deep down inside. This wasn’t love. She’d had love once, and she’d run away from it because it wasn’t the kind of love she wanted. Wasn’t the kind of love she’d dreamed about in wordless whispers, formless ideas in the back of her mind. Just a deep tugging feeling, as if someone had tied a string to her heart and was always pulling, pulling, ever pulling her toward something she didn’t know but would recognize when she saw it.

She was starting to think that kind of love didn’t exist.

He snored, while she watched headlights pass by in arcing stripes through bent and broken venetian blinds, lashing shadows across the walls and sometimes painting them blue and red when the piercing keen of police sirens soared in a receding banshee cry. She’d read once in a bent-edged and worn library book that the banshee, the baen si, was an Irish fairy who would wail when someone was about to die. Seemed about right, for Crow City cops. Wailing out a death cry for someone who didn’t know yet that their blood would color the streets and run in the gutters and wash away in the next rain, as if they’d never existed.

Toward morning, she slept. Thin and fitful, with the lumps in the futon digging into her ribs and his body heat as uncomfortable as a swampy Southern night, but she slept—and woke with his arm draped over her. His fingers cupped against her breast. The sky through the slats turned into bars of soft and pillowy gray, nearly white, paper waiting for sunrise to paint its colors. She squinted against the rising light, then pried off the heavy dead weight of his arm, zipped up her hoodie, and let herself out.

Leaning against the rusted rail of the exterior walkway, she fished a battered pack of Djarum Blacks from her pocket and lit up, breathing in the aromatic smoke of the clove cigarette and looking out over the parking lot. So quiet, in these hours when the slum children of the city had gone to bed. The wholesome and the good were just waking up, rubbing the sleep from their eyes and aching in their bones at the thought of another sixteen-hour day that would be just enough to put a roof over their heads. Whoring themselves for a place to sleep, just like her.

Thoughts like these were why she didn’t like sunrises.

She stubbed her cigarette out with the toe of her boot and peeked back inside. Mr. White Russians was still asleep. In the morning light he had the kind of sunken chest that made her think of the big crucifix over the pulpit during morning services in Catholic school. She’d always thought it was weird, the way the teachers and bishops had talked about chastity and purity, then spent half their day kneeling at the feet of a half-naked man with a body sculpted in exquisite detail, down to every tight, lean muscle. That was what he looked like. Sleeping Jesus, with his hair spilled over the dirty pillow and the scruffy scraggle of his beard.

She slipped back into the apartment and dug in the crumpled wad his jeans made on the floor, until she found his wallet. Wrinkled singles, fives, tens, damp as a sweaty palm. Pot money, probably. Tips. He’d said he was a waiter. They always were. She took a ten, enough for bus fare, coffee, and something to eat, and stole out into the rising yellow glare of day. He wouldn’t mind, and she’d never see him again. He’d known that. She’d known that. If she hadn’t made the choice, he would have. It was easier that way. Throw them away before they threw her away.

Made it hurt less.

She stopped at the Starbucks on the corner and treated herself to a cappuccino and a muffin, avoiding the barista’s eyes. She knew what she looked like, with her fishnets ripped in huge holes over her thighs, clunky combat boots that weighed more than she did, and her L’Oreal Whispersoft Blonde hair spilling out of her hood in limp straggles, sticking to the smears of lipstick and mascara and the thin sheen of sweat glossing her face.

She a strawberry, she thought, and cracked a smile that felt just a little too much like a lunatic grin. Cocaine her pimp.

God, she hadn’t seen that movie in years. She’d been twelve the first time, sneaking it in the dark of her family’s living room with the sound down to almost nothing, the TV’s flicker reflecting off the dark, richly paneled oak walls and gold fixtures. Her mother would have killed her if she’d found out. Little Leigh, watching a prostitute crawl on her hands and knees toward Richard Gere, biting her lip at the unfamiliar tingle in her panties and wondering what it would be like to live with that kind of freedom.

Maybe she’d take her leftover change and grab it from a Redbox tonight. Find someone with a DVD player. Do what they wanted her to do, what she did best, then put them to bed and lose herself in a little nostalgia, remembering when she’d been naïve enough to wish she could look that sexy in thigh-high stilettos.

With her cappuccino warming her hands, she caught the bus uptown, tucked into a corner and sandwiched away from a thick man with roving eyes and stale pizza breath that clouded around him like cologne. He got off at the edge of the business district. She stayed, curled in on herself and listening to her battered, scratched pawn-shop iPod while Melanie Martinez lilted in her babygirl voice.

Hey Mom, please wake up, Dad’s with a slut…

The bus let her off in the Rooks district. Run-down little barrio houses shouldered up to new townhouse developments, posh for those who liked to pretend they weren’t so very pretentious, rich-kid runoff from Blackwing Downs proudly established on the ground floor of gentrification. As she meandered down the street, she kept her head down, but felt the soccer-mom stare from the woman unloading groceries from her minivan, and another arranging the flowers in her outdoor window box. Leigh smiled to herself.

It’s okay. You don’t know it, but I’m one of your tribe.

When the squeals of children rose over the lazy hum of her music, she slowed—half a block from the playground, with its brightly painted red climbing bars and wooden cutouts of grinning monkey faces pinned to the chain link fence. Her heart turned sluggish, and nearly stopped cold. It always did, though she did this nearly every day. She was supposed to feel happy, staring in at those cheerful colors and nodding little heads of messy hair while tiny fingers grubbed in the sandbox and chubby legs chased back and forth.

Instead all she felt was a deep loss that carved into her and left a hole somewhere in the center of her chest, in this low dark place she couldn’t touch but knew held the ugliest, rawest, most beautiful parts of her.

He was with the new girl today, clinging to her hand and looking down at his sneakers with quiet solemnity. The girl was a redhead, slim, perky, with the kind of freckles that made her look like a tawny sweet little animal. As far as Leigh knew Jacob had hired her just a few weeks ago, and for a heavy hateful moment Leigh wondered if he was fucking her.

Fuck it. She didn’t care.

She only cared about that beautiful, overly serious little boy who didn’t even know who she was.

He had on his Osh-Koshes today. She’d figured out he loved them just from how often he wore them, even though they’d gone threadbare and the legs were a little too short now; one of the buttons had been stitched back on with wrong-color thread, crimson against Thomas-the-Tank-Engine blue. He had Jacob’s deep black hair, but Leigh’s wide brown eyes and fair, almost translucent skin. He didn’t like to talk. He didn’t like to talk at all, but she could see so much happening behind those eyes, his little mind turning over and over and seeing so many things.

But he didn’t see her.

She fumbled her phone from her pocket. Her old shitty TracFone that didn’t even have any fucking minutes; she couldn’t remember the number because she never gave it out, never used a phone after she’d left her last one in the dumpster, full of texts she’d never answer and a thousand missed calls. But the TracFone had a camera, and she flipped it open with shaking fingers and held it up and zeroed it in on that quiet, grave little face with its delicate nose and stubborn jaw.

Quick flash. Done. Stored away with over a thousand other pictures, one for nearly every day of the last four years, broken by painful gaps on the days she couldn’t get close enough. That was it. She was finished. She should go.

But she lingered, watching him bend to pick up a white and pink clover flower, before he tilted his head back to ask the nanny a question Leigh couldn’t hear. She couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t stand seeing him look up at that clean, pretty, wholesome girl with such innocent trust.

So she turned and walked away, because she’d never known how to do anything else.

CHAPTER TWO

SHE SPENT THE DAY AT Gary’s, with the dusty clouded half-light of the sun streaming through the windows of his shitty little shoebox bar, tucked into a back street in the Jackdaw district. They had an arrangement, unspoken and informal. She swept up behind the bar; he let her have beer on tap, kept the backpack containing all her worldly possessions upstairs, and looked the other way while she cruised for her next nameless bed each night.

You look like hell, girl. Gary leaned on the bar, watching her through his one good eye, a milky witch-thing that bulged from the socket and made the clear, bright, utterly lifeless green of his glass eye look normal. Where’d you wake up this morning?

Back of the Nests.

Not a good place to be.

She scrubbed a dried skim of beer foam from the rim of a shot glass. The bar wouldn’t open for another five hours, and she had a lot of glasses to clean. You say that about every place I wake up.

Because you wake up in shit places.

Don’t start the Daddy act again.

He shrugged with a phlegmy snort. I hate talking to the cops. Don’t really want to have that conversation, being the last fucking person to see you alive.

You won’t. She turned on the water and lingered over the bitter-froth taste of her Amstel Light, savoring the sweet fuzzy high of a minor beer buzz while she watched the flow course over the glasses in the sink until they looked like crystal rocks in a whitewater stream. I know what I’m doing.

Which is why I don’t understand why you keep doing it.

Because… She pressed her lips together until her teeth stamped against their soft insides. Because I need to.

What the hell are you looking for?

She shrugged. I’m too sober for this conversation.

And I’m too drunk. He straightened the cuffs of his perfectly tailored shirt. That was Gary’s thing. He looked like the resurrected corpse of a drowned sea dog, but he loved those fucking shirts and wouldn’t be seen anywhere without one, hanging on the sagging bones of his body. Just don’t want to see you end up in the gutters, girl.

But the gutters are where some of us belong.

You ever read any Oscar Wilde, Gary?

"I don’t read anything but Playboy."

Liar. I’ve seen your Kindle. She toyed with her beer bottle, watching the liquid slosh dully against brown glass. "The Picture of Dorian Gray. He says ‘You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.’ She smiled to herself. I want that to be me. I want that to be my legacy. A lifetime of all the sins I’ve ever wished for, and the courage to follow through."

He grimaced. Hard to have a legacy when you’re unemployed and homeless. Job’s still there if you want it.

I have a job.

Washing glasses drunk ain’t a job. He eyed her, that witch-eye rolling and the lid twitching. That’s just a damaged little girl doing shit that don’t make sense, and one old man stupid enough to let her.

But you serve a damned good beer. And damaged implies I don’t want to be exactly the way I am.

Yeah? A measuring look raked over her, and he snorted. Then you’re doing a shitload better than most of the human race.

Leigh laughed and shut the water off, then plunged her arms up to the elbows in the icy coolness. Her body always ran so hot, a fever under her skin, and she liked the feel of cold prickling goosebumps everywhere and chill slick water matting the fine golden hairs of her arm against her skin, as long as it wasn’t blowing on her. Jacob had always hated that, when she’d turned the air conditioner off in the sweating stickiness of deep summer.

Jacob had hated a lot of things.

I love you anyway, baby girl. That’s what love’s about. Forgiving your imperfections.

Yeah. Her imperfections.

Hey. Leigh.

She looked up into that marbled eye. Gary dropped his gaze and fiddled with his cufflinks. Little gold horses, running against a pinstriped field. He swore in his glory days he’d run a stable, making six figures a year on race cups. Get him drunk enough and he’d tell a hard-luck story about I Spent it All on Peonies and the broken leg that had ruined his life, bankrupted him, and sacrificed his eye to an angry bookie.

Wasn’t a bookie, one of the early-shift bartenders had told her one night. Jimmy. Jimmy with the too-easy smile and the roving eyes that liked to peer down the front of her hoodie, hoping maybe one night when she rolled the dice she’d land on him. He lost that eye in a mugging. Hands up, whimpering like a baby, pissing down his leg, begging the perp not to hurt him. Guy stabbed him and ran.

She liked Gary’s version better.

She waited him out, while he made garbled noises in the back of his throat and turned those cufflinks around until they spun like carousel ponies. He spat on the floor and swore, then glared at her.

Fuck. Look. My car’s in the shop. I gotta start inventory, but I need to pick up the car before close of business today. You think you could run grab it for me? I’ll pay you. Easy fifty bucks.

I don’t need your charity.

It’s not fucking charity. I need a goddamned favor and it’s a pain in the ass. I’d pay fucking Jimmy too, but that fuckshit’s late for his shift again. His shoulders came up around his ears; he avoided her eyes. She snorted.

God, you’re a shitty liar. She pulled her arms out of the water and dried them on a towel. All right. But you’re finishing your own dishes.

And you’re not driving buzzed. Go upstairs and sleep it off.

Thought you were in a hurry.

I could lose my liquor license letting you walk out of here. The car can wait another hour. He waved toward the stairs. Go. I’ll call ahead and let him know you’re coming.

Rolling her eyes, Leigh tossed the towel down, trudged up the stairs to Gary’s cluttered patchwork single-room apartment, kicked off her shoes, and crawled into the old man’s bed.

She’d slept here more than once, on days when she needed a nap or nights when she dozed off at the bar and didn’t wake up enough to stop Gary from carrying her up and tucking her in like he was hoping she’d wake up and call him Papa.

It was the only bed she ever slept in without having to open the coin slot between her legs to pay for it. She knew what he was trying to do: trying to put a roof over her head, give her some kind of stability when she refused to take a job or rent an apartment, when she’d rather find a dry cardboard box in an alley on a rainy night than settle into anything permanent. Or even something as mercurial as shacking up with the same guy night after night, instead of sneaking out before they could ask her number and mumble about wanting to see her again.

Gary didn’t get it. Gary didn’t understand that her blood was made of ennui and missed chances, and she’d given up trying to explain a long time ago. Some things just were what they were.

But she kicked her boots off and sank into the floral patterned quilt that still smelled just a little bit like a woman who hadn’t been around to make Gary’s bed in years, and let herself enjoy feeling safe for a few quiet minutes before safe could start to feel like caged.

*     *     *

She woke with the sun in her eyes and the clink of bottles coming from below. Yawning, she rubbed the crusts of sleep from the corners of her eyes, rolled out of bed, and rummaged in her backpack for clean panties. She’d have to use that fifty to get some quarters for the Laundromat later, or play domestic for a few minutes longer and borrow Gary’s washer-dryer.

After rinsing the taste of old beer from her mouth, she stole an apple from Gary’s fridge and clomped downstairs. He’d left a note on the bar, with the address and the name of the shop. She scanned his crabbed handwriting, gnawing little bird-bites out of her apple so it would last longer and make her feel fuller. Blackbird Pond, in the lower Ravens. She shrugged, stuffed the note into her pocket, then waved at the back of Gary’s head through the storeroom door as she trudged out into the midafternoon sun.

The city 67 line took her from the worn-down kitsch of the Jackdaws to the Ravens. She tilted her head back as the bus passed under a white stone arch draped with the red, black, and white flag of the Arapaho Nation. The painted brick cut the sky in two, and she peered up and imagined she was crossing the border between worlds while her music thumped in her ears and snarled we’re killing strangers so we don’t kill the ones that we love.

She got off a few blocks later and followed the directions on the note, turning off the main street and onto a narrow lane that was mostly empty burnout lots with overgrown grass poking through the remnants of chain-link fences. Squatter’s paradise. The jutting edges of cracked sidewalks caught on the treads of her boots as she took a few skipping steps and hopped over some of the more jagged fissures. Step on a crack, break yo momma’s back.

The address on the note led her to one of the few buildings that didn’t look ready for demolition. She stood on the sidewalk and studied the garage. New renovations on an old building, like putting a fresh coat of makeup on an old whore, but clean enough. The sign over the door said Blackbird Pond next to a silhouette of a girl, her skirts blowing in an imaginary wind. The garage door had been rolled up against the summer heat, exposing an almost manic level of organization, every tool in its place. Two out of three lifts were occupied—a slick older model Firebird on one, gleaming fresh-painted black with the logo on the hood in a vivid ice-blue fade. The other looked like it just might crumple under the weight of Gary’s massive boat of a Chevy Impala.

A pair of worn combat boots stuck out from under the Impala like the Wicked Witch’s ruby slippers. Leigh smiled to herself, tugged her earbuds out, and tip-toed closer, listening to the scuff and clang of rough hands at work. She stopped next to a pair of long legs in dirty, frayed jeans, rested her hands on her knees, and bent to watch, holding her tongue.

You do know I can see your shadow. A low, gritty voice drifted from beneath the Impala. Dry, coolly masculine, inflected with a certain cultured, exacting articulation, yet rough about the edges—as if he spoke so rarely his voice was rusty, ill-used. That roughness brushed over her skin like chill breath, and she shivered. That voice didn’t belong in the light of day.

Ghosts aren’t supposed to cast a shadow, she said.

Is that what you are?

That’s how I live. Somewhere between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

I see.

A humorless, mocking chuckle slid from beneath the Impala, followed by a long, ferally graceful body: a stark man, defined by absolutes and keen edges. Chill gray eyes, pale as cracked ice. Hair as black as the sea at night, sharp-cut and falling over one eye, spilling against the cracked wood of the creeper beneath him and touched with thin threads of shooting-star silver at the temples. Older, she thought, from his hair and a certain dignified elegance to his stubble-shadowed jaw. Tanned, scarred skin stretched over broad shoulders. Sweat and grease stains darkened his thin white A-shirt. His tattoos said ex-military, jagged silhouettes of fierce-sweeping wings and a pointed beak in the stark style of the Arapaho, turning his right arm into a canvas from shoulder to wrist, slick black oils painted on burnished gold. He stretched out atop the creeper in a long, lazy sprawl and looked up at her, guarded and impenetrable. Something about him spoke of cold precision. A gunsight in human form, locked on and ready to kill.

And when he looked at her as if he could see right through her, see through the transparent empty pointlessness of her, Leigh didn’t just feel like a target.

She felt like prey.

She straightened and looked away, tucking her hands into her pockets, her stomach shivering and light. This your place?

It is.

Blackbird Pond?

One witch, at your service.

"She’s contrary as a very witch herself, she quoted, a smile trying to creep over her lips if only she’d let it. She bit it back and studied the Impala—watching him only from the corner of her eye. You done working your magic on Gary Mitchell’s car? I’m supposed to pick up."

You’re Leigh, then. He rolled to his feet with easy grace. He moved like an animal, something savage under his skin, behind those unreadable eyes. Something wild that pulled at Leigh like the jungle calling to a beast that had spent its entire life behind bars. She lingered on his hands, large and cruel and rough-cut as raw granite, as he wiped his fingers clean on a rag. Just finished final inspection. You sure you’re big enough to drive her? She’s a brute.

My feet reach the pedals, Daddy.

A forbidding stare pinned her. Cute.

Nothing else. Just that hard, steady stare while he stood over her, feline and powerful as a black-spotted leopard, lazy strength looming tall until she was a child in his shadow, beneath the weight of his gaze. He didn’t look at her the way most men looked at her. Like they were eyeing her pale pretty thighs and tiny skirt and slight, girlish body and wondering if she was street-legal, wondering if she’d let them go for a test drive to find out. There was a certain kind of man who went for the dirty grunge princess look, pure heroin chic, all smeared eyeliner and kiss-swollen lips, and normally when she made eye contact she knew with a certain click of rightness that she’d found a place to sleep for the night. Even the ones who didn’t want to fuck her, she could still tell what they were thinking—but not him.

He was a glacier, and she found herself wanting a name just to make him human.

Still he waited. Leigh lowered her eyes, curling her fingers in the pockets of her hoodie and digging her short chipped glitter-spangled nails into her palms until the edges scratched her. He was supposed to offer the keys, let her sign off on the repairs, and send her on her way. Not stand there watching her like he wanted something, but nothing she could offer. Something ate at her, but she refused to ask what curled on the tip of her tongue.

No names.

She cleared her throat softly. What branch of the service?

His brow arched in a line as severe and cutting as a razor blade. How could you tell?

Tattoos. Dead giveaway. You wear them like war paint.

Something flickered in his eyes. A reaction, finally. She hadn’t realized how much his emptiness, his complete lack of reaction, was getting under her skin until she saw something else on that grim face—even if she wasn’t quite sure what it was.

Marines, he said tightly, almost challenging.

No wonder you talk like you’re straight out of West Point. God, she wanted out of here. She didn’t need this strange, quiet man looking at her, confusing her. She couldn’t read him. Couldn’t figure out what he wanted. Even if his eyes were reflective walls of steel, he wanted something. Everyone did. His wanting wrapped her lungs in cold hands and squeezed tight until her next breath hurt, and she barely forced out, You going to hand over the keys?

He slid his hand into his pocket and withdrew a plastic temporary keychain, the ring rattling against the key—then let it fall to his side, disappearing into his palm. Are you going to pay the repair bill?

The bill. Right. The bill. She closed her eyes, swearing under her breath, the sour thick taste of mortification on her tongue. She’d been standing here trying to figure him out while he’d dug those silver eyes into her like bright needles, twisting her insides…

…and he’d only been waiting for her to pay up and leave.

Crap. She opened her eyes and swallowed back that sick embarrassment, pushing it down past the knot in her throat. Gary didn’t send me with any money.

Then how do you plan to pay for this?

Her breaths hitched. How did she ever pay for anything? She only had one form of currency, but Gary wouldn’t have sent her expecting her to…would he?

Of course he would. No wonder he’d refused to look at her.

It hadn’t been about the money at all.

She wet dry lips.