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The neon-lit beer-bottle clock behind the bar was mocking me. The barely visible minute hand―buried under layers of grime, strewn beer, and regret―inched closer to midnight. Despite my best efforts not to care, my palms were sweating.

It is just a regular night , I told myself.

I had promised myself that this year would be different. That I wouldn’t sit around waiting like some lovestruck idiot, wondering if this would finally be the Samhain my mate summoned me.

Spoiler alert: She wouldn’t.

She hadn’t for the last nine years, so why would this year be any different?

Which meant I had two options. Number one: throw myself into my incubus nature, feeding freely and finally accepting what I was. Number two: do the complete opposite and attempt to find an actual, real-life emotional connection with someone.

Option one was a no-go.

For me, feeding had always been about survival, not pleasure. Unlike most of my kind, I had never enjoyed taking desire from strangers. It was mechanical, a means to an end—just enough to get me from one Samhain to the next without starving.

When I was younger—and significantly more naive—I had this ridiculous idea that I would save myself for my mate. In hindsight, I had romanticized the whole thing, convinced that my witch would summon me the very first Samhain that she could, and we would figure out life, love, and passion together.

Looking back, I had no idea what I was thinking. Absolute idiot.

Who wanted a virgin incubus? Literally no one. The entire purpose of an incubus was to provide pleasure—and yet there I was, deliberately starving myself, waiting for a witch who clearly had better things to do than summon me.

That first Samhain was a sucker punch straight to the soul.

And I, being the tragic, lovesick fool that I was, nearly starved to death out of sheer stubbornness.

If it hadn’t been for my friends, Ambrose, Blaise, and Lochran, I probably would have faded into the shadows like some pathetic incubus ghost story.

They had convinced me to start feeding, listing off a whole range of plausible excuses for why my mate might not have summoned me yet.

“She’s studying.”

“She’s traveling.”

“She’s finding herself.”

And that first Samhain, I accepted it. I was happy for her, in fact.

And none of my friend’s mates had summoned them that year either, so it wasn’t like mine was doing anything unusual.

So, I shoved aside my romantic notions of us losing our virginity together, convinced myself that this was fine, and started feeding—just enough to survive.

And I waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Nine years later, I was done waiting.

She wasn’t traveling. She wasn’t studying. She wasn’t “finding herself.”

She just didn’t want me.

So, this year, instead of sitting around feeling pathetically rejected, I was going to do something for myself. For the first time in my existence, I was going to try something radically different for an incubus—Option two.

I was going to try dating.

Dating and incubus demons went together like milk and vinegar—which is to say, not at all.

We weren’t a dating kind of species. We fed, returned to our realm, and repeated the cycle until our mate finally summoned us—or at least that was the case for my clan, who had a centuries old bargain with the Briar Coven witches.

Other incubus demons found their fated mates by searching the mortal realm, waiting to just randomly stumble across them like something from a bad rom-com.

Feeding wasn’t enough. It never had been.

I needed to know what it felt like to be chosen—not because of my magic, but because someone actually saw me . Wanted me .

To watch someone lose themselves in my eyes—my real eyes—not the face of whatever fantasy their subconscious had crafted.

To have someone laugh at my terrible jokes because they truly found them funny, not because they thought it might coax me into their bed.

To hold someone and feel them lean into me, not because my touch sent them into a frenzy of lust, but because it felt right.

This year, I wasn’t going to sit around waiting for Fate to disappoint me again.

Which was why I had enlisted the help of an old friend.

And because I apparently had nothing better to do with my time, I’d arrived at the dive bar four hours early for my meeting with Jasper.

That meant spending the evening hunched in the darkest corner, swirling my barely touched bourbon and doing my absolute best to avoid making eye contact with the bartender, who kept casting me looks that flickered between unfiltered longing and homicidal rage.

The moment she first laid eyes on me, I recognized the familiar sharp intake of breath, the slow drag of her gaze, like she was trying to memorize every detail, and the slight parting of her lips, as if she couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing.

The incubus curse in full effect.

Anyone actively searching for a sexual partner saw me as their ultimate fantasy—a living, breathing embodiment of whatever did it for them. The only people who saw the real me were the ones who weren’t interested in me at all.

And, of course, my fated mate, who had clearly decided I wasn’t worth the effort.

“Has anyone ever told you that you look like Tom Hiddleston?” the bartender had asked, her voice silky and sending a skitter of revulsion over my skin.

Loki again.

Tom Hiddleston was a very handsome man, obviously, but my actual appearance was more Thor than Loki—tall, broad, and chiseled, if I do say so myself, but chestnut-haired instead of golden-locked.

The kind of guy Lochran once described as “one of those rancher romance cover models, but, like, sadder.”

“I get that sometimes,” I said, taking a slow sip of the bourbon she’d slid my way.

She leaned in over the counter, pressing her arms together just enough to make sure I noticed the bulge of her breasts, her grey eyes crawling over my Loki-form with open appreciation.

“So sexy,” she purred.

Before I could respond, she reached over and placed her hand on mine.

And just like that, it was over for her.

The incubus touch didn’t create desire—it amplified it.

If there was even a flicker of attraction before, the moment our skin met, it became a raging inferno.

Her pupils dilated, her breath hitched, her fingers tightened over mine, and I was half-surprised that she didn’t leap over the counter and attack me where I stood.

I snapped my hand from hers. I never touched a human until I’d got explicit consent that they wanted me, albeit in whatever form of me they saw, and that they knew it was a onetime, no-strings-attached deal.

I wanted to leave them satisfied, not wondering what had possessed them to ask me into their bed.

Which was why I’d immediately declined. And why she had spent the past four hours casting daggers at me, looking as if she were one spilled drink away from stabbing me with a corkscrew.

By morning, the worst of it would wear off, and this time tomorrow, she’d chalk it up to the questionable martini olives she was grinding on.

So, I kept my gaze locked on the damn neon clock, listening to the tick, tick, ticking of the grimy second hand as midnight drew closer.

Stop thinking about it, Devlin , I told myself.

“Devlin,” a deep voice called over my shoulder, smooth and familiar, but heavier than I remembered. A second later, a massive wolf shifter dropped himself unceremoniously into the seat across from me.

I blinked, taking him in.

The features were the same—full lips, sharp angles, jet-black hair, and those cool, onyx eyes—that had once belonged to a boy who’d looked like he had stepped out of a K-drama.

But that boy was gone.

In his place sat a towering, broad-shouldered force of nature—one who had at least six inches on my six-foot-three frame.

His muscles stretched the seams of his black jacket, the kind of effortless strength that came from dominance, not vanity.

Power rolled off him in crashing waves. Controlled, but undeniable.

The young pup I had once rescued was now an alpha.

And not just any alpha...

... the alpha of the infamous Hell’s Gate pack.

Jasper’s lips quirked into a half-smile. “You haven’t changed, Shadowman.”

“I can’t say the same for you.” I gave a vague gesture at all of him—the size, the authority, the fact that he could probably bench press me without breaking a sweat.

Jasper chuckled, “Well—”

Static filled my ears as Jasper presumably divulged information about his pack.

I let him talk, his lips moving in a way that was unreadable.

Whatever Jasper was saying about his pack, I wasn’t meant to hear it.

Anyone outside of the Hell’s Gate inner circle never did hear it.

And so, while Jasper went on about whatever it was he was saying, my mind wandered back to the first time I met him.

Seventeen years ago, the older, unsummoned demons of my clan decided it was time for the younger demons to start “exploring the mortal realm,” which, in reality, meant throwing us headfirst into an unfamiliar world with minimal preparation and hoping for the best.

It went about as well as you’d expect.

I was ten years old—fully grown in body, yes, but with the survival instincts of... well, of a naive incubus demon who had never left their realm before.

Which was how I managed to get hit by three separate vehicles before noon. The first two were cars, and I think I did more damage to them than they did to me. But the third was a truck carrying what must have been a metric shit-ton of logs, straight out of a Final Destination premonition.

And it almost killed me.