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DANTE

W ell… fuck me sideways.

She’s gone.

Again.

One second she’s blazing with power, tattoos glowing like lightning carved into skin, shadows wrapping around her like living armor—and the next?

Nothing.

She disappears into the cracks of the alley like the whole goddamn night made her up.

But that was real. I know it. I felt it in my bones.

I’m still standing in the alley, breathing like I just ran a marathon, adrenaline jacked through the roof, staring at the empty space she vanished from.

And there’s a goddamn dent in the dumpster to my right, where the rogue slammed into it like a crash-test dummy.

I turn slowly, letting instinct shift back into focus. The rogue’s still breathing—barely. His body’s twitching like a glitching puppet, twitchy with too much stolen power and not enough control. Magic burns off him like static, wild and erratic. Kid’s untrained. Dangerous. High on something he never should’ve touched.

But not dead.

Lucky him.

I walk over, crouch, and press two fingers to his pulse. It pounds, weak but steady. The bastard tried to take my throat out—would’ve, too, if she hadn’t stepped in.

That’s the part I can’t shake.

She didn’t hesitate. Didn’t run. Not until afterward. She saved me . Blew her cover doing it, and then vanished like a ghost with secrets too big for the world.

Fae.

She’s fae .

And not just any fae. I’ve seen fae glamour before, sure, but what I felt coming off her when the illusion cracked? That was something else. That was old, wild, and stitched together with prophecy and apocalypse.

And it makes zero sense that she’s working in a sleazy club under an alias, dancing under strobe lights like she’s trying to pretend she’s just another warm body.

Which means she’s hiding. From what? From who?

My jaw tightens. I don’t like being kept in the dark. Especially not when the shadows might be alive and watching.

I haul the rogue up with one arm—he groans, limp as a rag—and shove a suppression cuff on his wrist. It locks with a hiss, dulling his aura down to background noise. PEACE tech. Ugly, expensive, effective.

“Looks like it’s your lucky night,” I mutter, dragging his ass out of the alley. “Someone else did the hard part for you.”

By the time I get to the PEACE outpost three blocks south, the rain’s coming down harder now. I drop the rogue at the checkpoint, flash my credentials, and file a half-assed incident report that leaves out the part where I got saved by a glowing fae goddess with a bite like a blade.

The handler on shift—a vamp named Clara with a scar down her neck and a permanent sneer—raises a brow as I log the rogue.

“He’s one of Reign’s strays,” she mutters, scanning the guy’s face. “Seen his mug on a watchlist. Word is Gideon’s Torch is trying to stir up trouble again.”

“Big surprise,” I grunt. “Bastard tried to ambush me outside Lux. Came in twitchy, hopped up on wild magic.”

“Lux?” Her tone sharpens. “You good?”

“Still breathing.”

She eyes me for a beat too long. “And the twitchy part?”

“Handled.”

Lie. Sort of.

I leave before she asks more questions.

Home is a loft two stories above a boarded-up warehouse in Hell’s Kitchen. No neighbors. No landlord. Just a reinforced door, blackout windows, and enough wards to give a sorcerer a migraine.

I don’t even take off my boots. I head straight for the war table.

My setup’s messy as hell—maps, incident logs, notebooks, burner phones, encrypted tablets—but I know where everything is. Organized chaos. Like my brain.

I start digging.

Every source I have—official and otherwise—starts turning up references when I plug in the keywords: violet eyes, fae, tattoos that move, shadow magic.

Most of it’s garbage. Urban legend shit. Blog posts and forums from paranoid superfans and conspiracy theorists who think vampires run Wall Street and dragons sleep under the Pentagon.

But then I find something that stops me cold.

A PEACE incident file, redacted to hell. Timestamped six years ago. Location: New Orleans.

Subject: Unidentified female. Suspected dark fae origin. Eyes violet. Escaped containment during transport. Associated magical surge measured off the charts. Fatalities: twelve. Survivors: zero.

No name.

No photo.

But the way the witness descriptions match— the eyes, the runes, the shadows ? It’s her. It has to be.

My stomach knots. I sit back, exhale slow. That night… they called it an accident. I remember it on the news. It was a big deal, especially sice the veil had just started to lift, barley a crack and acceptance to our kind. They had said it was a magical riot, an anomaly. But if she was there—if she was the anomaly…

I rub my hands over my face, trying to force the image out of my head. Her eyes just before she vanished. Not afraid of me.

Afraid for me.

Like she knew exactly what would happen if I saw what she really was.

And yeah, maybe I should run the other direction. Maybe I should turn this intel over, scrub her name from my head, pretend this is just another fucked-up footnote in the supernatural clusterfuck of my job of bounty hunting.

But I can’t. Because I saw her.

And more than that—I felt her. That thing inside me, the old blood, the wolf and the guardian both? It didn’t snarl at her.

It knelt.

And that’s the part that won’t let me let this go.

I reach for the encrypted burner I use for off-grid jobs and start scanning for any mention of dancers, aliases, anything tied to “Nightshade” in the last six months.

I don’t get much sleep that night. But then again, I never do.

I sit there, sifting through shadows and half-truths, eyes burning from the screen, heart pounding a beat too loud in my chest because I know I’ll see her again.

And next time, I won’t let her disappear before I get answers.