Chapter 3

I don't scream.

Twenty years in a wolf pack teaches you exactly one useful thing: predators chase what runs.

So I stand there. Wet hair, ruined dress, heart beating hard enough to bruise my ribs, and I let the ring slip off my finger and drop onto the elevator floor.

It rolls. It stops against his boot.

He bends down.

He picks it up, and he holds it out to me on his open palm, and he doesn't look at me once.

"Thank you," I say.

His fingers are covered in scars. Old ones, layered over each other, wrists to knuckles.

Fourth floor. He steps out. The doors slide shut on the back of his head.

Fourth floor. Apartment 404. The unit next to mine. He's been living six inches from my bedroom wall for eight months and I have never once seen his face in the daylight.

I ride to my own floor. I let myself in. I stand in my dark kitchen and I shake for exactly ninety seconds.

Then I stop shaking.

I dump the sugar out of the ceramic jar on my counter. I take the boning knife out of the block. I slide it up the sleeve of my coat, blade flat against the inside of my forearm, and I walk down one flight of stairs and knock on 404.

The door creaks open.

The stench rolls out and hits me in the mouth. Meat left in the sun. Under it, silver — the sharp, wrong, metallic burn of it, coming off his skin like heat off a road.

Silver in his blood. That's why he's this thin. That's why he doesn't heal.

He stares at me through the crack.

I smile until my cheeks hurt.

"Hi. I'm 405? So sorry — could I borrow some sugar?"

He doesn't answer. He just looks at the empty jar in my hands like it's a language he doesn't speak.

Then he takes it and turns his back on me and walks toward his kitchen.

I step inside and click the lock shut behind me.

The apartment is empty. No furniture. No TV. One mattress on the floor and a wall of blackout curtain. And a smell I can't place until I see the closet door, chained shut, and decide I do not want to know.

He stops. He turns around.

"You locked it," he says. His voice is quiet and cracked, like it hasn't been used in a while.

"I did."

I walk toward him. Step. Step. Step. He doesn't move — he never moves, he just watches me come with his head tilted like a dog hearing a sound it can't identify.

I stop when my chest is an inch from his.

I go up on my toes.

I lean in like I'm going to kiss him.

And his eyes — for one second, one full, perfect second — go wide with something that is not calculation. It's not hunger. It's shock. The mass murderer who threw me off a tower looks, for one second, like a boy who has never been touched in his life.

My mouth stops one centimeter from his.

"What's your name?" I whisper.

His lips part. "Damon."

"Damon." I let the knife drop out of my sleeve into my palm. "As in damned."

I drive the blade into his chest to the handle.

Blood sprays hot across my cheek and my mouth and the front of my ruined dress. He staggers back into the wall, and his hands come up — not to fight me, not to pull the knife out — but to grab my wrist and hold it there.

He looks at the knife. Then at my face.

And he smiles.

"There she is," he says.

I twist the blade. He goes down.

I stand over his body while it twitches, and I laugh, and the laugh comes out sounding like a sob.

Six months early. Not this time. This time nobody ruins my wedding. This time the monster dies in a rented apartment with a sugar jar on the floor and I go back upstairs and I win.

I wipe my hands on his shirt.

And on my way out, I pull open the drawer of the desk by the door — because there's a corner of a photograph sticking out of it.

Just one photograph.

Then I open the drawer all the way.