WIDOW

Present Day

CHARLOTTE, NIGHT

THE HUNT

Ross moved through the warehouse district like a man with nothing left to lose.

Which, if he was being honest with himself, wasn't far from the truth.

The smell hit him first-rust and river water and the faint chemical tang of whatever they manufactured in the squat buildings that lined Statesville Avenue. Late October had settled over Charlotte like a damp wool blanket, not quite cold enough for frost but enough to drive the homeless into shelters and clear the streets of anyone who didn't have business being out at two in the morning.

Ross had business.

He kept to the shadows between the streetlights, his boots finding the quiet spots on the cracked pavement without conscious thought. Muscle memory. The Army had drilled it into him years ago, and the years since had only sharpened the instinct. Move without sound. Watch without being seen. Hunt without becoming the hunted.

The Glock at his hip was a familiar weight, though he knew it would be useless if things went sideways. Steel didn't kill them. Steel just pissed them off.

The knife strapped to his thigh was another matter entirely.

Madronite blade, eight inches long, perfectly balanced. It had cost him three months of favors and a conversation with Matthew DiBondra that still surfaced in his nightmares from time to time. The things that man knew. The things he'd seen. The things he'd built his entire empire around destroying.

But the knife worked. God help him, it worked.

He'd used it four times now. Four monsters turned to ash and memory. Four nights of shaking so hard afterward that he couldn't hold a cup of coffee until well past dawn. The crash always came. It was the price of the high-that crystalline clarity that descended over him during the hunt, when everything else fell away and there were only the target and the mission and the purity of purpose.

Maladaptive coping, the VA therapist had called it, back when he'd still been going to sessions.

Ross called it the only thing keeping him upright.

Tonight would make five.

The intel had come through Temper three days ago. A pattern of disappearances in the NoDa arts district-young men, late teens to early twenties, the kind who worked delivery jobs and walked home alone after their shifts ended. Two had turned up dead in alleys, throats torn out, bodies drained of blood so thoroughly that the medical examiner had written it off as some new synthetic drug causing hemorrhaging.

The ME didn't know any better.

Ross did.

A third victim was still missing. Probably dead by now, dumped somewhere the cops wouldn't find him for weeks. Maybe months. The ones who fed for pleasure rather than necessity rarely bothered cleaning up after themselves. They wanted the bodies found. Wanted the fear. Wanted the newspapers speculating about serial killers and gang violence while they laughed in the shadows.

Hawthorn called them Baneful. Valensi who had abandoned whatever passed for conscience among their kind and embraced the predator within. They were rare-most of the monsters kept to the old rules, fed without killing, maintained the secrecy that had protected them for millennia-but when one went rogue, the body count climbed fast.

Ross had spent the last two nights mapping her hunting ground, learning her patterns. She was young, as far as he could tell. Maybe a decade or two since her turning. The older ones were more careful, more controlled. They didn't leave bodies where humans could find them. This one was sloppy. Arrogant.

She thought she was invincible.

They all thought that. Right up until they weren't.

He spotted her at 2:17 AM.

She was standing in the mouth of an alley off Matheson Avenue, her body language loose and casual, like she was waiting for a bus that would never come. Pretty, in that way they all were-dark hair, pale skin, features that belonged on a magazine cover. The predators always looked like angels. It seemed to be part of the design.

But Ross saw the way her head turned. Too smooth. Too precise. Tracking something down the block with the patience of a cat watching a mouse.

He followed her gaze and felt his stomach clench.

A kid.

Couldn't have been older than seventeen, maybe eighteen. Thin and gangly in the way teenage boys were before they grew into their frames. He was walking fast, head down, earbuds in, a thermal delivery bag slung over one shoulder. The logo on his jacket marked him as working for one of those late-night food apps. Probably trying to make a few extra bucks before school tomorrow.

Probably wouldn't make it home at all if Ross didn't move.

The woman-the thing-pushed off from the wall and began to follow. Her stride was unhurried, confident. She knew the kid couldn't outrun her. Knew that no one would hear him scream in this part of town at this hour. Knew that she had all the time in the world to play with her food.

Ross moved parallel, keeping to the shadows, his hand finding the knife at his thigh. The Glock would have been louder, would have drawn attention. The knife was silent.

The knife was final.

The kid turned down a side street. Bad choice-it dead-ended at a loading dock behind a shuttered furniture warehouse. The woman's pace quickened. She was done waiting.

Ross broke into a run.

He came around the corner just as she was reaching for the boy, her hand closing on his shoulder, spinning him around. The kid's eyes went wide-not with fear, not yet, just confusion. Pretty girl. Dark alley. His brain hadn't caught up to the danger.

"Hey," Ross called out. "Step away from him."

She turned. The confusion on the kid's face was nothing compared to the irritation on hers. Her features shifted in the darkness-subtle, barely perceptible, but Ross had learned to see it. The way the shadows seemed to gather around her eyes. The way her lips pulled back just slightly, revealing teeth that were longer than they should have been.

"Walk away," she said. Her voice was honey and broken glass. "This doesn't concern you."

"Yeah." Ross drew the knife. "It really does."

Her eyes found the blade, and something in her expression changed. Recognition. Fear, maybe, though she buried it quickly beneath contempt.

"You're one of them," she said. "Hawthorn's little attack dog."

"Woof."

She moved.

Fast-faster than anything human had a right to be. One moment she was ten feet away, the next she was in his face, her hand closing around his throat with fingers like steel cables. The impact drove him backward into a stack of wooden pallets, the wood splintering against his spine.

The kid screamed.

Ross drove the knife toward her chest, but she caught his wrist, twisted. Bones ground against each other. He felt something give-not a break, not quite, but close. The knife clattered to the concrete.

"Stupid," she hissed, her face inches from his. Her breath was cold, smelling of copper and something older, darker. "Did you really think you could take me alone?"

Ross headbutted her.

It hurt him more than it hurt her-his vision went white for a moment, stars exploding behind his eyes-but it surprised her enough to loosen her grip. He dropped, rolled, came up with the knife back in his hand.

She was on him again before he could set his feet.

The next sixty seconds were chaos. Claws and fists and the blade singing through air that was suddenly thick with blood-some of it his, more of it hers. She was stronger, faster, more experienced in the close-quarters violence that was her birthright. But Ross had spent six years learning how to kill in places where dying was the default setting, and he'd spent the years since learning how to kill things that shouldn't exist at all.

He took a hit to the ribs that cracked at least two of them. Another across his face that opened his cheek to the bone. He kept getting up. He always kept getting up. It was the only thing he knew how to do anymore.

The kid-Marcus, though Ross wouldn't learn his name until later-had pressed himself against the loading dock, frozen in terror. At some point during the fight, he'd tried to run. She'd backhanded him almost casually, sending him sprawling across the concrete, his head striking the corner of a rusted dumpster.

He wasn't moving.

Ross saw the blood pooling beneath the boy's skull and felt something cold settle into his chest. Something familiar. Something that had been sleeping since the last time he'd felt truly, absolutely certain about what he needed to do.

The woman saw the change in him. Saw it and, for the first time, looked uncertain.

"You-" she started.

Ross didn't let her finish.

He feinted left, drew her guard, then drove the Madronite blade up under her ribs at an angle that would have punctured a human heart. She wasn't human, but the blade didn't care about anatomy. The blade only cared about what it was made of.

She screamed.

It wasn't a human sound. It wasn't even close to human. It was the sound of something ancient and terrible realizing, far too late, that it was about to die.

The Madronite spread through her system like fire through dry kindling. Ross watched her face contort-pain, rage, disbelief-as her flesh began to crack from within, dark lines spreading across her skin like shattered porcelain. Her eyes found his, and for just a moment, he saw something almost human in them. Fear. Genuine, mortal fear.

Then she came apart.

The collapse took maybe thirty seconds, but it felt longer. Cells disintegrating, tissue dissolving, bones crumbling to powder. By the end there was nothing left but a pile of greasy ash and the faint smell of something burning.

Ross stood over the remains, chest heaving, blood streaming down his face. His hands were shaking. They always shook afterward. The high was already fading, leaving behind the familiar crash-the hollow emptiness where purpose used to be.

Five, he thought. Five monsters.

Then he remembered the boy.

Marcus was alive. Barely.

Ross knelt beside him, checking for a pulse, assessing the damage. The head wound was bad-scalp lacerations always bled like hell, but this one had the ugly look of a fracture beneath it. The kid's eyes were open but unfocused, tracking nothing.

"Hey," Ross said, patting his cheek. "Hey, stay with me. Can you hear me?"

"The... the woman..." Marcus's voice was thin, distant. "Her face... her face..."

"I know. Don't think about that. Help is coming."

It was a lie. Ross hadn't called anyone. Hadn't had time. In the blink of an eye, he looked at the knife, knew he couldn't let the cops take it. He looked around and reached under the garbage bin and found a small space along the underside and slid the knife into it. No time left. He'd have to remember this place. Or, let Temper know.

As if summoned by the thought, the wail of sirens cut through the night. Not close yet, but approaching. Someone in the surrounding buildings must have heard the screaming. Or the gunfire-had he used the Glock? He couldn't remember. Everything after drawing the knife was a blur of violence and instinct.

"Just stay still," he told Marcus. "The ambulance is coming. You're going to be okay."

Another lie. The kid had seen things tonight that would never be okay. Would never make sense. Would wake him up screaming for years to come, assuming the head trauma didn't take those memories away entirely.

Maybe that would be a mercy, Ross thought. Maybe forgetting is the kindest thing.

He heard tires squealing somewhere close. Doors slamming. Voices shouting. The cavalry, arriving too late as always.

Ross didn't run.

He could have. Part of him wanted to-the part that knew how this would look, knew what questions would be asked, knew that standing over a bleeding teenager next to a pile of ash that used to be a woman was not a situation that resolved itself easily.

But he couldn't leave Marcus. Not like this. Not broken and bleeding and staring at something his mind couldn't process.

"FREEZE! HANDS WHERE WE CAN SEE THEM!"

Ross raised his hands slowly. Blood-his and hers and some that he couldn't identify-dripped from his fingers onto the concrete.

"Step away! NOW!"

He simply did as he was told. No resistance at all. Gave some distance between him and the boy.

"On your knees! Hands behind your head!"

He complied. The concrete was cold and wet beneath him, soaking through his jeans. He could see Marcus from this angle, could see the EMTs pushing past the cops to reach him, could see the confusion on their faces as they tried to make sense of the scene.

Good luck with that, he thought. I've been trying to make sense of it for years.

They cuffed him with his face pressed into the pavement. Someone was reading him his rights, but the words washed over him without registering. All he could focus on was the pile of ash a few feet away, already scattering in the light breeze. By morning there would be nothing left. No evidence. No body. Just a case file full of questions that would never be answered.

A cop crouched beside him, shining a flashlight in his face. Young guy, maybe mid-twenties, with the kind of fresh-scrubbed earnestness that suggested he hadn't been on the job long enough to get it beaten out of him.

"Jesus Christ," the cop muttered, taking in the wounds on Ross's face. "What the hell happened here?"

Ross laughed. It came out wrong-too sharp, too hollow. The cop flinched.

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

They put him in the back of a cruiser while the EMTs worked on Marcus. He watched through the window as they loaded the kid onto a stretcher, his head wrapped in gauze, an IV already running into his arm. Alive. That was something. That had to count for something.

The cops were poking around the scene with flashlights, taking pictures, looking for evidence that would explain what had happened here. One of them crouched near the pile of ash, frowning, probably trying to figure out what the hell he was looking at. He'd never figure it out. None of them would. They'd write it up as industrial residue, or accelerant, or just leave it out of the report entirely.

Humans were remarkably good at not seeing what they didn't want to see.

Ross let his head fall back against the seat and closed his eyes. The shaking had gotten worse. It always got worse in the aftermath, once the adrenaline wore off and there was nothing left but the hollow place where purpose used to be.

Five monsters now. Five kills. Five nights of wondering if he was the hero of this story or just another kind of predator.

The faces came back to him, as they always did. The ones he'd killed. The ones he'd failed to save. Rufus, lying in a pool of blood on the floor outside the laboratory. The look in that Valensi's eyes right before she'd snapped his neck-the same casual disregard you'd show while swatting a fly.

We will see you end up as the cattle you are.

Ross opened his eyes. The first gray light of dawn was beginning to creep across the Charlotte skyline, painting the warehouses in shades of ash and bone.

He thought about Marcus. About the story the kid would tell-or not tell, depending on how the head trauma shook out. About the way he'd looked at Ross at the end, not with gratitude but with a kind of numb horror. Like he couldn't tell the difference between the monster and the man who'd killed it.

Maybe there isn't one, Ross thought. Maybe that's the point.

The cruiser door opened. Someone was talking to him, asking questions he couldn't quite hear. He let himself be pulled from the car, let himself be led toward the station, let himself become another problem for the system to process.

Somewhere across Charlotte, in an office he'd never seen, a case file was being born. A file full of contradictions and impossibilities. A file that would land on someone's desk and refuse to make sense no matter how many times they read it.

Somewhere across Charlotte, a woman named Brianna Van Demir would inherit that file.

She had no idea what was coming.

Neither did Ross.

But as the sun crept higher and the night's horrors faded into the harsh light of morning, one thought crystallized in his fractured mind with perfect, terrible clarity:

This isn't over.

It was only beginning.