Page 88 of Wild Thorns

I was alone in the garage apartment. I'd stayed in to work. Normal evening. Normal night.

Except nothing had felt normal since Callum pinned me to the kitchen floor and ‌got me off, twice. Since I'd lain next to Jasper that night and felt like a fraud. Since I'd started cataloging my sins like rosary beads: Eli in the archive. Jasper in my bed. Callum's fingers inside me while I moaned his name.

I was working on a logo design, trying not to think about any of it, when someone knocked on my door at ten PM.

My first thought was Marcus.

Three years of conditioning doesn't disappear overnight. My body went rigid, and I was already calculating escape routes before my rational brain caught up. The fire escape. The window in the bedroom. The phone in my hand, ready to dial.

But when I looked through the peephole, it wasn't Marcus.

I didn't recognize him. Tall, lean, with pale skin and dark hair slicked back from a face that was almost too symmetrical. Handsome, in the way a knife is handsome, all edges and sharp lines. He stood on my porch with his hands clasped behind his back, his posture relaxed, but the way he held himself set my lizard brain screaming.

His eyes were wrong. I spotted it the instant he stepped into the porch light: they caught the light like an animal's eyes in headlights. Too still. Too focused. Like something that hunted in the dark.

Every instinct I had screamed at me not to open that door.

I opened it anyway. Just a crack. Just enough to speak through.

"Can I help you?"

"Serena Calloway." Not a question. He said my name like he was reading it off a kill list.

"Who's asking?"

He smiled. It was the smile of something that had studied human expressions without understanding them; the right shape, the right muscle movements, but empty behind the eyes. A mask worn by something that had never been human at all.

"I'm here to deliver a message," he said. His voice was pleasant, conversational, completely at odds with the predatory stillness of his body. "You should leave, Serena. The Voss boys can't protect you from what's coming."

Ice flooded my veins. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"You will." He stepped closer, and I stumbled back, the door swinging wider than I'd intended. The air around him seemed to ripple, like heat rising off summer pavement, and I caught a whiff of something animalistic, something off: stale musk, copper, and something rotten, like meat left too long in the sun. "You're going to want to remember this conversation when—"

He stopped mid-sentence. Tilted his head, like a dog hearing a distant whistle. His nostrils flared.

And then they were there.

All three of them.

I didn't see them arrive. One moment I was alone with this stranger, and the next Callum was between us, his back to me, his body a wall of flexed muscle. Jasper flanked my left side. Eli stood at an angle, his hands raised in a way that seemed almost ritualistic.

"You're on Thornwood territory." Callum's voice was different; lower than usual, and rougher, with a growling cadence that vibrated in my chest like bass through a speaker. "Uninvited. You have ten seconds to leave."

"Or what?" The stranger's smile widened, showing too many teeth. "You'll make me? Three against one? Over a human? Have fun explaining that."

His eyes slid to me. Lingered. Something hungry in that gaze, something that made me want to scrub my skin raw.

"Five seconds," Callum said.

"She smells like all of you. Like she's been rolling in your scent." The stranger laughed, a sound like bones grinding together. "That’ll be interesting info to share. I wonder who’ll pay the most, the Beaumonts or your fa—"

I saw it—a flicker of something raw on Callum’s face at the word Beaumonts. Not just anger. Recognition. Whatever history lived between those families, it ran deep enough to make a man who feared nothing flinch.

Jasper lunged. What happened next will live in my nightmares until I die.

The stranger's face changed.

Not metaphorically. Not subtly. His skull cracked and reformed, bones pushing against skin that stretched, tore and knitted back together in ways that made my stomach heave. His jaw elongated with a wet, grinding sound—cartilage separating, tendons snapping and reattaching. His eyes sank deeper into his skull and then bulged forward, the irises flooding yellow, the pupils narrowing to vertical slits.