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“I heard she lost both of her parents, one after another. No other family. Lives alone. Her father was some kind of piece of shit, but everything about her family is private. Her mother came from money. Painter or musician, I think. Her father was in shady business and lost the family fortune. Gambling, people say.” Piro shrugs. “That’s what I heard from the girls. Lara doesn’t share anything. No one knows much. She just started partying with vampires, running stardust through the city.”

I store every piece of information. Two weeks ago, Lara Voss was just a dealer sitting in my VIP room. Another pretty thing with a cold stare and too much attitude. So why am I thinking about her now? Why does she keep crawling back into my head?

She annoyed me, initially. That composure. That certainty. She carried herself like she had nothing to prove and nobody to answer to, and something about it got under my skin. Too confident for someone in her position.

Then I found out she’s a necromancer. I never hang out with any. No one does unless they want someone killed in a very specific way, or unless a necromancer comes to collect the price on their head. Even my father never pushes Vukovic. We never move too close to the Southside. Vampires are easy to fuck with. But necromancers… They are unpredictable. And even death is better than to walk as their puppet with no soul.

And Lara is one of them. Partly. Somehow.

Piro leans back in his seat, watching me too carefully. “If you want a fuck toy, there are plenty of girls in the city. Trust me. Some are even untouched by me.” He tries to smile, but it doesn’t land. “Just leave Lara alone. She doesn’t deserve whatever you’re doing to her.”

“I haven’t even started properly.”

“Nero.”

“I don’t want to hurt her.” I pause. “I mean, I do. But not in a bad way.”

Piro laughs, shaking his head. “I haven’t seen you go for a girl like that in a while. What happened in the South? Did you have someone there?”

“Mostly trouble.”

He laughs harder. He has always been the happy one. Maybe because our childhoods were different. Maybe because I take after our father more. After my mother saw what Vito did to me, she refused to let him train Piro the same way. Maybe that was better. No one deserves to be fucked up like that.

I drop Piro at his place and keep driving through the city with Lara still in my head.

I remember her walking through the Crown lobby that night. White hair, confident step and eyes sharp enough to cut through all the bullshit. I knew immediately she was the girl Julian mentioned. He said family, but they didn’t look like siblings. I would have known her before if she was that close to him.

But everything changed when she touched me in the Moon.

I know pain, it’s been part of my life. But what she did then was different. Dark and sweet at the same time, rotten like a good wine.

Then I saw her on the floor after touching Julian’s body.

I saw what it cost her. She’d done that voluntarily, for someone she didn’t even know, and it had wrecked her. I didn’t want to leave her then, alone on the concrete, with tears of pain dropping down her pale cheeks. I didn’t even know if she would die or not. She assured me she was ok, but she definitely wasn’t. She was more broken than I ever realized.

Midnight City traps me inside my own thoughts as the car drifts without purpose, and all I can see is her face.

CHAPTER 20

THE SOUP

I’m lying on the cold wooden floor in my living room. An old sitcom is playing on the TV, canned laughter spilling quietly through the apartment. I stare at the ceiling and barely breathe.

After finding Julian’s body, I stayed home for three days. No clubs. No runs. No working. Just my apartment, nightmares, visions, and excruciating pain. I take stardust, more than I should, more than is safe, more than I can afford to think about. It barely makes the memories disappear.

I need to pee. I drag myself up from the floor and go to the bathroom, moving like an old corpse. On my way back, I stop beside the master bedroom. Their bedroom. I go in.

Everything in here has remained the same. My father didn’t move my mother’s things after she died. He was just living with a ghost. And I didn’t touch anything of his once he was gone. So I was living with two.

This apartment isn’t a home. It’s a museum of my old life. I look at their wedding picture on the dresser. She, fragile as a spring flower. Him, dark and scary. Even in the photograph, you can see death in his eyes.

There’s another photo beside it, from their trip to Amalfi. I pick it up. My mother probably forced him to take it. She wears a summer dress, her hair loose around her face, her skin warm from the sun. She isn’t sick yet. My father stands next to her in a white shirt, rolled sleeves and hair messy from the wind. His face softer than I ever remember seeing it. He looks at her like he sees an angel. Like she is his salvation.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough.

He was always drawn to wrong things. He loved my mother more than anything. I know that. He had other mistresses – alcohol and gambling were his lovers. And when she was gone, he lost it completely.

She died of leukemia. A blood witch, dying of blood disease. I can’t even call it irony anymore. No one could help her. Not the Red Coven, not the necromancers, nobody. Her body simply refused to live.