Declan
I lay flat on my back on the mattress, staring up at the shadow-draped ceiling beams. I had stripped down to my dark grey t-shirt and sweats, but I hadn't even bothered to pull the duvet over myself. The sheets felt too clean. The room was too still.
In the city, I had learned to sleep through the chaos. Sirens, screaming pedestrians, slamming car doors—it was a steady blanket of white noise that kept my mind occupied. But here, in the absolute vacuum of the woods, every tiny sound was magnified tenfold. The settling of the floorboards. The drip of rainwater from the eaves. The distant, low groan of pine trees swaying in the wind.
And every time I closed my eyes, my brain dragged me right back to the hallway—to that damn painting, to the golden eyes staring out of the dark woods, and then straight into the memory of Julian's death.
The rain in Manhattan. The smell of copper and trash in the alley behind the warehouse. The fluorescent glare of the ambulance lights flashing red and blue against the slick, wet pavement.
I remembered dropping to my knees on the cold slate tiles. I remembered the slick, dark blood pooling around my hands as I reached for him. Julian.
His throat shredded with such raw, violent force that the medical examiner had spent an hour trying to figure out what kind of industrial machinery could have caused that kind of tissue tearing.
They called it a botched robbery. They called him careless. They told me to take time off because I was screaming at the M.E. in the middle of the morgue, telling them no human knife could leave jawbone fragments crushed into fine dust like that.
I snapped my eyes open, gasping for air as my lungs seized up. My chest was heaving, cold sweat pooling along my collarbones.
I couldn't stay in this room. I couldn't stay in this house.
I swung my legs over the edge of the mattress, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. I pulled on my dark leather jacket, pulled my heavy boots onto my feet, and reached for the nightstand. My fingers wrapped around the familiar, cold steel grip of my SIG Sauer P226 service pistol. I holstered it at my hip, checking the magazine out of pure muscle memory, before slipping silently down the back staircase and out the side door into the freezing night air.
I needed air. I needed to drive until the voices in my head fell quiet.
I climbed into the driver's seat of my truck, cranking the ignition. The engine roared to life, its headlights slicing through the pitch-black yard. I shifted into drive and pulled off the ranch, turning onto the narrow county road that snaked deeper into the mountain pass.
The fog had rolled down from the higher elevations, thick and dense, settling over the road like a heavy gray blanket. My headlights could barely punch five feet through the gloom, casting eerie, towering shadows against the pine trees lining the asphalt. I drove slowly, my speedometer hovering around twenty miles an hour, the wiper blades clicking back and forth in a rhythmic, hypnotic scrape against the glass.
According to the map I had memorized earlier, this stretch of road ran directly along the eastern boundary line of the Zephaniah Reserve—a massive, privately owned territory that covered hundreds of thousands of acres of wilderness.
Suddenly, my headlights caught a massive shadow in the middle of the road.
I slammed my foot on the brake pedal. The ABS system kicked in, the tires screeching loudly against the wet pavement as the truck skidded sideways before coming to a violent halt just ten feet short of the shape.
My heart vaulted into my throat. My hand instantly dropped to my hip, my fingers wrapping around the grip of my gun as my NYPD instincts surged through my blood.
Standing dead in the center of the fog-drenched road was a man.
No—not just a man. An absolute force of nature.
He stood well over six-foot-five, carrying a thick, devastatingly muscular frame that looked like it had been carved out of pure stone. His heavy, dark canvas coat hung unbuttoned and open despite the freezing rain, revealing a massive, heavily hair-dusted chest and dark, intricate tattoos that crawled up his shoulders and thick arms. Long, wet, ink-black hair hung in wild, wavy strands past his shoulders, dripping rain onto a strong, square jawline covered in a dark, full beard.
He was devastatingly rough—a lethal mix of untamed, wilderness power and striking, dangerous handsomeness.
But it was what he was doing that made my blood run ice-cold.
He was dragging a heavy, reinforced black canvas body bag across the yellow lines of the road, the fabric stretched tight against a large, heavy form weighted inside.
"Police! Don't fucking move!" I barked, shoving my car door open and stepping out into the mud. I drew my P226 in a fluid motion, bringing it up, locking my sights directly onto the center of his chest. "Put your hands up! Now!"
My heart was beating like a sledgehammer against my ribs, an unexplainable, violent wave of electric heat surging through my skin the moment my eyes locked onto his outline. It felt like the air around us had suddenly been pressurized, making it hard to draw a complete breath.
The man stopped. Slowly, deliberately, he turned his head toward me.
My breath caught in my throat, freezing in my lungs.
A dark leather patch was strapped tight over his left eye, and a jagged, white scar cut through the brow, tracking down across his cheekbone and disappearing into his dark beard. But his single remaining eye—a sharp, piercing hazel flecked with vivid specs of gold—flashed through the mist, locking onto me with an intensity that made my knees physically tremble. His lips, framed by the dark beard, curved into a slow, dangerously playful smirk.
"Police?" the stranger's voice rumbled.
It was deep, thick, and impossibly resonant, vibrating straight through the asphalt beneath my boots and echoing in the center of my chest. He didn't raise his hands. He didn't even glance down at the loaded firearm pointed at his heart.
"You're a long way from the city, city boy," he murmured.
"I said don't move!" I shouted, tightening my fingers on the grip. I forced my voice to stay steady, but my palms were slick with sweat inside my gloves.
The sheer gravity of his presence was overwhelming. It felt like standing right next to a downed power line—a raw, humming current of energy radiating off him that made my skin prickle and my blood boil with a terrifying, confusing heat.
"Drop the bag!" I ordered, taking a slow step forward. "Drop it and step away, or I swear to God I will drop you."
The stranger let out a low, rumbling sound from deep in his throat—a sound that sounded terrifyingly close to a purr. With agonizing slowness, he reached down with one massive, calloused hand, grabbing the heavy metal zipper at the top of the body bag.
I tightened my finger on the trigger, every muscle in my body pulling taut, expecting the worst. I expected to see a human head. A corpse. A victim of whatever sick monster was hiding in these woods.
With a sharp clack, he pulled the zipper down, reaching in and pulling back the heavy canvas.
Revealed beneath the black material wasn't a human face. It was the glossy, dark fur, slender snout, and branched antlers of a dead buck.
"Poaching on county roads is technically a ticketable offense, detective," the stranger murmured.
He took a step toward me, completely ignoring the gun still pointed straight at his nose. He kept coming until he was standing just inches from the barrel of my weapon, leaning down slightly so his single hazel eye was level with mine.
The moment he stepped into my space, the scent of him hit me like a physical force—rain, crushed cedar needles, and a rich, suffocating heat that made my head spin.
"Or were you planning on taking me in for murder?" he asked softly, his wine-colored lips twitching with dark amusement.
"Step back," I rasped. My voice sounded deeper, raspier than usual as I fought against an insane, inexplicable urge to reach out and touch his jawline, to feel the heat radiating off his skin.
What the hell is wrong with you, Killer? my detective brain screamed at me, panic flaring in my chest. He's trying to disarm you. It's a power play. He's a local suspect trying to mess with your head.
"You're shaking, Shiny," the stranger whispered, his golden-hazel eye gleaming with a dark, possessive light.
Before I could pull the trigger or step back, he reached out with two massive, calloused fingers. Slowly, gently, he rested them against the warm steel of my gun barrel, nudging the weapon downward until it was pointing at the asphalt.
His touch on the metal sent a violent shockwave of heat straight up my arm, making my breath hitch in my throat.
"Lower the iron before you hurt yourself," he said, his voice dropping into a low, rumbling register that felt like a command. "I'm Zion. Zion Zephaniah. And this..." He gestured casually with his head toward the pitch-black woods behind him. "...is my backyard."
I stared at him, my mind scrambling as the surname landed in my head. Zephaniah. The family that owned the massive, closed-off reserve. The local royalty who answered to no one.
"You're the Chief," I breathed, forcing my legs to move, stepping backward until my back hit the cold hood of my truck just to put distance between us.
"I am," Zion said, his smile widening to reveal sharp, bright white teeth.
He reached down with one hand, grabbing the heavy nylon strap of the body bag containing the two-hundred-pound deer. With terrifying, effortless strength, he swung the bag over his shoulder as if it weighed nothing at all.
"Welcome to Enen, Detective Killer," Zion murmured, taking a step backward into the fog. "Try to get some sleep. You look like you've seen a ghost."
Before I could form another sentence, Zion turned on his heel and melted into the dense treeline. The dark fog closed in behind him instantly, swallowing his massive frame as if he had been built out of the mist itself.
I stood completely alone in the middle of the road, the engine of my truck idling softly behind me, the rain falling in steady sheets over my face.
My heart was beating out of my chest. My hands were trembling against my thighs, my skin still burning on my arms where his gaze had rested.
I gripped my service weapon tightly, shoving it back into my holster with a sharp click.
He's playing mind games, I told myself fiercely, wiping cold rain from my eyes as I walked back to the driver's side. An arrogant, rich local who thinks he owns the mountain. He's trying to flex on the new city cop to keep me off his land.
I climbed back into the cab and slammed the door shut, shifting the truck into reverse and backing away from the Reserve border.
I tried to focus on the road. I tried to focus on the case files I would have to read in a day at the precinct. But as I drove back toward Malachi's ranch through the dark, one single, terrifying thought echoed in the back of my mind, louder than my insomnia, louder than the memory of Julian's blood:
Why did looking into his eye feel like I had just been found?