Chapter 1
The night my sex tape went viral was the same night I learned monsters were real.
Dream Richards never expected the worst decision of her week to involve both her boyfriend and possibly supernatural soul theft, but life, apparently, enjoyed multitasking.
The bedroom smelled like sweat and expensive cologne and the kind of rain that drifted in through the cracked balcony doors and made the city sound farther away than it was. Neon bled through the curtains in lazy streaks of blue and gold, painting bars of light across the sheets, across her thighs, across the long, tattooed line of the body braced over hers.
Zay Brooks had her pinned to the mattress with one forearm beside her head and the other hand wrapped low around her hip, and he was smiling that smile. The one that had ruined a campus full of girls before her. The one that said he knew exactly what he was doing and exactly how good he was at it.
“You’re quiet, baby.” His voice had dropped to that low, scraped-raw register she’d learned meant he was already half gone. “That’s not like you.”
“Maybe you finally said something worth shutting up for.”
He laughed against her throat, and she felt the vibration of it everywhere. Six-foot-two of bad decision and unfair genetics. Dark, wavy hair he never bothered to tame, falling forward over a face that had no business being that symmetrical. Eyes the dark, lit green of a bottle held up to a streetlamp. A line of ink wrapped his ribs and curled up under his arm — something he’d gotten the summer he turned eighteen and refused to explain. Muscle laid down deep and easy, the kind that came from actually doing the work, not posting about it.
Criminally pretty. That was the only phrase that fit. Dream had said it to Thalia the first week of the semester and Thalia had screamed.
He dragged his mouth down her collarbone and bit, and she arched up under him before her brain had time to weigh in.
“There she is,” he murmured. “C’mon, Richards. Let me hear you.”
“You’re needy tonight.”
“You’re wet,” he countered, and slid a hand between them to prove it. “So, who’s needy.”
“Rude.”
“Honest.”
His fingers worked her in a slow, practiced rhythm, and she hated that he’d learned her body that fast. She hated, a little, that he was good at this. It made it harder to keep him in the convenient little box she’d built for him — the hot, entertaining, do-not-catch-feelings box. The box was, currently, structurally compromised.
“Zay.”
“Yeah?”
“If you don’t stop being smug and start being useful, I’m gonna throw you out a window.”
He grinned against her mouth. “I love when you sweet-talk me.”
Then he kissed her properly, and useful was suddenly the only word that meant anything. He shifted, and she felt the heavy, blunt drag of him against her, and her breath caught in a way she could not pretend was casual. He noticed. Of course he noticed. He noticed everything when it served him.
“You want it, baby?”
“Don’t make me say it.”
“Oh, you’re saying it.” He nudged closer, slow, infuriating. “Say it.”
“God, you’re such a —”
“Say it, Dream.”
“Fuck me.” Quiet, because she refused to give him the volume he wanted. “Happy?”
“Ecstatic.”
He pushed in on a single slow stroke and her whole body went still around the stretch of him, and then he started moving — deep, controlled, like he had nothing to prove and all night to prove it. One of her legs hooked high around his hip. One of his hands fisted in her curls. He talked through it the way he always did — filthy and easy, voice low at her ear, telling her how she felt, what she did to him, how he’d been thinking about this since calc, since lunch, since the moment she’d opened the door in that oversized shirt with no bra and that look in her eyes that said get over here and prove it.
She lost time. She lost grip of her own breathing. The neon kept washing the walls. The rain kept coming in. The first orgasm hit her on his fingers and his mouth and a whispered, “That’s it, give it to me, that’s my fucking girl,” that she absolutely was not going to think about later. The second hit her with his hand braced flat on the headboard above her and his hips snapped tight against hers, and that was when it happened.
He kissed her at the wrong moment.
He kissed her right at the edge — right as he was tipping over with her — and something in Dream’s chest opened.
Not metaphorically.
Opened.
Energy slid into her mouth like smoke. Warm. Metallic. Alive. It tasted like copper and something underneath copper she had no word for. It poured off his tongue and over hers and down, and for one impossible second, she felt every single thing inside Zay Brooks — every cocky, golden, untouchable atom of him — try to follow it.
He came with a broken sound against her mouth.
And inside her chest, something inhaled.
Not her lungs. Something deeper. Something that did not have a name. A pull — a terrifying, surgical suction — like a door inside her had swung open and the room behind it was hungry. For one horrible second, she saw it leave him. Not physically. Something deeper. A shimmer beneath his skin. A thread. Gold-dark, faintly luminous, drawn toward her on the exhale they shared.
His soul.
Or some piece of it.
Dream wrenched her mouth off his and the thread snapped back into him like a rubber band, and Zay went limp against her shoulder with a shudder she felt down to her teeth.
