Chapter 1
Chapter 1: The Hunger Begins
The dog had been staring at the front door for eleven minutes.
Nikos had counted every one of them from the shadow of the upstairs landing, his fingers curled around the cool marble of the banister. A stray black Labrador with a gimpy back leg and a stare like a debt collector. It had been coming for three days now, ever since the last sitter quit.
The doorbell rang.
Nikos descended slowly, the sound of his own footsteps hollow in the too-large foyer. He’d bought the house for the silence. For the thick stone walls that kept the Mediterranean sun and the neighbors’ questions out. He hadn’t accounted for a dog.
He opened the door.
The man on his porch was not what he expected. Young, yes. Twenty-two, maybe twenty-three. But it was the way he stood that snagged Nikos’s attention — weight shifted onto his left hip, one hand shoved deep into a jacket pocket that was too thin for the evening chill, the other holding a leash that was attached to nothing. He had a bruise on his jaw that was fading from purple to yellow. He smelled like rain and cheap coffee.
“You’re not the dog,” Nikos said.
The man blinked. “No. I’m the guy who’s been feeding him.”
A pause. The dog — the actual dog — materialized behind the man’s legs and sat on his foot. The man didn’t flinch.
“He waits for me,” the man said. “Every night. I bring him scraps from the taverna. Tonight I followed him here.” He tilted his head, and the porch light caught the green in his eyes. “You own him?”
“I don’t own anything that looks at me like that.”
The man laughed. It was a short, surprised sound, like a coin dropping into a slot. “He looks at you like you’re the only thing standing between him and the void.”
“I’m a doctor,” Nikos said. “I’m familiar with that look.”
That was how it started. The man’s name was Elias. He was from Thessaloniki, he said, a student who’d come to the island for the summer to escape a breakup that had left him with a bruise on his jaw and a habit of feeding strays. By the end of the week, Nikos had hired him to walk the dog — a dog Nikos hadn’t wanted, hadn’t named, and now found himself buying a bed for.
The dog’s name was Stavros. Elias named him.
The problem wasn’t the dog.
The problem was the way Elias smelled.
Nikos had lived a long time. Long enough to forget exactly how old he was, which was its own kind of confession. Long enough to know that the hunger was a liar. It told you it was about blood, about the copper taste of it, but it was never just that. The hunger was about proximity. About the moment a person let their guard down.
Elias had no guard.
He left his neck exposed when he bent to refill Stavros’s bowl. He wore threadbare shirts that slipped off one shoulder. He called Nikos “doctor” with a teasing lilt that made the word sound like an endearment. And he bled — always, it seemed. Paper cuts from the clinic’s files, a scraped knuckle from the gate, a shaving nick on the jaw. Small offerings. Nikos could smell each one from across the room, sweet and bright, and he would find himself standing too close, his hand on the doorframe, his throat clicking as he swallowed nothing.
He started drinking from the blood bank at the hospital in Rhodes. It was clinical. Efficient. It kept him from doing something stupid.
It did not keep him from watching.
Elias had a way of moving through the house like he belonged to it — barefoot, humming, leaving coffee rings on the side tables. He talked to Stavros in a low murmur that Nikos pretended not to hear. On Tuesday, he fell asleep on the couch with his mouth open, and Nikos stood in the doorway for a full minute, counting the pulse in his throat.
On Friday, Elias stayed late.
The storm had knocked the power out. Candles guttered on the kitchen table, and Elias had offered to wait for the generator to kick in. It didn’t. Nikos lit another match. Elias’s face flickered in the dark — the bruise now gone, the jaw sharp, the eyes dark and steady.
“You don’t eat with me,” Elias said.
“I eat alone.”
“That’s not an answer.”
Nikos set the match down. The silence stretched, thick as honey. Stavros whined from his bed in the corner.
“You watch me,” Elias said. His voice was quiet, not accusing. Curious. “Every time I come here. You stand in the hallway and you watch me. Why?”
The candle flame bent sideways, as if the room had inhaled.
“Because I’m hungry,” Nikos said.
The words landed like stones in a well. Elias didn’t move. He didn’t blink. He just sat there, hands loose around his coffee cup, and let the statement sit between them.
“So eat,” he said.
Nikos crossed the kitchen in three strides. His hand found Elias’s jaw — warm, real, human — and tilted it up. The pulse under his thumb beat a rhythm that matched the rain on the roof. Elias’s lips parted. His breath was coffee and mint.
“You don’t know what you’re offering,” Nikos said.
“I know exactly what I’m offering.” Elias’s hand came up, fingers curling around Nikos’s wrist. Not pulling. Holding. “I’ve been standing in your hallway too.”
The admission broke something. Nikos’s mouth found Elias’s throat, not with fangs but with teeth — a graze, a test. Elias made a sound. Not a gasp. A sigh. Like relief. His hands slid up Nikos’s back, under the shirt, fingers pressing into the muscle of his shoulders.
“Why me?” Nikos asked against his skin.
“Because you look at me like I’m the only thing standing between you and the void.”
The fangs came out on their own. Two quick punctures, clean as a needle. Elias’s body arched against him, a full-body shudder that Nikos felt in his own chest. The first pull of blood hit his tongue — hot, salt-sweet, alive. Elias’s hand fisted in his hair. He didn’t push away. He pulled closer.
“More,” Elias whispered.
Nikos lifted him onto the table. Coffee cups scattered. The candle tipped and went out. In the dark, Elias’s mouth found his — open, searching, smeared with his own blood. Nikos pulled back just far enough to see the smear on his lip, the dazed hunger in his eyes.
“You’re shaking,” Nikos said.
“So are you.”
Lightning lit the room white for a heartbeat. Elias’s throat was still bleeding. His shirt was open — when had that happened? — and his chest was heaving. Nikos’s hand splayed across it, feeling the heartbeat hammer, feeling how badly this man wanted him.
“If I start,” Nikos said, “I don’t know that I can stop.”
Elias’s laugh was breathless. He hooked a leg around Nikos’s hip and pulled him down until their mouths were a breath apart.
“Who said anything about stopping?”
