They shot my father at the dinner table. They burned our house with him still inside. They came for me next, with a knife and a name I'd never heard. I ran barefoot through the snow until my feet went numb. And then I crawled under the iron gate of the one place in this city no one dared enter— the private wing of Dante Moretti. The man they called the Devil of New York. Behind me, the men skidded to a stop in the slush. I heard one of them curse. "Go get her," the younger one hissed. "She's right there." "That's Moretti's floor." The older one spat on the ground. "You want to die tonight? Anyone who crosses that line comes back in a bag." They left me. Two hunters, walking away from a wounded girl, because something worse lived on the other side of that gate. I should have been relieved. Instead, my whole body started shaking. The corridor was black marble and silence. No guards. No cameras blinking. Just a single door at the end, glowing faintly from underneath, and a sound coming through it that didn't sound human. A low, cracked, animal noise. Like a man trying not to scream. I don't know why I opened it. Maybe because I'd already lost everything, and fear stops meaning much when you have nothing left. The room was wrecked. A table split in half. A chair through the window. Glass everywhere, glittering like frost. And in the center of it, on his knees, was a man. Bare shoulders. Black veins crawling up his throat like ink under skin. His hands were bleeding, because he'd been digging his own fingers into the marble. He lifted his head. His eyes were gold. Not warm gold. Molten. Wrong. "Get out," he rasped. I couldn't move. He was across the room before I understood he'd stood up. His hand closed around my throat and lifted me until my toes left the floor. "Who sent you?" His voice scraped. "Answer me." "N-nobody—" I clawed at his wrist. "They killed my father—I was just running—" His grip tightened. His nails split the skin at the side of my neck. Blood ran down my collarbone. And then something impossible happened. Where my blood touched his hand, the black veins retreated. Like a tide pulling back. The ink drained out of his throat, out of his jaw, out of the whites of his eyes, until all that was left was a man—young, beautiful, terrifying—staring at me like I'd just walked out of a church wall. He set me down so gently my knees buckled. "You," he whispered. He leaned in and breathed against my hair like he was drowning and I was air. "Twelve years. Nine hundred donors. Not one match." His thumb dragged through the blood on my neck. "And you fall through my door." "Let me go." My voice broke. "Please. Let me go." "I can't." His forehead touched mine. He was burning. "Not tonight." "Don't—" "I'll pay for it," he said, and there was something almost like grief in it. "Every day for the rest of my life. But not tonight." He kissed me. The room went white at the edges. My back hit silk. His mouth found the cut on my throat, and the last of the black burned out of him like a fire dying, and I stopped fighting somewhere between the second heartbeat and the third, because his hands shook and mine did too and neither of us was strong enough to stop what was already happening. I woke at dawn wrapped in a blanket that cost more than my father's whole shop. He was asleep beside me. His back was covered in scratches. Mine. I put on my ruined coat and I ran again. I cried the whole way to the bus station, and I told myself I would forget him. Three months later, I sat on the bathroom floor of a motel in Queens. Two pink lines. I pressed my hand flat against my stomach and I laughed until it turned into sobbing, because there was only one thing on God's earth worse than being hunted by the men who killed my father. Carrying the Devil's child.