Centuria Books · Shadows of Starlight: Vigilante’s Shard
Shadows of Starlight: Vigilante’s Shard — Read the First Chapter
The obsessive protector watching her from the rooftops has to learn the difference between guarding a woman and owning her—or lose her by choice.
The Weight of Other People’s Skies
Lactic acid burned a slow trail up the back of Sarah’s calves, pooling under her kneecaps in a dull, rhythmic throb. Hour fifteen. Maybe sixteen. The digital clock above the nurses’ station blurred into a glowing red smear against the sterile white wall of the pediatric oncology wing.
She leaned over the edge of the oversized hospital crib, her arches screaming against the cheap foam of her sneakers, and pressed a warm hand to seven-year-old Leo’s trembling spine. His skin was paper-thin beneath her palm, feverish and damp.
“Shh, brave guy.” Her voice came out low, a steady hum she felt in her own chest more than heard. “The dragons are gone. I chased them out the window.”
Leo whimpered, his small fingers twisting into the fabric of her scrub top. “Promise?”
“Promise.” She forced her cracked lips into a wide, bright smile, pouring every final scraping ounce of energy into it. A thick coil of wildly curly chestnut hair slipped free from her tortoiseshell clip and bounced against her cheek. She didn’t brush it away. If the tickling curl kept Leo focused on something other than the chemo port in his chest, it could stay there all night.
This was the transaction of her existence. The hollow compulsion inside her ribs operated by a singular law: empty yourself out so someone else can be full. Fourteen years bouncing through the rusted, indifferent machinery of the foster system had carved that law into her bones. Squeeze the last drop of warmth from your own veins. Anchor the broken people around you. Maybe then they won’t discard you. Because if you fell, the ground was hard, and the air was empty, and no one was ever going to stay to catch you.
Leo’s breathing finally leveled out. Sarah carefully extracted her scrubs from his grip and tucked the thin cotton blanket under his chin.
When she straightened, her spine popped in three distinct places. She gathered her charts, her whole body aching beneath the damp, wrinkled fabric of her uniform. The night-shift supervisor, Brenda, caught her eye from the desk.
“Go home, Miller. You clocked out an hour ago.”
“Just wanted to make sure Leo settled.” Sarah’s voice was raspy but she kept it buoyant, offered a quick wave, grabbed her worn canvas tote. “See you tomorrow!”
—
The automatic doors of St. Jude’s slid open and vomited her into a wall of water.
A torrential downpour hammered the concrete, the sky ripped open and bleeding a black, freezing ocean onto the city. Wind rattled the streetlamps. Sarah tipped her head back. A tired, genuine laugh bubbled up her throat—the sheer chaotic absurdity of the weather matched the buzzing static behind her eyes perfectly. She stepped directly into the deluge. Cold water soaked through her thin cotton jacket in seconds, plastering her scrub pants to her thighs. She had no umbrella. She’d given hers to a new trainee two days ago and forgotten to ask for it back. It didn’t matter. The rain felt like a reset button.
Three stories above the street, swallowed by the shadows flanking a gargoyle-studded fire escape, Samuel watched her.
He did not shiver. The freezing rain sliced down his face, dragging over the jagged scar tissue that slashed across his left cheekbone and disappeared into the collar of his tactical jacket. At six-foot-three, his heavily muscled frame remained coiled in the dark, motionless as the stone beside him. His jaw tightened as he tracked the chaotic bounce of her curls beneath the jaundiced wash of the streetlights.
Three weeks. Three weeks of being a ghost haunting her periphery.
His chest expanded slowly, pulling the scarred tissue across his ribs taut. He watched her tilt her face to the rain, watched the soft curve of her throat expose itself to the elements. A jagged ache bloomed behind his sternum—the kind he didn’t have a name for, the kind he didn’t want one for. She was a radiator in a freezing world, bleeding warmth into a city that only knew how to take.
She was everything Evie had been.
His calloused fingers dug into the rusted iron railing until the metal groaned. The memory of his sister’s blood—hot and sticky and rapidly cooling on a warehouse floor—coated his palms like a second skin. He blinked, pushing the phantom sensation away. He had failed Evie. The syndicate had taken her, broken her, and left him with a rotting cavity where his humanity used to live.
He was a monster now. A precision weapon forged in back-alley slaughter. His hands were built to snap clavicles and crush windpipes, and he knew it the way he knew his own pulse: his touch would corrupt anything pure. So he stayed above. Watching. Making sure the filth of this city never reached her.
Below, Sarah hit the intersection of 5th and Pike and pivoted left, aiming her worn sneakers toward the narrow, unlit passage of the Blackwood underpass.
A low sound moved through Samuel’s throat. No.
It was her shortcut when she was running on fumes—he’d catalogued it, noted it, filed it under acceptable risk during daylight hours. But tonight it crossed an invisible line.
Benjamin’s territory.
He launched from the fire escape without thought. Not down—dropped, catching the crossbar of a lower balcony with both hands, his muscles absorbing the momentum in silence, then vaulting to the roof of the adjacent brownstone. He tracked her from above, a shadow hunting a sunbeam.
—
Down in the alley, darkness swallowed Sarah whole. The rain morphed, its sound changing as it ricocheted off brick walls and corrugated steel dumpsters. Water sloshed around her ankles.
Then she hit the wall of scent.
Her steps faltered. The air in the narrow passage thickened, pressing against her sinuses. Wet asphalt. And iron. Not the metallic tang of old pipes—fresh iron, hot iron, the kind that crawled up the back of your nasal cavity and coated your throat with something that tasted distinctly like pennies. Her hindbrain screamed before her conscious mind caught up. Bile spiked in her esophagus. She had spent enough time in emergency medicine to know what she was smelling.
She stopped. Ahead, illuminated by a single flickering bulb caged in wire, silhouettes moved.
“He said Tuesday, Mickey. It’s Thursday.”
The voice was casual. Bored.
Sarah pressed her spine against the freezing coarse brick. Her breath hitched, trapped itself in her throat.
Under the flickering light, two men in heavy leather coats held a third man on his knees. The kneeling man was sobbing, blood mixing with the rainwater running down his face. A fourth man—sharp suit, thoroughly destroyed by the storm—stepped forward holding a curved blade.
“Please,” the kneeling man gargled.
The suited man didn’t reply. He whipped his arm in a short, brutal arc.
A wet, tearing sound ripped through the alley. A thick spray of black arterial blood painted the flooded concrete.
Sarah’s hands flew to her mouth. Her wet sneaker slipped against a piece of shattered glass.
It popped. A tiny, insignificant sound, utterly deafening in the half-second of silence following the execution.
The suited man stilled. He wiped the blade slowly on his ruined slacks and turned his head.
“Well.” His eyes found her in the dark. “Looks like a stray kitten wandered into the abattoir.” A half-smile. “Grab her.”
The two men in leather coats dropped the twitching corpse and pulled heavy black firearms from their waistbands.
Ice flooded Sarah’s veins. Her heart hammered against her ribs like something trying to break through bone. The oxygen in the alley simply vanished. Her legs, already burning from fifteen hours on her feet, locked up and cemented her to the pavement.
Her brain, desperate and fractured, pulled her somewhere else entirely.
The suffocating smell of blood and asphalt faded. The brick wall against her back dissolved. Weightlessness. The rusted chains of a playground swing digging into her small palms—she could feel the bite of the metal, the rough oxidized edges. She pumped her legs, kicking up, up, up toward a blinding blue sky. Wind rushed past her ears. At the absolute apex of the arc, gravity ceased to exist. She was untethered. Flying. Safe from the earth and everyone on it.
—
Above the alley, perched on the lip of the fire escape directly over the men, Samuel watched the guns level at Sarah’s trembling frame.
Something ancient snapped in his skull.