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.
The red haze slammed down. The dissociative void cracked open—the black, bottomless place where he lost all tether and became only velocity and damage. He was going to tear them apart. He felt the monster unhinge its jaw, the sheer force of his rage threatening to turn him reckless, sloppy.
No.
Not in front of her.
Samuel’s jaw clenched hard enough that he felt something shift in a back molar. He forced his attention down through the dark, past the guns, past the bodies, and fixed it on Sarah. On the freezing rain lashing her soft, exposed skin. The water hitting her collarbone, dragging down the slope of her neck, raising goosebumps along her arms. The stark vulnerability of her shivering frame, the absolute stubbornness of the warmth still radiating off her in a city doing everything in its power to extinguish it.
The red haze crystallized. Cold. Razor-edged. Precise.
He moved.
—
Sarah opened her eyes as a shadow eclipsed the flickering light.
It didn’t fall—it plummeted, a massive silhouette dropping silently from above and landing directly between her and the armed men. The impact shattered the puddles, sending a shockwave of water in every direction. The ground beneath her feet shuddered.
The suited man barely had time to raise his blade. “What the f—”
The giant surged forward. His right arm snapped out—a blur—his gloved hand clamping over the throat of the first man. A sickening wet crunch echoed off the brick, and the man’s body collapsed before the expression left his face.
The second man yanked his trigger. The gunshot roared through the confined space, a physical thing, concussive, and Sarah felt it in her back teeth. But the giant was already gone—he slipped under the line of fire, drove his shoulder into the gunman’s sternum with the force of something structural failing. A sound like green wood splitting. Then the man was airborne, and then he wasn’t, the pavement cratering slightly where he landed.
Sarah’s knees gave out. She sank against the wall, hands clamped over her ears, hazel eyes blown wide.
Only the suited man remained. He slashed wildly, his arrogance entirely replaced by something high-pitched and animal. The giant let the blade slice through empty air—once, twice—then stepped inside his guard. A massive hand wrapped around the man’s wrist. A single twist. Bone broke through skin in a jagged white line, blood spraying across the flooded concrete. The suited man’s scream was cut off by an elbow that caved in his nose, and he dropped without another sound.
Silence slammed back into the alley.
Sarah’s chest heaved. Her scrubs clung to her shaking frame, soaked through, and the smell of wet asphalt and iron had been replaced entirely by something rawer, hotter. She became aware of her own heartbeat in a way she’d never been before—each pulse a separate, enormous event.
Slowly, the giant turned to face her.
The flickering bulb carved harsh shadows into his face. Broad chest rising and falling in slow, controlled measures beneath a black tactical jacket. Rain slicking his dark hair back from sharp angles and a brutal history written in scar tissue—a jagged line ripping across his cheekbone, pulling the skin taut, giving him a perpetual expression that landed somewhere between fury and grief.
Sarah’s throat convulsed. Her mind, still half-clinging to the phantom chains of the playground swing, could not assemble what she was seeing into anything coherent. Three armed men. Less than ten seconds. The bodies arranged around his boots like broken furniture.
Samuel stood perfectly still. The rain washed the blood from his knuckles in thin pink rivulets. His dark eyes locked onto hers.
He saw the terror in her dilated pupils. The violent trembling of her jaw. The monster inside him roared—step forward, take her away from this rot, absorb her shivering into your own heat—and the lie in his chest answered it immediately, a throbbing certainty worn smooth from years of repetition.
My touch will corrupt her.
His blood-stained hands grazing her skin. The darkness bleeding in through the point of contact. He was the executioner. He was the violence in the alley. He was what she should be running from.
A violent shiver wracked her small frame. Her curls clung to her cheeks in wet, heavy ropes.
She pushed herself off the wall.
The movement was wobbly, her knees knocking together, her wet sneaker splashing in the bloody rainwater. She was running on nothing—he could see it in every line of her, the total depletion of a woman who had already given everything she had hours before she ever stepped into this alley. Yet her hazel eyes moved through the dark with a terrible, exhausted focus, and they landed not on the bodies, not on the gun still lying in the flooding water, but on his face.
On the cut the blade had traced along his forearm.
“You’re bleeding,” she whispered.
Samuel went absolutely still.
The words hit him somewhere below defense, below armor—somewhere he hadn’t known was still exposed. He didn’t look at his arm. He looked at her. At the woman who had just watched a bloodbath and whose first coherent sentence was an assessment of his wounds. The exhausted, irrational, unbreakable instinct of her, defaulting to care in the middle of a slaughterhouse.
The rain kept falling. Cold and stinging, washing everything into the gutters.
Sarah took another trembling step toward him, and the shadows that had held him for three years—the ones he’d built wall by wall, conviction by conviction, in the space between what he was and what he’d destroyed—began, very quietly, to crack.
What Bleeds in the Rain
Rainwater channeled down the bridge of Sarah’s nose and dripped from her chin into the flooded gutter. Her scrub top clung to her ribs, useless against the wind knifing through the narrow corridor between buildings.
A few feet away, the man hadn’t moved.
He was enormous—chest heaving once, slowly, beneath soaked black canvas, the single streetlamp at the alley’s mouth throwing amber light across the hard planes of his face. A scar pulled at the corner of his mouth. His brow was heavy, shadowed, carved into something that looked less like an expression and more like a permanent condition.
Sarah kept her eyes on his forearm. The laceration was deep, the kind that didn’t close on its own. Crimson welled up, washed away in the downpour, and welled up again, dark and insistent against pale skin.
Her lungs burned.
The part of her brain that had kept her alive through fourteen years and eleven foster placements screamed at her to walk away. This man had just turned three armed attackers into broken, motionless heaps on the wet concrete. She had watched him do it with her own eyes.
Her boots didn’t move.