Prologue: Midnight In The Gutter
Broken bottles and creaky floorboards almost always remind me of Thay. The way his weight shifted as we got older, scraping through my unlocked window to disappear under my sheets from whatever monsters stalked his house that night. Spine to spine beneath the same blanket. Heart to heart beneath the same bruise.
He is my gallows.
And if I were being honest, my heart is a stupid thing when it comes to him.
A stupid, dark, violent thing that beats and beats and beats… until it stops.
BANG.
one
Daphne: Kandy With A K
The salt from the Sound always makes my eyes burn in the fall, when the water cools, and Seattle leans hard into the smell of rotting fish and meandering waste. Still, I hate sleeping with my window shut. The idea of being locked in and Threx locked out makes my stomach knot, even though I am twenty-five, and he has a key to my shoddy little apartment on Capitol Hill.
Time is a tricky thing.
In more ways than I want to admit, I am still that ratty little girl plastered to dirty sheets, shivering on a mattress in a lightless room.
“Are you dressed, bitch? We are leaving in thirty,” Kandy with a K shouted from the other side of my door.
I have had my fair share of roommates, but she is my favorite. Though I am pretty sure her real name is Emma, and she is the lost heiress to some tiny country that made its fortune in crystals.
“Daphne?” she called again, and I sat up, rubbing my eyes in the dim light.
Right. The Black Wing Party.
Threx was part of some underground crew that made Sons of Anarchy look like a Jack Kerouac novel if Edgar Allan Poe had accidentally pissed all over it in an alley. They didn’t ride motorcycles, but I am pretty sure they did everything else, from punching to killing to trading dark secrets in a world that reads like dark romance but ends up on true crime.
Threx,or Thayor Milo Gavros, if you have the pleasure of receiving his official mail as I do, joined when we were only sixteen, and managed to climb his way up… but to what, I have no idea. It has always felt like he is chasing death the way I chase life, which is probably why I study midwifery and spend my nights with proof that life is real and that lights can turn on.
Still, Kandy had the hots for half the members in his crew, and being Threx’s… gah. I don’t even know what the fuck I am. Not girlfriend. The last time that title dropped, he ghosted me for a week. And trust me, I am painfully aware he beds women daily.Best friend? Maybe, but even that feels too clean, and nothing about Threx and me ever comes out in the wash. Like a bruise. Or a scar. Or a fucking lifetime. Whatever I am means I am allowed in. Forever.
Which is not the golden ticket most people imagine it to be.
It is like being invited into the possibility of a plea bargain. Still, there is no shortage of burly, tattooed, muscled men whose dicks are as unhinged as their fists. And all I can say to that is,yummy.
“I am coming,” I mumbled, feeling around for my lamp and phone on the nightstand. I had attended four home births this week, and the last was all back labor. Ten hours on your hands and knees, while a mother screams into your core, leaves you listless and wobbling.
I half-glanced at my phone to see if Threx had texted, not at all surprised to find him absent. He doesn't love it when I attendthese parties or when any spotlight reveals what he is up to when I am not looking.
“Look hot,” Kandy ordered. “I mean it. If you put on a pair of leggings and a sweatshirt again, I will disown you.”
Dammit. When did getting dressed take so much work? Fucking eyeliner, curling irons, the whole half-day ritual? High pony. Low pony. Braid? Meanwhile, Netflix was looking a hell of a lot sexier than getting wasted with sweaty men. Well… sweaty Threx’s were nice.
“Stop doingthe thing.” Kandy finally threw open the door and found me standing there like a deer waiting for the kill shot. “You know, the inner monologuethingwhere you talk yourself out of going.”
“I was not doing that.” I lied, smiling.
Kandy was a mocha princess who curved and bounced like a porn star with a degree. I shared her curves, with tits and hips in all the right places, but instead of a porn star, I was more of a kinky librarian who shoved Oreos in her mouth at five in the morning and called it breakfast.
“Plus, you need to get laid,” my roommate snarled, cocking her head to the side, then popped it upright. Asshole. “Twice.”
Her comment hit me between the thighs.
Too bad Sex and I were in a scowl match lately. It’s not that I couldn’t get men. That part was simple. I was just bored with the endless roll of hips and the mindless “You like my dick?” routine.