Chapter 1

Kozell had spent a year and six months in Nova Scotia, hiding in a cold, quiet place where nobody knew his name.

It hadn’t helped. The thing inside him had come along on the plane, and it was still hungry.

Now he was back in Nashville. He stepped off the aircraft and his bodyguards closed in around him like a wall.

“Welcome back, sir. We need to move before the paparazzi notice you,” the chief of security said.

Too late. Flashes were already exploding across the tarmac.

“Mr. Kozell! A year and a half away! How was Nova Scotia?”

“Over here, Kozell! Why did you disappear?”

They chased the car down the road, some of them running alongside it just to catch a single word. Kozell kept his eyes forward and his jaw tight. He couldn’t answer them. The noise, the heat of so many bodies pressed close and the thudding of so many hearts were all too much. One slip and the world would see what he really was, and the fans who adored him would turn into a mob.

Everybody wants a free life, a life without fear. That was all Kozell had ever wanted, and it had never felt further away.

The penthouse had changed while he was gone. Everything gleamed and the air smelled of polish and fresh flowers. For a moment, standing in the doorway, he let himself feel something close to peace.

“Cool and calm,” he murmured. “Almost like I’m a normal man coming home.”

Almost.

He climbed to his bedroom, where his luggage had been arranged with perfect precision, and shut the door. He stayed in the shower far too long, with his forehead against the tiles and the water running hot, counting his breaths and trying to quiet the pulse in his ears.

Why couldn’t I have been like Zelda? Why was she born ordinary and I born like this?

He stepped out with his robe tied at his waist and water running down his chest. At the dressing table he dried his black hair until it fell back into its silky side cut, the long fringe hanging over his right eye, as it always did. Through the left one he studied himself.

A handsome face. A rich man’s face. A face that belonged to someone with a perfect life.

“Beauty and money,” he said to his reflection, “and not one night of peace.”

He went down for lunch.

Meals in the penthouse were always quiet. The dining table was long enough for twenty, and he sat at the head of it alone, served by staff who kept to the “do not talk” rule he had written himself. Silence was safer. Silence meant no one got close.

Then the doors burst open.

“Kozell! You’re back! Why didn’t you tell us?”

Zelda hugged him from behind. He gave her a cold smile. It was all he had left to give.

“Mom and Dad are furious. You might get spanked when you finally show up.”

He studied her without expression. “I wanted it to be a surprise.”

She rolled her eyes. “A surprise? The most famous animation maker in Nashville lands at the airport and you thought no one would know? It’s already on every news channel. You don’t get surprises anymore.”

“Then I suppose I don’t have a life of my own,” he said quietly.

The sadness in his voice made her frown. “Every celebrity gives up their privacy, Koz. Why are you being so dramatic?”

He sighed. He was too tired for one of her long speeches. All he wanted was a simple evening with his sister, the way it used to be before the secret came between them. He had missed her more than he could say, and he wasn’t going to ruin their first day together with an argument.

“You’ve changed, Zelda. You look… grown. Beautiful.”

She burst into laughter. “I’m twenty, Kozell! Did you think I’d stay sixteen forever?”

“I suppose not.”

“And look at you.” She poked his arm. “The gym body, the goatee, that big Adam’s apple. You’re a full-grown man now.”

“Is that good?”

“Of course it is. Growing is good.” She sighed. “I just wish you’d stop being so cold and weird.”

He pushed the muffins toward her. “Eat something.”

“Lemonade, please.” She wandered off toward the kitchen, still talking. “Mom and Dad expect you tomorrow, by the way. Don’t skip.”

“I won’t.”

She returned with her glass and settled across from him, watching him with those sharp, curious eyes.

“You know, Koz, you’ve built so much. Koz Animation Corporation, your own school, and you never even finished college. And I’m still sitting in class with nothing to show for it. Sometimes I wonder why you never let me enroll at Wolfries College. Why?”

Something moved behind his eyes, too fast for her to catch.

“That school isn’t for your type of people,” he said.

Zelda stared at him. “My type of people? Kozell, that doesn’t make any sense. Wolfries isn’t a special academy. It’s a regular college. So tell me the real reason.”

He stood up so abruptly that his chair scraped across the floor.

“I need to rest.”

“Don’t walk away from me! You’ve only just come home, can’t we have one peaceful day? Kozell! Are you even listening? Koz!”

He heard every word. He just didn’t turn around, because he couldn’t let her see what was happening to his eyes.

Kozell wasn’t a gentle man, and he didn’t pretend to be.

He was cold, blunt and impatient, with a mouth sharp enough to wound. He smoked to dull the edges of his nerves. When someone annoyed him, he could make them wish they had never met him, and most people who did meet him left disliking him. That was the point. A man nobody likes is a man nobody gets close to.

And yet beneath all of it he was untouched.

He never went to clubs. He never took a woman home. He avoided girls the way other men avoided fire, not because he hated them but because he was terrified of what he might do to them. He had already hurt more than a few. His secret had walled him off from the world so completely that he had never known what it felt like to hold someone who wasn’t afraid of him.

The papers called him the fifth most handsome man in Nashville. Girls dreamed about him and boys idolized him, and none of them knew the truth.

His body was untouched, but his mind was not. In the dark, like any other man, he wanted. He imagined a woman in his bed, her warmth against him, her heartbeat slow and steady beside his own.

That was the problem. He could never imagine her heartbeat without imagining something else.

By midnight the penthouse was silent.

Kozell stood on the balcony in the dark, a cigarette burning unfinished between his fingers. Nashville glittered below him, thousands of lights, thousands of lives. Music drifted up from a club down the street, and laughter, and the click of heels on the pavement.

And under it all, something else: the heartbeats.

He had spent a year and a half training himself not to hear them. He heard them now. They rose from the street like a low drumbeat, each one with its own rhythm and its own warm, living scent. A couple stumbling out of the club, laughing. A man smoking in an alley. A girl in a red dress, alone, wobbling on her heels.

His fingers tightened on the railing. The metal groaned.

Not tonight. Please, not tonight.

His mouth had gone dry. His gums ached. When he glanced down, the nails on his hand had darkened and lengthened, curving into something that was no longer human. In the glass of the balcony door, his left eye stared back at him, and it was no longer brown. It was black and smoky, swirling like a storm.

The hunger was awake.

He dragged himself inside, locked the balcony door, slid the bolt, then the second bolt, then the third. He sank to the floor with his back against the wall, breathing hard, and pressed his claws into his palms until they bled.

Below him, the girl in the red dress laughed at something on her phone.

“You came back for nothing,” he whispered to the empty room. “You can’t run from yourself.”

On his phone, a message from his mother lit up the dark: Tomorrow, Kozell. We’ll be waiting.