*Selene*
They say Eros City never sleeps.
They're wrong.
It doesn't sleep—but it doesn't stay awake either. It drifts, caught in a half-dream where neon lights flicker like distant stars, and secrets pass from mouth to mouth like cigarettes. It's always dusk here, even at dawn. And maybe that's why I've survived this long. In a place that doesn't know how to be one thing or the other, I've learned to fade between the cracks.
The town permits you to disappear if you so much as desire it.
I'm on my seventh shift this week at Velvet Veins, the bar where the whiskey is aged in blood and the staff are older than they look. The humans who come here don't know. They think it's just a retro joint with vampire-themed cocktails and a dress code stuck in the 1920s. They think the low lighting and live jazz are part of the aesthetic.
They have no idea what hides behind the red velvet curtains. They don't even notice me.
Which is exactly the idea.
"Selene," Mara, the other bartender, tells me, her silver-blonde hair scraped back into a noose. "Guy at the end wants a refill."
I glance down the length of the bar. Booths flicker in the haze of soft lighting, shadows dancing like ghosts over red leather and smoke. My eyes snag on him immediately—not because he's loud or demanding. Just the opposite. He's too still. Too focused. He's been watching me for the past ten minutes like he's trying to solve a puzzle.
He's not a regular. I'd remember.
Tall. Golden skin with warm undertones, like he doesn't belong here in this place of cold blood and darker things. A scar at the corner of his mouth, like he's always on the verge of an unfinished smile. Black curls fall over his forehead in a manner that's careless, like he's not trying to impress. Vinyl records stack up next to his arm on the bar.
He's good-looking.
Which is to say he's dangerous.
I take the bottle and walk down to him, icy calm. I learned how to be invisible in being noticed years ago. Don't blink, don't scream, don't glance at them for longer than two seconds.
"Refill?" I say.
He looks up at me, and I've suddenly forgotten how to breathe.
His eyes are. odd. Hazel, but not flat. The kind of color that catches and shifts with light. They gleam like gold buried in firelight. And beyond that—he sees me. Not the girl I'm pretending to be. Me.
And for an instant, I want to look back.
"Selene, huh?" he says.
My hand freezes in mid-pour. "Do I know you?"
"No." He smiles, hardly at all. "But I've seen you before."
My heart skips a beat. Impossible. I'm careful. I was. I changed my name when I fled the Bloodlines. I burned the records, wiped the files. No one outside this club should know who I am.
"Where?" I ask, cautiously.
He taps his temple.
"In a dream."
A shiver runs down my spine.
I step back automatically, scanning the bar for doors, witnesses, anything out of the ordinary. But the music keeps going, the workers chuckle in the back of the room, and the rest of the crowd is too absorbed in their own diversions to notice.
"You have to go," I inform them. "We don't serve psychics."
"I'm not psychic." He raises his hands like he's surrendering. "I'm a musician. I left a set with the DJ and thought I'd grab myself a drink."
I look at the records beside him. Jazz. Blues. Something old and funky. He's telling the truth. But it does not calm my mind.
I nod once and start to walk away.
"Wait," he says, and the tone in his voice keeps me from proceeding.
I turn around, slower this time.
"You don't remember me," he says softly. "But I've been dreaming about you since I was fourteen."
I should laugh. I should kick him out. But I don't. Because something in the way he says it—the soft reverence, the calming certainty—empties my chest.
"Dreams aren't real," I tell him.
He leans forward slightly, and for a moment, the overhead light shifts. One weak, broken beam of flickering fluorescent light touches my hand.
My skin shimmers.
Not sparkling like the fantasy novels say. It's subtler than that. Like frost catching moonlight, or metal just before it cools. Just a flicker. A glint.
He sees it.
His lips part, his pupils dilate.
"You're cold," he murmurs, and his fingers brush mine.
I brake too hard. My stomach lurches.
His touch is still in my nerves, static. And for the first time in a long time, the hunger inside me stirs—not hunger for blood, or for feeling, but for something more. A memory that I can't locate. A sensation I've never experienced.
"Forget you saw that," I tell him harshly.
"I don't want to.
I stare at him, at the scalding breath curling off his flesh, at the pulsating rhythm of his pulse in his neck.
He should be afraid. But he's not.
"Your name?" I demand before I can stop myself.
"Julian."
Of course it is. It's too poetic, too soft, too human-sounding.
"Well, Julian," I say, and attempt to be disinterested, "you should probably go before you begin to see other things which aren't real."
"I don't think you're fake," he whispers. "I think I've been looking for you."
Something inside me breaks.
Not much. Just a hairline crack in a wall I've spent years constructing. But I can feel it. That slippery pull. The kind of rope that never ends well.
"You should quit looking," I whisper.
He doesn't answer. Just stares at me a second longer than he should.
I go. That's all I can do.
---
The end of the shift just before sunrise. Flipping the locks on the doors behind the last tipsy couple, wiping down the bar with trembling hands, and I pretend none of it ever happened. Mara's already gone. The jazz has melted away to nothing.
But I can still feel him.
Julian.
His scent lingers in the air—earthy, sharp, electric. It's wrong how good it smells. How *real* it makes everything feel.
I slip out the back, into the alley behind Velvet Veins, and climb the fire escape three stories up to the roof. The city stretches below me, full of light and noise and lives I'll never live. My skin still shimmers faintly in the moonlight.
I curl my fists into balls until the hunger will pass.
This is why I stay hidden. Why I graze sparingly, never taking even a mouthful too much. Why I starve my feelings.
Because as soon as anyone sees me for who I really am.
I might never want to hide again.