Rain slashed sideways through the skeletal remains of the abandoned factory, the metallic stench of rust clinging to the air like the ghosts of dead machines.
Aria Blackwood pressed her back against a corroded steel beam, her gloved fingers dancing across the holographic keyboard projected from her wrist cuff. The jagged scar beneath her collarbone throbbed—a permanent reminder of the last man who'd gotten close enough to touch her.
Men are knives, her father had warned her the night he died, his blood soaking into her childhood bedsheets. They'll cut you open just to watch you bleed.
A shrill alarm blared in her earpiece. Three heat signatures materialized on her retinal display, closing in from the northeast catwalk. She didn't need to see their faces to know what they were—hired guns with greedy hands and emptier souls. Always men. Always hungry.
"Trackers disabled," her AI assistant, Nyx, intoned with mechanical precision. "Exit route compromised."
Aria's lips curled into something that wasn't quite a smile. "Override Protocol Hades."
The factory floor exploded with light as her EMP mines detonated. Shadows writhed like living things as mercenaries shouted, their night vision goggles overloading in bursts of sparks. She moved like smoke through the chaos, boots silent on the grease-stained concrete.
A hand grabbed her arm from behind—rough fingers digging into her jacket.
Without turning, she jammed her shock glove into the man's throat. His scream died as fifty thousand volts lit up his nervous system.
"Touch me again," she spat at the twitching body, "and I'll fry what's left of your pride."
Gunfire erupted behind her. Aria dove behind a rusted forklift as bullets chewed through metal, sparks showering around her crouched form. Her fingers flew across the holographic display—rerouting power, overriding security protocols with practiced efficiency. The industrial press suspended above the mercenaries groaned to life with a mechanical shriek.
"Sweet dreams," she whispered.
Hydraulics screamed in protest. The men looked up just as ten tons of steel plummeted toward them. Their final cries were cut short by the wet crunch of collapsing bone and twisted metal.
Aria didn't flinch. She'd stopped feeling guilty about dead men long ago.
She was halfway to the rooftop exit when the air shifted—a faint scent of citrus and gunpowder that didn't belong in this tomb of rust and decay. Her knife was in her hand before she fully turned, muscle memory overriding conscious thought.
"Clever little spider."
The voice rolled through the darkness like a predator's purr, rich and dangerously smooth. A man stepped into the flickering emergency lights, all lean muscle and coiled violence. His combat boots made no sound on the metal grating—a ghost made flesh. His eyes locked onto hers with terrifying intensity: one ice blue, the other storm-cloud gray.
Heterochromia. The clinical term couldn't diminish their hypnotic pull.
Kael "Ghost" Morrison. Underground fighting champion. Professional killer. Beautiful, deadly animal.
Aria's grip tightened on her knife until her knuckles went white. "You're in my way."
He smiled, and the scar across his throat rippled like a fault line. "I'm your only way out, sweetheart."
The endearment hit her like a physical blow. Behind them, the factory doors exploded inward with a deafening crash. Armored figures poured through the breach—government black ops, their tactical visors glowing hellish red in the darkness.
Kael moved faster than thought itself. His arm snaked around her waist, yanking her against the solid wall of his chest as a sniper round sparked off the beam where her head had been a heartbeat before. His body burned like a furnace through their rain-soaked clothes, and she hated how her treacherous body responded to the contact.
"Let go!" She drove her elbow toward his ribs with vicious intent.
He caught it effortlessly, his fingers wrapping around her arm like steel bands. "Still breathing, aren't you?"
Her knee shot toward his groin—a move that had dropped men twice his size. He twisted at the last second, spinning her around and pinning her against the concrete wall. His breath fanned across her cheek, warm and somehow intimate despite the chaos erupting around them.
"Hate me later," he murmured, his voice a dark promise against her ear. "Right now, we run."
Every cell in her body revolted against the contact—the scorching heat of him, the iron grip that somehow managed to be gentle even as it restrained her, the way her pulse quickened traitorously at his proximity. She gathered saliva and spat directly in his face.
Kael laughed, the sound dark and unhinged and utterly captivating. "Good girl. Keep that fire burning." He hauled her into a sprint, bullets chewing up the concrete floor at their heels like hungry teeth.
They exploded onto the rain-lashed rooftop together. Aria wrenched herself free the moment they cleared the doorway, her knife flashing in a silver arc toward his throat. Kael ducked the strike with fluid grace, his hand closing around her wrist and stopping the blade inches from his jugular.
For one frozen moment, they stood chest-to-chest on the ledge three stories above the churning black water below. Rain plastered her dark hair to her skull and turned his shirt translucent against the carved muscle of his torso. They were both breathing hard, both soaked, both magnificent in their lethal beauty.
"Jump with me," he said, there was something almost vulnerable in the words.
"Go to hell," she snarled back.
His mismatched eyes gleamed with what might have been admiration. "Already there, spider. Question is—are you brave enough to follow?"
The grenade landed at their feet with a metallic clink.
Time crystallized. Kael's face went blank with recognition and something that looked suspiciously like protectiveness. He wrapped himself around her like a human shield as the world exploded into fire and shrapnel and falling sky.
They fell three stories through rain and darkness, the impact with black water driving every molecule of air from her lungs. When they finally surfaced, gasping and choking, he still held her—one hand fisted in her tactical jacket, the other pressing something small and cold into her palm.
Aria's fingers closed reflexively around the object. Her father's pocket watch. The antique silver felt like ice against her skin.
Her blood turned to arctic slush. The last time she'd seen it, the watch had been clutched in her father's lifeless hand as he bled out on her childhood bedroom floor.
"He begged me to save you," Kael murmured, blood streaming from a gash on his temple to mix with the rain. "Funny thing—he never realized you'd be the one saving me."
Revulsion and something infinitely worse—something warm and treacherous and utterly unwelcome—curled in her stomach like a living thing. She shoved him away with both hands, putting distance between them in the frigid water.
"I don't need saving," she bit out.
He let her go immediately, spreading his hands in mock surrender. The soaked Henley clung to his torso like a second skin, revealing a roadmap of violence written in scar tissue—some surgical, some jagged, all telling stories she didn't want to imagine.
"Then walk away," he said softly, and the challenge in his voice was unmistakable. "See how far you get on your own."
Aria took three defiant steps through the water before her legs buckled without warning. The blood loss from wounds she hadn't noticed finally catching up to her. Kael caught her before she could sink beneath the surface, his fingers accidentally brushing the scar on her collarbone as he steadied her.
Her vision blurred—not from blood loss, but from the horrifying realization that his touch didn't repulse her the way every other man's did.
Worse than that.
It felt like coming home to a place she'd never been.
As black helicopters circled overhead like mechanical vultures, their searchlights cutting through the rain, Kael pressed his forehead against hers. His breath was warm against her lips as he whispered words that changed everything:
"The man who killed your father? He's watching us right now."