Prologue

Chicago — Nine Minutes Before the Fitting

My shadow leaves my body in the elevator.

One second it lies beneath my heels, a narrow black shape under brass lights. The next it climbs the mirrored wall on four silent paws, wolf muzzle stretching across my reflection while the rest of me remains painfully human.

Nine minutes.

That is how long I can survive without it.

I press the emergency stop. The elevator shivers between the forty-sixth floor and Elias Crowe’s penthouse atelier. My shadow bares translucent vampire fangs at me from the ceiling.

"Get back inside," I whisper.

It turns its head toward the leather document case in my hand.

The assassination contract inside is written on human skin.

I did not ask what kind.

The blood curse twists through my veins, hot and cold at once. My wolf half lunges toward the escaped shadow. My vampire half tries to drink it. Pain folds me against the mirrored wall, but I keep my breathing even. Assassins who sound injured do not survive fittings with famous defectors.

My phone counts down from 08:41.

"You want Elias dead too," I tell the shadow. "Help me finish this."

It scratches one word into the condensation above my head.

MOTHER.

I go still.

Valeria Quill has been dead to me for eleven years, which is not the same as being dead. She rules the vampire side of Chicago’s occult fashion market from rooms no camera records. She taught me that fabric can conceal a blade, hold a spell, or preserve a victim’s last terror in its weave.

She also taught me never to mistake maternal interest for love.

"This contract came through the Guild," I say.

The shadow writes again.

SILK.

I open the case.

The contract names Elias Crowe as a hunter who abandoned his order and began purchasing forbidden vampire silk. It claims he has made seven shifters disappear. It offers enough money to buy the blood treatments that keep my two natures from shredding each other for a year.

Tucked behind the contract is a strip of burgundy fabric I did not place there.

It moves when I look at it.

One fine edge curls around my fingertip, almost affectionate. My wolf goes silent. The glass-in-my-blood agony eases for the first time in months.

Then the fabric tightens.

I cut it with the knife hidden under my wrist. The severed thread releases a sound too high for human hearing.

My shadow drops from the ceiling and pins it with one paw.

A memory flashes through our connection: rows of dress forms breathing in a dark room; bodies trapped inside cloth; my mother’s hands guiding silver needles through skin that still feels pain.

Not Elias’s hands.

Hers.

The timer reads 06:52.

"If he’s working for her, I kill him," I say. "If he’s hunting her—"

The shadow snaps its jaws around the living thread. Burgundy light races up its muzzle. Suddenly I see through its eyes.

The elevator shaft becomes transparent. Magical fibers web the building from basement to penthouse, each one carrying stolen instinct upward. Wolf rage. Vampire hunger. The last panic of hybrids who entered the atelier and never left.

At the center of the web stands Elias Crowe.

He is alone beneath a chandelier, arranging a gown on a headless form. Silver scars cross his forearms. Hunter scars. He presses two fingers to the gown, and the entire web flinches away from him.

Not master.

Jailer—or surgeon.

He looks directly toward the elevator, though forty floors and steel separate us.

"Zara Quill," he says to the empty room.

My shadow hears him.

So do I.

"If your mother sent you, wear the red dress. If the Guild sent you, wear the black. If you came for yourself, don’t wear either."

He lifts silver shears and cuts a glowing thread. Somewhere below, a wolf howls in relief.

The vision breaks.

My shadow recoils into the mirror. The timer reads 04:13.

I remove the cover identity’s black cocktail dress from the garment bag hanging beside me. A professional fitting requires the illusion of trust. The fabric smells ordinary, but the modeling agreement clipped to its hanger is not. Fine occult print grants Elias authority over every garment placed on my body inside the atelier.

Contractual captivity wrapped as couture.

I tear off the signature page.

The elevator starts moving by itself.

My phone loses signal. The emergency brake refuses my hand. Above the doors, the floor numbers climb.

My shadow writes one final warning across the mirror.

HE KNOWS WHAT YOU ARE.

"Then we’re even."

I burn the modeling agreement in the brass ashtray, strip off the black dress, and replace it with my own fitted underlayer: weapons hidden at spine, thigh, and wrist, no fabric I did not choose touching my skin. The assassination contract remains in the case.

Evidence. Leverage. A lie with a price.

At 01:02, my shadow flows down the wall and circles my ankles. It resists when I pull, showing me one last image through the atelier’s thread web.

Behind Elias, a dress form turns its head.

My mother’s face pushes outward from beneath the silk.

Her mouth forms two words.

WEAR ME.

The timer reaches eight seconds.

I drag my shadow into my body. It enters like freezing smoke, slamming my vampire hunger against my wolf’s rage until my knees nearly buckle. By the time the elevator chimes, I am whole enough to kill and divided enough to be dangerous.

The doors begin to open.

Bergamot, white tea, ash, and dried blood breathe through the widening seam. Beyond it waits an atelier full of living clothes and the defected hunter whose death could buy my cure.

I tighten my grip on the contract.

Then I step into the belly of the beast.