Prologue

Music that helped write this book

Safehouse - Kami Kehoe x Ekoh

Tear you apart - She wants revenge

The Promise - In this moment

Hellfire - Late night savior

Wildfire - Sub focus

Electric Callboy - Everytime we touch

Doomed - Phix x Ekoh

Rise from the ashes - Stria

Demons - Written by Wolves

Chokehold - Sleep tolken

Oxygen - Written by Wolves

Gravity - Defences

Blow- Ava under fire

bullet for my valentine - dont need you

bullet for my valentine - venom

bullet for my valentine- your betrayal

Apashe x YMIR - Never change

Beg for me - Braeker

The trees wanted me dead.

They reached with crooked fingers and tore at my jacket like some vindictive lover, snagging a seam and making me curse under my breath. Mud tried to keep me, roots tried to trip me, and the night air tasted of iron and bad decisions. Behind me, voices—human and hot with certainty—broke the dark into jagged pieces. Hunters. The kind that pray you’re only a story until they can put a crossbow bolt through your certainty.

I should have been afraid. I’d been running long enough to perfect the performance: the quickened breath, the stumble that looks like weakness, the limp that lures them in. But fear has an annoying habit of getting old. It deserts you like everyone else. These days, I felt something colder under the skin—focus, the kind that comes when your body remembers how to be dangerous and your head remembers the long list of things it still wants to do.

A branch cracked. A shot cracked after it. Bark exploded like a bad memory. I tasted smoke and something coppery, and for a moment my hands shook with hunger that had nothing to do with blood. You learn to separate the two after a while: the need that eats you and the practical appetite that keeps you alive. Mostly I try not to confuse them.

I dropped where the world gave me cover—under a fallen log half-swallowed by mud—because hiding is the only polite thing left to do when you're not about to stab someone. Crouched, I listened. Their boots crunched in the leaf litter: quick, confident, ignorant. They spoke in clipped orders and curses like they were rehearsing righteousness. The thunder of their approach felt like a stampede until it was just the tidy rhythm of three pairs of boots. Too few to be a fluke. Too many to be merciful.

They were good. They had the right gear—bolts, silver-lined nets, prayers stitched into the hems of their coats. They had candles in glass jars, the old kind, because they liked to believe the show mattered. They called out my name as if names were a leash and the world would obey.

Silver.

I should have laughed at that. I always do when people try to own me. Names have been used like shackles and like promises. Mine has been both and neither. I had taught myself to move like a rumor—soft at the edges, impossible to pin down. Tonight, apparently, I was a rumor with a target on it.

A bolt whistled through the air, missing my shoulder by inches and shattering the log above my head into a spray of splinters. Someone cheered like they'd scored, and another voice—younger, breathless with adrenaline—swore they’d seen blood on my sleeve earlier. They were hungry for spectacle. I was tired of giving them one.

Okay then. If they wanted the show, I would give them a rehearsal. I used fingers numb from cold to find a shard of broken wood and pry myself out of the mud like I was being born into a different life—one without witnesses. Pain is useful; it gives the body a purpose. Pain kept me moving. The hunters sounded closer. The smell of gun oil and cheap incense hit me—some of them believed perfume made them holy.

I moved through the trees the way a shadow moves: with intent and reluctance in measured doses. They'd followed my scent trail like a map because people always mistake scent for weakness. I left false traces, slowed my heartbeat when a creek forced my steps, and when I needed to, I laughed. Quiet laughter from my own mouth, because sometimes the only person who appreciates your jokes is you. "Come on," I mumbled into the dark, "you couldn't aim if your life depended on it."

Of course one of them answered. A low snarl, half-annoyed, half-convinced he was about to be a legend. "She's close," he said, and I could almost hear the scripture for the obituary he planned to recite later.

Close enough, maybe. Close enough for a trap.

I broke through the trees into a strip of highway like I was dragging the forest behind me. Headlights carved the night into blinding strips, and the smell of exhaust made my eyes water. There was no reason for any sane person to be on this stretch at night, which is why the hunter's focus was so single-minded: they thought outlaws belong out here, in the open, where you can gloat. They underestimated my preference for chaos.

A car idled near the shoulder—its engine an impatient growl. The hunters piled out, boots slamming gravel, flashlights stabbing like accusatory fingers. My mouth filled with the metallic tang of too-old blood at the same time I heard a laugh. Not a hunter's laugh. Different. It slid across the highway like someone who'd shown up late to a party and been disappointed to find it already in flames.

I didn't stop moving. Running in the open is a different kind of ballet. There's no cover to hide behind. It's all about endurance and misdirection. I feinted left, doubled right, felt one hunter lurch and miss his footing on the slick shoulder, and then—because I am not a heartless monster—because there are rules even to killing and I like to stick to my own—I trip a hunter with a flick of the boot. He goes down. The others curse and aim. Too fast. Too proud.

A flashlight bloomed wild and bright in my face, and I thought, briefly, how theatrical it all was. "Stand," a voice commanded like it was cataloging the scene for a scrapbook. I obliged in the way one obeys a farce: by pretending to do what they want. I stopped, hands slightly raised in surrender, because the look on their faces when they expect an easy trophy is deliciously predictable.

"Don't move!" they said again, and then someone fired. The bolt missed me again, this time slamming into a taillight of the idle car and shattering red into the night. Tiny stars of glass rained down and pricked my fingers. For a second, all of us paused as if to admire the violence.

Tripping the hunter hadn't been enough. I needed an exit. I needed the kind of chaos that didn't leave a neat headline. I had a plan that involved less stabbing for the hunter type and more making them look foolish, because it was fun and because it hurt their pride. Pride is a toxin.

I bolted. Straight at the car. The driver screamed and the hunter who had fallen rolled onto the hood with a pained yelp—the kind of sound that will probably haunt his dreams and also make him tell the story in bars for years. The rest of them cursed and scrambled, their glamour broken.

Someone shouted my name like a prayer. I didn't answer. I ran over the road like I had the right to the asphalt, like it was a ribbon tied to my ankle and I wasn't cutting it yet. I didn't stop until the trees swallowed the highway again and the hunters' shouts became tinny and distant. My chest burned. My hands were clawed and raw. The hunger in my veins hummed like a radio on low.

I collapsed against a tree and let myself breathe like a person who'd been given a reprieve but not a pardon. Rain started—soft at first, then harder, a curtain meant to wash things clean. For a second I imagined it did—washed the blood, the mud, the need. For a second I thought of other things: of coffee that didn't taste like poison, of a bed that didn't creak with old sins. Those were small, foolish fantasies. I let them go, because fantasy and I have an agreement: it distracts you long enough to get you killed.

Still, as I sat there, shivering and half-laughing at my own survival, I made a promise. It wasn't dramatic—no sword raised, no gods consulted. It slid into me like a pill. No more running. The words felt foreign and the most honest thing I'd said in a long time.

The hunt would resume tomorrow, or sooner. That was the nature of the world I lived in: circling vultures and humans with holy claims. But maybe, just maybe, I could learn to be less prey and more problem.

I stood, shoulders back, and walked toward the road because the night is always hungry and, apparently, so am I.