All Chapters of Shadows of Desire: Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

The rain had thinned to a mist that made the city look like it was exhaling—warm breath against the night, fog silvering the streetlamps and softening the edges of everything. I left my apartment without deciding to. One second I was sitting with my laptop closed and the next my body was moving, drawn by an old habit I couldn’t break: when my head is loud, I walk.The sidewalks were slick. Tires hissed past. Somewhere, a kitchen fan vented star-anise and char, and the smell folded into memory in that unkind way scent always does. Elysium’s bar had a clove syrup the bartenders stirred into the club’s dark cocktails; sometimes the sweetness flashed through the leather in the air, the heat of bodies, the metallic tang of anticipation. I slowed, swallowing hard. It wasn’t the club I missed most. It was the belonging.I turned down Seventh, past the late-night florist and the bodega with the cat in the window, paw pressed to the glass like he wanted to come outside and misbehave. There’s a

I didn’t plan to write him. The letter began itself.It was after midnight, the hour when the city softens, when sirens become faraway threads and the radiator’s ticking feels like a companion. I sat at my small kitchen table with a stack of lined paper I never use—reporters don’t handwrite anymore—but a blank document on a laptop felt too slippery, too easy to revise into safer lies. Pen and paper might hurt enough to make me honest.The first sentence took three tries. I wrote Victor, then crossed the comma so hard I tore the page. I started again: Victor— and sat there with the dash yawning at me, a bridge I couldn’t build.I closed my eyes and let the world narrow to him: the weight of his hand at the back of my neck when he guided me through a crowded hallway, the steady voice I could follow in a room of noise, the way his breath warmed my ear when I was blindfolded and trembling and the darkness felt too big. The letter wasn’t a choice anymore. It was the only thing that could m

Morning came feeling like it had been pinned to the wall. The light was thin and metallic, the kind that makes everything look photographed rather than lived in. I brewed coffee I didn’t really want, just to have something warm to hold. The restricted guest card Marco had given me sat on the table where I’d left it, a small square of plastic with a red dot—no name, no promise, only possibility. I traced the dot with my thumbnail and told myself not to hope too loudly.My phone buzzed.Marco: You awake?I typed without thinking. Barely.Marco: Good. Come by. Side door. Two knocks, then three. Don’t use the card. I’ll meet you in the stair.The coffee was suddenly worth finishing. I threw on jeans, a sweater, the coat with the inside pocket that kept the keycard warm against my ribs, and flew down the apartment stairs two at a time. The city wore its weekday face—brisk, unsentimental. Steam rose from the street grates in white ribbons. When I turned the corner to the service entrance, m

The first alert found me at the kitchen sink, wrists under a ribbon of cold water, trying to scrub away the damp alley air that still seemed to cling to my skin. My phone pulsed on the counter, then again, then lit up like something on fire.Three messages in a row from a former colleague whose number I hadn’t deleted because you never delete numbers; you just move them to a colder room in your mind.You seeing this?They’re saying “exclusive.”That’s your place, isn’t it.I didn’t have to open the link to know. But I did. Of course I did.The tabloid’s homepage greeted me with a headline written in that bright, feral voice they use when they smell blood: Behind the Velvet: Secret Sex-Club Exposed (Blurred for Reader Protection). Below it, a carousel of images—faces smudged into anonymity, bodies rendered into impressionist smears—but the spaces were not blurred enough for me. I could still read the club’s bones: the hammered brass rail on the mezzanine, the chandelier that throws a c

There’s a certain hush the city wears on weekday afternoons, a tired quiet between lunch and sundown where the light goes a little sallow and everyone waits for the second act. I was in that hush when my phone buzzed with a number I hadn’t saved and hadn’t needed to. Some numbers write themselves into your nerves.We need to talk. I have names. —JI stared at the screen long enough for the message to gray with my fingerprints. The last time I’d held anything of Jennifer’s, it had been the shape of her fall—Leo’s soft apology, the door closing, the realization that pride is just heartbreak with good posture. Now she had names.I forwarded the text to Marco without comment, because we had an agreement about everything, especially me. His reply came quick.Neutral ground. No Elysium. You don’t go alone.I thought of Victor’s voice in the stairwell after I’d seen the envelope exchange—how his trust, if that’s what it was, could only live at arm’s length—and nodded to no one. “Neutral,” I