All Chapters of Shadows and First Blood: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

The door to the apartment groaned like it was sick of me slamming it, but I couldn’t help it. My head was still buzzing from the bell above O’Rourke & Finch and the stranger’s steady smile.Sammi was on the couch, half-sprawled, legs dangling off one armrest, brush in hand, phone glowing in the other. She tossed both aside the moment she saw me. Jay sat on the floor in front of the coffee table, knees bent, elbows resting, something small and metal glinting in his hands. He was turning it over and over, quiet.“You look like someone spit in your blood bag,” Sammi said, raising an eyebrow.“More like someone spit in my face,” I muttered, shrugging off my jacket. I wanted to throw it at the coat hook but didn’t trust my aim. My pulse was still racing, my palms raw from cl

Months bled together the way nights do when you stop counting them.Winter folded into spring, and the city kept turning without asking permission. The hunters had gone quiet—too quiet—and the silence itself started to feel like a trap, one I couldn’t see the teeth of yet.Sammi and Jay had become a unit. At first it was a joke—her shoes turning up under his couch, his coffee mugs crowding her sink—but before I realized it, she’d moved across town. Now, their laughter lived in a space that wasn’t mine. And when I came home, the apartment echoed with too much air.Travis lingered, but he was thinning. His jokes came late, sometimes garbled, like radio static. When I looked for him in the mirror, sometimes I found only myself staring back.

 The next time he asked, I didn’t say no. We’d gone through the motions—his quiet visits, the shelves holding still in his presence, my stubborn refusals softening by degree. But after Travis faded, after the shop whispered me into silence, saying yes felt less like surrender and more like admitting the truth I’d been circling for months: I wanted the noise. He showed up at closing, as if he already knew the answer I hadn’t given yet. “Dinner?” Matrix asked, leaning in the doorway. Not pushy. Not hesitant. Just certain. My body betrayed me before my mouth caught up. “Fine,” I muttered. “One dinner.” The restaurant was small, tucked into a side street that smelled of basil

I woke to stillness.No hum of traffic, no thin whistle through cracked windows. Just the scent of cedar and the weight of a room that wasn’t mine.The sheet smelled like him. I hated how comforting that was.Matrix was already up, standing by the window with the curtain pulled half open. Morning light traced the planes of his shoulders, every inch of him a warning carved into calm.“Morning,” I said.He turned, slow, deliberate, like a predator deciding whether to hunt. “You’re home.”I blinked. “I’m… what?”“Here,” he said, as if it were the simplest truth in the world. “You live

 He’d been running for three days before they found him.Rain, alley grit, the taste of iron in his mouth; that was the rhythm of his life then. He’d left the pack behind in British Columbia after the last hunt went bad—two hunters dead, one wolf torn open, everyone blaming everyone else. Matrix had learned early that loyalty only worked if the others were still breathing. So when the black van cut across the street and boxed him in, he didn’t fight. He waited, crouched low, muscles coiled. The doors opened and the smell of silver hit him like frostbite. “Matrix,” a voice said. “You’re hard to track.” The man who stepped out wore hunter black but not the usual mercenary scowl. He looked like