Chapter Text
The abandoned warehouse was already crowded almost to the brink, a sea of bodies moving haphazardly to the pulse of darkwave music beneath rudimentary, red stroboscopic lights hanging from exposed beams. In the center, a makeshift bar sold drinks with careless speed, the dealers using it as a convenient checkpoint to pass small bags and pills to overly excited partygoers, while eager couples indulged freely in public exposure without even the pretense of discretion.
But it wasn’t as if the intention had ever been to be sneaky. No—this party was a declaration. A spectacle of excess, debauchery, and recklessness worn proudly, flaunted.
Wherever one looked there was sex, drugs, and drinking, layered and overlapping until it became difficult to tell where one ended and the other began.
On one side, a girl sucked an ecstasy pill from her boyfriend’s tongue, lips parted and glossy, his pupils already blown wide from his own hit, hands gripping her hips too tightly. On the opposite end, two girls kissed hungrily, hands buried inside each other’s underwear, moving with frantic insistence while two men watched with lazy fascination, drinks dangling forgotten at their sides. And atop the bar, one of the bartenders—a slim, androgynous goth with a sharp mohawk—served vodka shots with a bottle in each hand to a group already too drunk to know they should stop.
It was the type of party Levan liked.
From the elevated platform overlooking the warehouse floor, he watched it all unfold like a king surveying his domain, cigarette burning lazily between his lips, a glass of tequila resting loose in his hand.
He rarely came to meddle—rarely bothered to take drugs or fuck—but he thrived in the chaotic energy of it, in the raw exposure of people stripped of restraints of civility. There was a quiet satisfaction in feeling superior to them, in observing their unravelling from a distance.
He stayed with his own kind regardless. A small cluster of elites like himself—sons and daughters of politicians, business owners, old money, and mafia alike—spread casually nearby, detached from the mess below.
He didn’t know what thrilled him more: watching them indulge in their lowest, darkest impulses, or witnessing how easily they lost the masks they wore so carefully during the day.
The current winner of the Math Olympics—the golden boy of the physics faculty, the poster child of perfection—was off to the left side of the warehouse, snorting methamphetamine from another man’s bare chest, laughing manically once he finished before grabbing the same man by the jaw and kissing him with bruising force.
Nearby, the honour student from Medicine, president of the chess club, was pressed against the cold metal stairs, dry humping her Pharmacology professor—a forty-year-old man with a wife and two kids—her hands fisted in his shirt like she might tear it apart.
No matter how hard they tried to pretend, how carefully they curated their reputations and moral superiority, under the right conditions they were no more than animals—ruled by their deepest, darkest desires.
His gaze slid over the crowd again, detached, almost bored, until it snagged on a man and two women trying to force their way to the bar.
At first glance, he didn’t recognize the two in front—a blond man and a woman with pastel-pink hair, both with that unmistakable art-school look, mismatched coloured converse and paint splashed jeans. His attention lingered on them for half a second before drifting to the last one.
She was dressed in the most insipid, unimpressive outfit imaginable: dark ripped jeans, low boots, a long-sleeved black knitted top. Her long brown hair was braided carelessly, keeping it away from her oval-shaped face. Her lips were full but asymmetrical, the lower heavier than the upper, her small nose slightly crooked, as if it had been broken once and never fixed properly. Thick black kohl framed dark brown eyes that should have been expressive—but weren’t.
She was nothing like his type.
Still pretty, yes, but not a bombshell. And yet his eyes followed her automatically, his attention narrowing in a way that felt intrusive and unwelcome.
There was something vacant in her gaze—an emptiness that didn’t read as naïveté or boredom, but absence. As if part of her was missing. As if she were already elsewhere.
The sensation pulled at him like gravity, a black hole he hadn’t chosen to orbit.
She moved through the crowd angled away from people, shoulders subtly hunched, body language caught between disgust and unease. While her friends shoved and bumped and laughed their way forward, she flinched at contact, even accidental.
Levan took the last drag from his cigarette, watching the smoke curl from his mouth in a thin, deliberate stream as his pulse ticked upward.
He crushed the cigarette beneath his boot and lit another, the movement practiced, irritated. He didn’t like the way his focus kept snapping back to her no matter how deliberately he forced himself to look elsewhere.
He watched her get the drinks—a strange, unholy mix of vodka, whiskey, and an overly sweet purple soda. Then, when her friends were distracted talking to someone else, she turned. Pretended to lean against a stool, maybe to speak to the bartender. Instead, her head angled right—toward one of the dealers.
A blond woman with absurdly large breasts and a dress that barely qualified as clothing.
They exchanged a few quick words and the blond winked, slipped a purple pill into her palm, and accepted the bills.
MDMA, he thought bitterly, watching her lift the pill to her mouth.
It happened in under a minute, totally invisible to her friends.
It pissed him off.
He didn’t like druggies—not as friends, not as bedmates. He had turned down girls more than eager to fuck for that alone. Drugs were weakness, an admission of failure.
Levan was connected to the Georgian mafia—the Vory v Zakone—his cousin running the North American branch. He benefited from it, sure, but he had never wanted to be part of it, just like his father. And drugs? Drugs were a way of sullying the body, contaminating what should be controlled, sharpened, they were beneath him. For people who couldn’t endure themselves sober.
So why the fuck did watching her swallow that pill not spark immediate disgust and rejection?
Why, instead, did it ignite something else—an urge so sharp it startled him? A need to go down there, grab her by the wrist, and make her spit that synthetic venom out before it dissolved into her bloodstream.
What was so different about her? So interesting. So special.
He didn’t know but he would find out.
The soft shower of October rain fell over that Bronx alleyway, fine and persistent. Droplets slid lazily down the visor of his black helmet, gathering before spilling over the edge and dripping onto the handlebars of his BMW bike in a steady, almost meditative rhythm.
He leaned forward, forearms resting against the fuel tank, grateful for the full riding gear hugging his body. It was impermeable, built for weather far worse than this, because he had been there long enough that even such a mild rain would have soaked him to the bone after two hours of waiting.
It hadn’t taken long for Levan’s web of connections to locate the girl from the party; all it required was a brief description of her and the two people who had been with her.
Ember Costalunga. Twenty-two years old. From Newark, New Jersey. Enrolled in a dual bachelor’s and master’s program in forensic science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice on a full scholarship. Living alone in a studio apartment in the Bronx.
Of course, he knew he was already well past the point of pretending to be decent, especially now, parked across the street from her building, watching for her. Stalking was an ugly word, one he didn’t particularly care for, but accuracy mattered, and there was no softer term that fit what he was doing. Still, when his cousin’s people started digging deeper—family, sealed records, the kind of things that never stayed buried—he shut it down.
That part, he wanted from her.
A light flicker caught his attention as the entrance door opened. A figure stepped out under the weak awning, shoulders slightly hunched against the rain.
Even from this distance, he recognized her immediately.
She wore a dark jacket pulled tight around her frame, a canvas backpack slung over one shoulder, and no umbrella. She paused at the top of the steps, hesitating for a fraction of a second, eyes lifting toward the sky as if measuring the rain, before committing and descending onto the sidewalk.
Levan watched her cross the street, her pace brisk but controlled, head angled down, braid pressed against her back by the damp. There was nothing hurried about her movement, but there was intent, the kind born of routine rather than urgency.
His fingers tightened briefly around the throttle before he consciously loosened them, forcing himself to stay still.
He turned the engine on only after she had already put distance between them, easing the bike into motion and following from a healthy margin. He kept to the rhythm of traffic, never close enough to draw attention, never far enough to lose her, watching her slip down the steps of a subway entrance marked by the familiar sign: D Sixth Avenue Express.
He didn’t need long to understand where she was headed. The faculty.
Without hesitation, he took the next left and cut through traffic toward the West Side of Manhattan, the bike responding eagerly beneath him. By the time he reached Fifty-ninth Street, the rain had thinned to a mist, and the city had resumed its usual impatient pulse.
She emerged from the station ahead of him, already climbing the steps, blending seamlessly into the stream of students and commuters funneling toward the surrounding buildings. He slowed, then stopped entirely, watching her disappear inside without following.
Three more hours passed after that.
He stayed where he was, parked a block away from her building, letting the city cycle around him while daylight faded into early evening. People came and went. Lights switched on behind windows.
When she finally reappeared, she darted down the street and into the subway entrance with barely a glance behind her.
Levan watched until the crowd swallowed her completely.
He didn’t follow this time.
He had learned enough for the day—the hours she kept, the route she favored, the means of transportation. He had all the time on the world to watch and learn more in the coming days.
Restraint, after all, was what separated control from compulsion.
He started the engine and pulled away from the curb.
Levan had been methodically following her whenever his own master’s classes and life allowed him. It wasn’t as if he needed to attend all of them; he was gifted enough to pass with honors on the little dedication he bothered to put in, his mother’s academic aptitude passing onto him as eye color.
From Monday to Friday, she went to the faculty without exception. She had three hours of class on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, plus additional hours in the library on Mondays and Wednesdays, and lab work on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Every Monday evening she went to the gym, and every Wednesday she stopped for groceries at the Target closest to her apartment, moving through the aisles quickly, efficiently.
Her lunches were light: usually a simple sandwich with cheese, lettuce, and tomato, paired with a banana and a soy latte from the campus café. Before the gym and during long library sessions, she relied on oat and blueberry bars, always keeping a large thermos of coffee within reach.
She liked dark coloured clothing, preferring the most insipid and bland to disappear and not claim attention to her, mostly purchased for an alternative second hand in Bronx where she was in good terms with the cashier.
He found himself unsettled by the scarcity of actual food and water she consumed, the observation drifting from detached notation into something uncomfortably close to concern. Still, it was easy enough to understand. Between rent, groceries, commute, and tutoring fees, her scholarship was already stretched thin, leaving little room for indulgence or excess.
She was an excellent student—so consistently prepared that every time he followed her into the library under the pretense of studying, someone from her class eventually approached her for notes. She never refused, though she always seemed faintly uncomfortable with the attention, shoulders tightening, eyes flicking up too quickly before she handed over her neatly organized pages.
Despite what he had seen the night he first noticed her at the warehouse party, she wasn’t actively using any kind of drugs, nor was she going out to drink or party. In fact, she barely socialized at all. Her circle, if it could be called that, appeared small and functional, some run-ins in campus with the pastel pink haired woman and the blond man, Marie and Tucker.
The more he observed her, the more his interest grew, edging dangerously close to obsession.
He had grown so familiar with her through watching that he already knew things she’d never said out loud. That she disliked sudden touch and flinched almost imperceptibly when someone brushed too close. That loud, unexpected noises made her tense, her jaw setting hard, particularly at the sound of banging doors. That enclosed spaces unsettled her—frightened her, even—like the faculty elevator or the narrow study cubicles in the library.
Over time, he had also become adept at deciphering the small nuances of her permanently neutral expression. The slight tremble of her eyelid when she was irritated or pushed too far. The tightening of her lips when she was startled or afraid. The excessive blinking when she was confused. The way she chewed the inside of her cheek when anxious, or stared straight ahead, eyes hollow and unfocused, when sadness crept in. And yet, not once in the three weeks he had been following her had he seen a genuine smile or heard a real laugh—any unguarded sign of joy or happiness.
Even when she smiled while talking to Tucker and Marie, her mouth curved without conviction, the expression never reaching her eyes. They remained vacant, emptied of light, so profoundly sorrowful.
Even he—who so often borrowed emotions he didn’t feel in order to manipulate others—had experienced real joy. He had laughed. He had felt exhilaration, sharp and intoxicating, in his life.
But Ember existed in a constant state of quiet dissociation, a suspended unhappiness that never seemed to lift.
It followed him back to his Upper Manhattan apartment at night, crawling beneath his skin, needling at his thoughts, driving him mad not only because he didn’t know why she was like this, but because, he had no immediate solution to offer.
Levan came to a decision quickly.
Distance had served its purpose. He had learned her patterns, her schedules, the small defensive habits, her tastes. Watching her from afar no longer yielded new information; it only fed the restlessness that had begun to bleed into his days to compulsion.
So he chose a setting where he could approach her without scaring her off: the library.
It was a Monday afternoon, exactly when he knew she would be there, seated at one of the long wooden tables near the back, close enough to the windows to benefit from the weak autumn light but far enough from the main aisles to avoid unnecessary traffic. He arrived ten minutes after she did, timing it deliberately, giving her enough space to settle into her routine before he entered it.
Her thermos sat to her right, its metal surface dulled by use, a neat stack of notebooks arranged to her left. She was bent slightly forward over her laptop, braid falling over one shoulder, one leg tucked beneath her in the chair. Her brow furrowed in concentration, lips pressed together as she typed, unaware of the attention converging on her.
Levan selected a book he had no intention of reading and approached the table with unhurried steps, careful to keep his presence unremarkable. He adjusted his path at the last second, just enough to clip the corner of her chair with his knee.
The impact was light, almost negligible, but she reacted instantly.
Her shoulders jerked, breath catching sharply as she twisted toward him, eyes wide with fear for a fraction of a second before she masked it, fingers curling instinctively around the edge of the table.
It fucked with him having to scare her that way to get his way but it was a little price to pay.
“Sorry,” he said immediately, his tone calm, controlled, kind. “Didn’t see you there.”
He watched the way the tension retreated inward hiding it away. Her gaze flicked to his face, then down, then back up again, cataloging him the same way he had been cataloging her, though far less thoroughly.
“It’s fine,” she replied after a beat, voice even but tight. “I should’ve pushed the chair in.”
She began to move it, flustered, and that was when he stepped in fully, setting the book down on the table as if to steady himself, effectively anchoring the interaction where he wanted it.
“No, really. That one’s on me,” he said, offering a faint, disarming smile that stopped short of charm. “I was distracted.”
That earned him the smallest reaction—a barely perceptible lift at the corner of her mouth, a reflex to pretend cordiality. He took note of it immediately.
“I’m Levan Kereselidze,” he added, extending his hand in a gesture that was polite, measured, but also easy to refuse. “But you can call me Kera.”
She hesitated, exactly as he knew she would. Her eyes dropped to his hand, then to his face, and back again before she accepted, her grip brief and light, as if prolonged contact were something to be avoided.
“Ember,” she said. A pause. “Costalunga.”
He released her at once, stepping back half a pace to give her space, filing away the warmth of her skin, the quickness of her pulse.
“Forensics?” he asked, nodding toward her open notebook, its pages dense with annotations.
She blinked, momentarily caught off guard. “Yeah. You too?”
“No,” he replied easily. “International Law and Politics, master’s.” He gestured vaguely behind him. “This library is calmer, more silent than the one on my own faculty.”
That, at least, drew a fuller reaction. She huffed softly, a sound that might have been a laugh in another life, and shook her head.
“I get that,” she said, tone loosening just a fraction.
He watched her relax by degrees, the defensive edge dulling in small, measurable increments. The shift fed something sharp and possessive in him, a satisfaction he kept carefully buried beneath a neutral expression, even as it settled in his chest like a feast laid out for his more controlling instincts. She was yielding without realizing it.
Good.
“Do you mind if I sit here?” he asked with perfect politeness, his voice even and unassuming, despite the fact that he was already pulling out the chair across from her and settling into it with unhurried ease.
She hesitated, fingers pausing over the keyboard, eyes flicking briefly toward the empty seats nearby as if weighing her options. The moment stretched, thin and fragile.
“I—no,” she said finally. “It’s fine.”
“Thanks,” he replied, offering her a brief nod before opening the book he had brought, position6ing it between them like a harmless barrier.
Ember didn’t know it yet, but she had opened a door wide for him to get in and never leave.