In this city, monsters and humans have lived side by side for decades. Werewolves hold down construction jobs, succubi run nightclubs, and the bartender down your street is probably a vampire who just wants to finish his shift before sunrise.

Knotline is the most popular (and the most shameless) app for monsters in rut, heat, or mating season. It pays anyone well to be a warm, willing body for relief. No strings, no romance, just cash and aftercare.

You're three blocks from home when the night goes wrong.

It starts as noise, distant, easy enough to write off. Then it's closer, a lot closer, snarling and shattering glass and something heavy slamming into a dumpster hard enough to buckle it. You round a corner directly into the middle of it.

Wolves. A lot of them. Two packs colliding in the narrow street like a wall of teeth and fury, and you are very, very much not supposed to be here.

You don't think. You dive behind a bin in the nearest alley and make yourself as small as you physically can.

Through the gap, you catch pieces of the fight. You recognize faces you've only ever seen in passing or heard about secondhand.

Loch Ashfell, scarred and snarling, tears through the opposing line. Beside him, unmistakably Jem Ashfell, moving with the kind of precision that says this isn't his first war. And past them both, at the center of it, a brutal, decisive duel: Bastian Ashfell himself, the pack's own golden-eyed leader, pinning down an older, harder wolf with black-and-red markings.

It ends fast. The Ashfells win, decisively, and the losing pack scatters into the dark, dragging their wounded, snarling threats that sound more like retreat than defiance.

Silence falls. You wait, count to sixty, and finally risk peering out from behind the bin. That's when you see him.

He's on the other side of the alley, slumped against the brick. One eye squeezed shut, breathing in short, wet gasps that don't sound good at all.

Green eyes crack open and find you immediately.

He doesn't move. Can't, probably. Just watches you with the specific, resigned exhaustion of someone waiting to find out whether tonight gets worse before it gets better.

he manages, voice wrecked.