I Put a Collar on the Alpha Monster

The feeling was back.

Someone was watching me from the dark.

It had been there since the moment Arthur Hayes's people picked me up from the countryside—that gaze, clinging to my back like a hand that wouldn't let go. Night City was raining tonight, no moon, the broken neon signs above sputtering and hissing in the wet.

I slowed my steps and turned deliberately into a blind alley, one I'd clocked earlier for its dead cameras.

"Lost, sweetheart?"

He came up behind me on a wave of stale sweat and old skin. I stopped and turned around. In the stuttering red light I could make him out clearly: a bleached-out jacket gone thin at the elbows, the muscles around his mouth twitching with anticipation. His eyes moved over my chest and thighs like the edge of a rusted saw.

"I—I don't know where I am."

My voice caught at exactly the right moment. Shoulders drawn in, eyes down. I'd been practicing that particular posture since I was seven.

"Don't be scared." He smiled, showing a row of yellowed teeth, and closed the distance. "I'll find you somewhere dry. You're soaked through—you'll catch cold."

His hand came out of his pocket.

Click. A switchblade snapped open.

"Not a sound." He dropped his voice and pressed the tip against my stomach, his other hand wrenching my wrist as he dragged me deeper into the alley, behind a row of garbage bins. "Be good. That pretty face of yours—be a shame to ruin it."

Cold brick met my back.

I let my shoulders cave.

Tears came instantly, rolling down in fat drops and mixing with the rain. I shook, my breathing ragged and shallow. "Please," I sobbed, the sound raw and broken, "I don't have any money, I don't have anything—please just let me go."

His throat worked. He was enjoying this very much.

"Money's not what I'm after." He tilted the blade up to my neck, pressing the flat of it against my skin just below the jaw. His breath hit my face, sour and close. "You've still got that body of yours."

He reached for his belt.

Close enough. Close enough that I could see the grime packed into his pores.

I wailed louder and shoved both hands against his chest in a last, useless show of struggle—and in that same instant, I bent my right index finger, just slightly.

The micro-blade hidden beneath my fingernail slid free. Two millimeters. Clear as glass.

I stopped fighting.

My fingertips drifted up along the rain-slick skin of his neck, slow and soft as a lover's touch, and passed over the carotid.

I stepped back.

The hand working his belt went rigid.

His pupils blew wide. A thin, leaking hiss came from his throat—he was trying to speak, but his vocal cords had gone completely still. The Padrino's custom neurotoxin: trace amounts in the bloodstream, three seconds, and the transmission of nerve signals to both the respiratory muscles and the larynx simply stopped.

The switchblade hit a puddle with a flat clang.

He went down like wet cement, crashing to his knees in front of me, both hands clawing at his own throat, eyes bulging and threaded red. He looked up at me, and there was something almost like disbelief in that look.

I looked back down at him.

I raised the back of my hand and wiped the fake tears from my face, unhurried.

The corner of my mouth curved up into a smile that came from somewhere genuine.

One last ugly rattle from his throat, two short convulsions, and then his face dropped forward into the dirty water below. Dead. The way a stray dog dies—without meaning, without weight.

I regarded the body with satisfaction. A perfect dose. Nothing wasted, nothing excessive.

The rain kept falling, washing everything clean.

I was about to leave when I stopped.

The gaze was still there.

What had been passive surveillance had become something else—a fixed, pressing lock-on that sat heavy against my skin, hot enough that it felt like it could burn through to the bone. I caught a scent beneath the rain. Cold fir resin, and underneath it, something like the iron tang of blood.

Whoever was in that darkness had watched the whole thing. They'd seen me perform the tears, seen me kill without hesitation, seen me smile at the body afterward. And they hadn't moved to stop me. They hadn't run.

My heart rate picked up. One beat, then another, then another, each one harder than the last, blood running hot through every vein.

It wasn't fear.

It was the shivering, electric thrill of recognizing something that belonged to the same category as yourself—something more dangerous, more lethal, closer to the edge.

I held that unseen stare, extended my tongue, and slowly licked the rain from my lower lip.

"Interesting," I murmured.

Then I looked away, stepped over the body, and walked out of the alley on my heels without looking back.

The heavy doors of the Hayes estate swung open under my hands.

The symphony of music and conversation in the gilded foyer went quiet for exactly one second.

Looks converged on me from every direction—surprise, contempt, the particular appetite of people who enjoy watching a scene, and a few that were almost something like pity. Fifteen years of complete silence, and now my biological father, Arthur Hayes, with his funding lines finally collapsing under him, had decided he needed me back inside this gilded cage without a day's delay. The math wasn't hard to follow. He needed to dress me up and sell me off to whatever wealthy degenerate would pay a premium to fill the hole in his accounts.

At the center of the room, a woman in couture silk stood holding a champagne flute, her eyebrows pulling together as she looked toward the entrance, a flash of disgust moving through her expression before she closed it off.

My stepmother. Sylvia.

"What are you doing here?" Her voice was flat and cold.

I drew my neck in and let my chin drop, water beading off my hair onto the expensive carpet, and raised a face that was soft, uncertain, and entirely harmless.

"Hello, Sylvia. There's a dinner tonight—I wanted to come."

She looked me over the way you look at something you've decided not to purchase. Then she composed herself into the very image of gracious patience and crossed toward me.

"This is a Hayes family dinner. Not a country child's game of house." She kept her voice mild, kept the performance of generosity intact. "I don't blame you—you weren't raised to know better. Go upstairs, change into something presentable, and fix yourself up. Do you understand?"

She came close.

Close enough that no one else in the room could hear her. One hand settled lightly on my shoulder, her expression arranged into something that read, from a distance, as tender concern.

"What I mean is: get back to your room and lock the door. Don't come back down here and embarrass yourself. Know your place."

I kept my eyes down. My narrow shoulders trembled with what looked, at a glance, like shame.

Sylvia watched my reaction with visible satisfaction and gave my shoulder a small, approving pat—every inch the firm but loving stepmother.

Then I looked up.

Round amber eyes, still bright with the suggestion of tears, blinked at her slowly, holding her gaze.

In a voice that carried no further than her ear, soft and even, I said: "Sylvia. Get that fake face of yours out of mine. Do you have any idea how badly your breath smells? You can wear all the couture you want—you're still just a dog barking in my house."

The color left Sylvia's face entirely.

She looked as though she'd swallowed something alive. Her eyes went wide and her facial muscles began an involuntary performance of their own, disbelief warring with fury. "What did you just say to me?"

The shriek split the foyer. Every guest in the room startled and exchanged glances.

I stumbled back two steps, eyes going wide and guileless, the rims flushing red on cue. "Sylvia, I'm sorry—I don't know what I did wrong."

I pressed the back of my hand to my eye, then turned and jogged up the staircase. As I moved, a fine, transparent, odorless powder slipped from my fingertips and settled without a sound onto the hem of Sylvia's dress.

I watched through my peripheral vision. Sylvia stood where I'd left her, her chest heaving, on the edge of something that might have been a blackout.

Arthur crossed to her with a furrowed brow. "What happened?"

Sylvia looked like she could shatter the stem of her champagne glass. She pointed at the stairs. "That little bitch just insulted me."

"Are you out of your mind?" He lowered his voice, sharp and dismissive. "She just walked in the door. She's been too frightened to string two words together. Watch yourself."

The words stuck in Sylvia's throat—too much to swallow, nowhere to put it. Arthur gave her arm a perfunctory tug and turned back to his guests with his smile already in place.

I pushed open the door at the far end of the second-floor hallway.

The room had been a storage closet. The window was small and set too high. The ceiling pressed down.

Inside the wardrobe along the wall, a few cheap dresses in the wrong size hung in a row alongside a collection of things my stepsister Isabella had worn out and thrown away. Sylvia's idea of a welcome home.

I walked to the wardrobe and ran my fingers along the fabric, not really paying attention.

Then I stopped.

My gaze cut through the hanging clothes and landed on the very back of the wardrobe.

The hair along my spine rose, one strand at a time.