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The glass case was supposed to be empty.
That was the whole damn point.
I had the lock picked, the alarm looped, and my left knee screaming because I'd been crouched behind a fake marble display for eleven minutes. The little black velvet tray inside the case should've held one ugly antique ring and a price tag worth more than my apartment building.
Instead, the ring sat there like it had been waiting for me.
“Seriously?” I breathed.
My earpiece crackled.
“Quinn,” Dex whispered. “You got it?”
“Working on it.”
“You said that four minutes ago.”
“Yeah, well, rich people have weird locks.”
“This is a charity auction, not Fort Knox.”
I looked around the ballroom.
Forty-foot ceilings. Crystal chandeliers. White flowers everywhere. A string quartet played near the champagne tower while people in dresses worth more than my whole wardrobe laughed too loudly at nothing. Half the city’s money was packed into this room, pretending they cared about wolf rescue funds and children’s hospitals.
Nobody cared about children’s hospitals.
They cared about being photographed caring.
The ring sat under a single tiny spotlight.
It wasn’t flashy. No giant diamond. No gold band thick enough to advertise a divorce. Just dark silver, almost black, with a red stone set in the middle. The stone looked wet.
Not shiny.
Wet.
The auction placard beside it said: PRIVATE ESTATE PIECE. DONATED ANONYMOUSLY.
No price.
No history.
No cute little paragraph about which dead duchess had worn it while ruining Europe.
That should’ve bothered me more.
“Quinn?” Dex said again. “Security’s making another pass.”
“I know.”
“Then grab the thing.”
Easy for him to say. Dex was outside in a delivery van with heat, coffee, and the magical ability to run away if this went bad. I was inside wearing a borrowed black dress that pinched my ribs and heels that could legally be called torture devices.
I slipped the tiny glass cutter from my sleeve and ran it around the edge of the display case.
The tool made no sound.
My pulse did.
I lifted the square of glass and set it down behind the marble stand.
Then I reached in.
The second my fingers got close to the ring, the hair on my arms lifted.
Not in a cute spooky way, either.
Every muscle in my body locked up like I’d put my hand near a live wire.
I stopped.
“Quinn,” Dex said. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re breathing weird.”
“I’m crouched in shapewear. That’s how breathing works now.”
I stared at the ring.
It stared right back.
Okay. Not literally. I wasn’t drunk. I’d had half a glass of fake champagne because a waiter practically shoved it at me when I walked in.
Still.
The red stone had a dark dot in the center.
Like a pupil.
“Nope,” I whispered.
I started to pull my hand back.
Then my phone buzzed against my thigh.
One message.
UNKNOWN NUMBER: LAST PAYMENT DUE MIDNIGHT. DON’T MAKE US VISIT AGAIN.
My stomach dropped so hard it hurt.
For one second, I wasn’t in the ballroom anymore.
I was back in Mom’s kitchen three months ago, staring at the red final notice stuck to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a lemon. Then two men in gray coats showed up at our door. They didn’t yell. Didn’t threaten. Didn’t even step inside.
That was worse.
One of them smiled at my mother and said, “Debt doesn’t disappear because people get sick.”
Mom died two weeks later.
Officially, it was an overdose.
Sure.
And I was the Queen of England.
The people who’d bought her debt had moved it to me. Apparently grief came with paperwork.
I needed fifty grand by midnight.
Dex’s buyer had offered sixty for the ring.
One job. One night. I paid the debt, got those gray-coated freaks off my back, and maybe slept for more than two hours without checking the locks.
That was the plan.
Plans were great.
Plans didn’t have creepy eyeball jewelry in them.
I reached in again.
My thumb brushed the band.
Cold shot up my arm.
Not normal cold. Not winter cold. This went under my skin and squeezed around my bones. My breath caught.
The ring moved.
I yanked my hand back so fast I smacked my elbow on the marble stand.
“Ow. Shit.”
“Quinn?” Dex said, sharper now. “Talk to me.”
“It moved.”
There was a long beat.
Then Dex said, “The ring moved.”
“Yes.”
“Like somebody bumped the case?”
“No. Like it moved.”
“Okay. Cool. Great. Love that for us. Leave it.”
I looked at the message on my phone again.
LAST PAYMENT DUE MIDNIGHT.
The ballroom clock above the bar said 11:17.
“I can’t.”
“Quinn, I can find another job.”
“By midnight?”
“We’ll figure it out.”
That was Dex’s favorite lie. He said it whenever the world got too ugly to look at straight.
We’ll figure it out.
Mom used to say it too.
I hated that sentence now.
A woman in a silver dress drifted toward the display. She was smiling at an older man beside her, but her eyes kept checking the room. Security, maybe. Or somebody’s wife looking for a reason to start a scene.
Either way, my time was gone.
I grabbed the ring.
For half a second, nothing happened.
The metal was ice-cold in my palm.
Then the stone opened.
That’s the only word I have for it.
The red surface split down the middle, thin as a paper cut. A black line appeared inside it.
I froze.
The ring snapped shut on my finger.
Pain ripped through my hand.
I bit down on a scream and nearly cracked a tooth.
“What?” Dex barked. “What happened?”
The ring had clamped around my right index finger. Tight. Too tight. The band wasn’t loose anymore. It was digging into my skin like it had teeth.
I tried to pull it off.
It didn’t budge.
“Get it off,” I whispered.
“Get what off?”
“The ring.”
“Why is it on you?”
“Because it jumped me, Dex!”
My finger burned.
I twisted the band. Pulled. Braced my hand against the edge of the case and yanked so hard my shoulder popped.
Nothing.
A bright bead of blood slipped down my knuckle.
The ring drank it.
I watched it happen.
The blood hit the black silver band, then vanished. Not smeared. Not soaked in.
Gone.
The red stone lit up.
Not bright enough for anyone else to notice. Just a deep, ugly glow against my skin.
My lungs forgot their job.
“No,” I said.
The ring tightened again.
Another cut opened under the band.
Blood ran faster.
The stone pulsed once.
Then twice.
Each pulse came with a hot little tug under my ribs, like somebody had tied a fishing hook to my heartbeat.
“Quinn, answer me.” Dex sounded far away now. Tinny. Panicked. “What the hell is going on?”
“I don’t know.”
That was the truth, which I hated.
I shoved my bleeding hand into my clutch and stood up too fast.
The room tipped sideways.
Champagne. Perfume. Burnt wax from the candles. All of it hit me at once.
And underneath it—blood.
Fresh blood.
Animal blood.
My head snapped toward the far end of the ballroom.
A man stood beside the auction stage.
Tall. Dark suit. Dark hair pushed back from a hard face. He had one hand in his pocket and the other curled around a champagne glass he clearly hadn’t touched.
He wasn’t looking at the auctioneer.
He was looking at me.
His eyes caught the light.
Gold.
Not hazel. Not brown. Gold like headlights in a dark road.
Every stupid instinct I had started yelling at once.
Run.
The man’s jaw tightened.
Then he started walking toward me.
“Dex,” I said quietly. “There’s a guy.”
“Yeah? It’s a gala. There are, like, a hundred guys.”
“No. This one knows.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
The man moved through the crowd without touching anyone. People stepped out of his way before they seemed to realize they were doing it. A server almost dropped a tray of glasses when he passed.
I backed up.
My heel caught on the hem of my dress.
Great. Perfect. I was going to die face-first into a flower arrangement because I stole haunted jewelry.
A hand caught my elbow.
Not the gold-eyed man.
The woman in the silver dress.
Her smile was still on, but it had gone stiff around the edges.
“Miss?” she said. “Are you all right?”
“Never better.”
Her gaze dropped to my clutch.
A dark red line had leaked through the fabric.
Her smile disappeared.
“Oh,” she said.
Not scared.
Recognizing.
That was worse.
Behind her, the gold-eyed man stopped walking.
He stared at my hand like he could see straight through the clutch.
The ring pulsed again.
Hard.
Pain shot up my arm and landed behind my eyes. I gasped.
The man’s face changed.
Just a little. His mouth opened. His shoulders went rigid.
Like he’d been shot.
Then every light in the ballroom died.
The quartet cut off in the middle of a note.
Someone screamed.
Glass shattered near the bar.
The emergency lights should’ve kicked on.
They didn’t.
The room went black. Full black. No moonlight through the windows. No glow from exit signs. Nothing.
My earpiece hissed.
“Quinn?” Dex said. “Quinn, the feed just went down. Get out. Right now.”
I tried to move.
Something grabbed my wrist.
Big hand. Hot skin. Not the hand with the ring.
I jerked back, but the grip held.
“Let go of me,” I snapped.
A man’s breath touched my ear.
Close enough that I smelled rain, smoke, and that same sharp animal blood.
“Don’t make a sound,” he said.
His voice was low and rough. Not loud. Didn’t need to be.
I went still anyway.
Then, from somewhere in the dark across the ballroom, another voice said my name.
“Quinn Harper.”
It wasn’t Dex.
It wasn’t human either.
And the ring on my finger answered with one hungry pulse.