OBSIDIAN VINES

OBSIDIAN VEINS

Book One – The Spark & The Secret

CHAPTER ONE: A BODY FOR A FAVOR

SIENA

Carmine City didn't sleep.

Not really.

It dozed in spurts, curled up in alleyways and bars, but even then, its pulse beat beneath the concrete-steady, aggressive, hot like blood on tile. I knew this city like the back of my hand, and I hated it the same way you hate a wound that never stops bleeding.

Every corner whispered secrets. Every flickering streetlight was a witness. You either learned to walk with a blade or let someone else carve you open.

I walked with a blade.

And tonight, it hummed in my coat pocket, heavy and hot-like it sensed what I didn't yet know.

The rain had turned to mist. Dense, clinging. The kind that crawled into your lungs and stayed there.

I shouldn't have taken the shortcut through South Tenebris. But the main road was crawling with Ricci muscle tonight-pissed-off little princelings with too much ammo and too little sense. So I cut through the alley behind the neon-lit brothel and the butcher shop that doubled as a body disposal.

I was halfway down the alley when I heard it: a low, raw groan. Followed by the sharp sound of metal scraping brick.

Instinct made me reach for the switchblade in my coat.

The mist parted.

And there he was.

A man slumped against the brick wall like a fallen god-blood slicking his shirt, soaking into his expensive pants, one hand still twitching toward the gun by his boot. His other arm hung limp, elbow bent wrong. Broken.

For a moment, I thought he was dead. But then his head jerked slightly, and our eyes met.

Steel-gray. Piercing. Bleeding rage and something colder underneath.

Not fear. Not desperation.

Just calculation.

I stepped closer, slow.

He didn't speak, but his fingers kept twitching. Reaching. Not for help-for his weapon.

I kicked the pistol into the gutter.

"If I meant you harm," I said coolly, "you'd already be bleeding out through your throat instead of your side."

His lips curled.

"Not the usual Good Samaritan speech," he rasped, voice rough like he'd gargled gravel.

"I'm not the usual Samaritan."

"Then what are you?"

I crouched beside him. The blood was coming fast, but I could tell it hadn't hit anything fatal. Yet.

I yanked his shirt open-black silk, expensive-and winced. Entry wound just below the ribcage. Clean shot, but it was leaking fast. The skin around it looked angry.

"You planning to bleed out here?" I muttered.

"Wasn't the plan."

"Funny. Could've fooled me."

"I'm Nikolai."

He said it like it should mean something. Like I should flinch. Like the syllables alone could break me.

I didn't blink.

I didn't tell him my name.

Instead, I pulled the small first-aid kit from my bag-the one I carried more out of habit than hope-and went to work. Gloves, antiseptic, a hooked needle I'd stolen from a vet clinic two weeks ago. I could suture a wound faster than I could recite the Lord's Prayer, and I'd done it enough times to know pain by sound.

He didn't scream.

Didn't groan again.

He watched me-eyes locked, unmoving, like I was a puzzle piece he'd been missing his whole life and just now found.

It was unnerving.

"You don't flinch," he said quietly.

"Would it help if I cried?"

"No. It'd disappoint me."

I cinched the final stitch and wiped the blood off my gloves.

"You're gonna owe me," I said.

His lips twitched. "Do I?"

"Yeah. You just don't know it yet."

I stood and backed away. His eyes followed me. I didn't bother offering a hand. He wouldn't take it. Men like him didn't like being helped. They liked owing. It meant control. Debt was their love language.

He'd crawl to safety, or he wouldn't. That wasn't my problem.

I was already ten feet away when he called out, voice lower this time.

"What's your name?"

I paused.

The mask on my face-the one I wore when working-covered everything but my eyes. A whisper of hair clung to the edge of my cheek. I knew I looked like a ghost.

That was the point.

"You don't get my name," I said softly, "but you get a chance."

And then I vanished into the mist.

NIKOLAI

I've survived four assassination attempts, three betrayals from my inner circle, and a car bomb that took out most of my left ear when I was twenty-one.

But I had never, in my entire life, been saved.

Not until her.

She stitched me up like a goddamn trauma surgeon, cursed me with the calm of a soldier, and disappeared like a myth. No name. No demand. No leverage.

Just eyes like war.

I laid there after she left, blood drying on my ribs, and thought: Who the fuck are you?

And more importantly: Why can't I stop thinking about you?

They said obsession starts with a moment.

A glance. A touch. A voice.

She didn't touch me.

She didn't flirt.

She didn't ask for anything.

But she left me haunted.

That's more dangerous than lust. More permanent than fear.

Three days later, I had every contact, camera, and snitch in Carmine City trying to trace a ghost.

And no one found a damn thing.

"You sure you weren't high?" Lucien-my younger brother and most trusted consigliere-asked, swirling scotch in a crystal glass across the desk from me.

"She stitched me up with vet thread and called me cute," I replied coldly. "I remember every detail. I want her name."

Lucien whistled. "Damn. You're serious."

I leaned forward. "She saw something."

"What?"

I stared at the window overlooking the east sector. The lights below blinked like dying stars.

"I don't know yet. But she saw something she wasn't meant to. And she didn't flinch."

"That's rare."

"No," I said. "That's impossible."

SIENA

The city's shadows clung tighter after that night. I could feel it in my bones-the shift. Like the air had teeth now.

I shouldn't have helped him.

He was Nikolai Moreau.

Head of the Moreau Syndicate. Ruler of Carmine's East Side. Ruthless. Brilliant. Cold. His name was stitched into the mouths of corpses and whispered in prayer by grown men.

And I had touched him. Looked him in the eyes. Fixed his fucking bullet wound.

"You're out of your mind," Eva hissed, slamming the locker shut beside mine.

Eva Sinclair was my best friend, partner in crime, and the only person in this world who knew I wasn't who I pretended to be.

"You don't help men like Nikolai," she continued. "You run from them. Or shoot them. Preferably both."

"He would've died," I replied.

"So let him."

"I need him."

That shut her up.

She stared at me. "Need him for what?"

"To get inside the Moreau network."

"Why? We already have intel on the Riccis."

"This is bigger than the Riccis," I said, voice low. "It's about the night my father died. I think Moreau was involved."

Eva exhaled sharply. "You're gambling with your life, Siena."

"I've already bet it."

NIKOLAI

By day four, I had a partial image-caught on a grainy street cam-of her vanishing down a tunnel.

Hair dark. Build lean. Walk like a fighter. Maybe ex-military, maybe just broken in the right ways.

I played the footage over and over again in my study, drink untouched.

Lucien stood behind me.

"You want her," he said, not asking.

I didn't reply.

"You don't even know her name."

"I will."

He paused. "And if she's lying to you?"

"Then I'll kill her."

But even as I said it, something in me didn't believe it.

END OF CHAPTER ONE