Chapter 1: A Kiss for a Pair of Shoes

The nightclub was a cage of manufactured joy, and Nyx was the one animal that knew it. The bass thumped like a panicked heart against her ribs, a frantic rhythm that failed to stir anything inside her. Flashes of magenta and electric blue strobed across a sea of glistening, writhing bodies, faces contorted in expressions of forced ecstasy. They were prey, all of them, chasing a high they would never quite catch. Nyx leaned against a sticky wall, a ghost at the feast, her dark eyes absorbing the light and giving nothing back.

She wasn’t here for the music, the drinks, or the fleeting promise of human connection. She was here because the nights were long, and the city’s nocturnal underbelly was the only place she could hunt for something to fill the gnawing hollowness within her. It was a methodical process. She would drift from one venue to the next, a temp worker by day, a predator by night, scanning, watching, waiting for a flicker of interest, an object of desire to latch onto. Most nights, she found nothing.

But tonight was different.

Her gaze, sweeping with practiced apathy across the dance floor, snagged on a detail so specific, so jarringly out of place, that it felt like a physical blow. It wasn't a person, not at first. It was a pair of shoes.

Black canvas sneakers, stylishly worn, moving with a lazy grace amidst the frantic stomping of the crowd. On the heel of each shoe was a small, embroidered emblem: a simple white rabbit, captured mid-leap.

The world tilted. The suffocating beat of the club faded to a distant pulse, replaced by the sound of a creaking swing set and the high, carefree laughter of a girl under a summer sun.

Lily.

The memory was a phantom limb, an ache for something long since amputated. A sun-drenched playground. Two small girls sitting on the edge of a sandbox. One of them, Lily, wore a brand-new pair of sneakers, dazzlingly white with little pink rabbits on the side