Midnight in Moscow.
The city slept under a cold, bruised sky, where streetlights flickered like dying fireflies.
At the city's forgotten edge, where silence rotted into the cracks of abandoned factories and broken homes, an old building stood like a ghost of steel and stone. Its windows were shattered, its door eaten by rust, its walls covered with graffiti and ivy that clawed upward like veins. Every gust of wind rattled loose metal sheets, whispering secrets of things that once lived-and died-inside.
Inside, the scent of death.
The floor was a graveyard of shattered glass and spilled blood.
At the center sat DAMIEN - the creature born between human sin and a wolf's fury. His once crisp white shirt clung to his body, soaked in the deep, wet red of fresh blood. The faint light of the broken ceiling lamp glinted off his chest, off the Bone Daggers he gripped weapons carved from the fangs of a saber-tooth wolf long extinct. Each blade shimmered with an ancient, restless energy, like it remembered every life it had ever taken.
Damien's chest rose and fell, calm, steady. Around him, bodies lay in ruin, sprawled across the cold, cracked floor like discarded dolls. Some still clutched their guns, others frozen in silent horror. The stench of blood and burnt metal filled the air.
He lifted his head slightly, brushing dark hair away from his face, his fingers leaving streaks of crimson across his cheek. The faintest curl of a smirk touched his lips. That smirk wasn't joy - it was possession, a quiet declaration of power, of what he truly was.
A low rumble of thunder rolled somewhere beyond the walls. Outside, Moscow was a living thing restless, cold, and loud. The distant hiss of car tires, the faint chatter of late-night wanderers, the mechanical hum of a city that never truly slept all of it throbbed faintly in the distance, like a heartbeat he no longer shared.
And yet, amidst that steady pulse of life, something else stirred.
A few streets away, Aria adjusted her scarf against the biting wind. Her heels clicked softly on the wet pavement, each step splashing through shallow puddles reflecting the broken moonlight. The night had turned colder than she expected after her friend's birthday party, laughter and music still echoing faintly in her mind.
Her breath fogged the air, and she pulled her coat tighter. The city always felt different past midnight - emptier, lonelier, as if it belonged to someone else entirely. Her phone had died an hour ago, leaving her with nothing but the sound of her own footsteps and the whisper of wind threading through empty alleys.
She turned a corner… and stopped.
An uneasy stillness crawled beneath her skin.
Up ahead, an old building stood hunched in the dark, one of its windows leaking a faint, flickering glow. Something about it felt wrong - like it was breathing. Curiosity tugged at her for just a moment… then the smell hit her. Sharp, metallic, suffocating.
Her eyes widened.
Through the broken glass, she saw him.
A man... no, a beast.
Sitting among bodies. His shirt soaked in blood, his skin glistening in the dim light, his posture too calm, too deliberate. And then there was his face - sculpted and unreal, framed by shadows, lips curved into a faint, unsettling smile.
And those eyes.
Gold. Predatory. Watching.
Her breath hitched. Her body screamed to move, to flee, but her mind couldn't catch up. Every inch of her froze paralyzed by the sheer wrongness of what she was seeing.
No… this isn't real. I'm dreaming.
But the sound of dripping blood shattered that hope.
Her heart thudded painfully, her pulse echoing in her ears like a drum. Her fingers twitched at her side, trembling. Every instinct begged her to run - yet she stood rooted, staring, trapped in a moment that felt stretched by fear itself.
Then, Damien's head tilted slightly.
Their eyes met.
And for a single, chilling heartbeat, everything between them went silent. The city faded. The air itself seemed to wait.
Then—he heard her.
Not her voice. Her thought.
Run.
A soft, desperate whisper, flickering like candlelight in his mind.
His lips curved again that same cold smirk. "Interesting," he murmured, voice rough, deep, too calm for the chaos around him.
It had been years since he'd heard a mind like that pure, unguarded, human.
He didn't understand why her fear called to him, but it did. Like the faint pull of gravity he couldn't resist.
Run, little one, he thought, leaning back against the wall, watching. Let's see where you go.
Aria's body jolted into motion.
She turned and ran.
Her heels clattered violently against the slick road, breath ragged, lungs burning. The city blurred past her in streaks of shadow and frost. Her throat burned from the cold, and tears stung her eyes. The night had turned into a maze of alleys and lights and wind that cut through her bones.
Every echo behind her felt like footsteps. Every gust of air felt like breath on her neck.
She didn't look back. She couldn't.
She reached her street — familiar yet distant under the silver wash of moonlight — and stumbled up the steps to her building. Her trembling hands fumbled with the keys, heart racing so fast it hurt.
The lock finally clicked. She shoved the door open and slammed it shut, twisting the bolt again and again until her fingers ached.
Silence.
Her back slid down against the door, her knees giving way. She sat on the cold wooden floor, chest heaving, palms pressed flat against her racing heart. The faint hum of the old refrigerator was the only sound in the small apartment.
Her reflection shimmered faintly in the darkened window wide eyes, pale face, hair tangled from the wind. She didn't recognize herself.
Her gaze drifted to the photo frame sitting on the small shoe cabinet. Her father's smile looked back at her kind, steady, frozen in time. He'd died three years ago in a car accident on a snowy road much like this night.
That memory always hit her like a whisper of cold air soft, yet sharp enough to hurt.
Her mother, a nurse at City General, was working another night shift. Always working, always smiling through exhaustion. She carried the weight of the world so Aria could live without worry even though both knew that kind of peace didn't really exist.
Aria pulled her knees close to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. "It's okay," she whispered, though her voice trembled. "It was just… a hallucination. Just my mind playing tricks after the party. Right?"
But the city didn't answer.
Outside, the wind groaned softly through the alley. The rain had stopped, but droplets still slid down the windowpane like tears.
And far beyond that glass hidden in the dark a figure stood beneath a flickering streetlight, his blood-soaked shirt half-hidden beneath a black coat.
Golden eyes watched the small apartment window, glinting once before fading back into shadow.
The night swallowed him whole.
And somewhere in the dark, Damien's voice — low, amused — whispered into the silence:
"Run all you want, little one. You've already crossed my path."