Chapter One: The Smell of Rain and Ash

The first time Elira Voss saw him, the sky smelled like wet stone and wildfire.

She wasn’t supposed to be here. The crime scene had been locked down for hours, yellow tape fluttering like warning flags in the wind. But curiosity had always been her disease — and tonight, it brought her to the edge of something feral.

The alley behind the butcher shop was cold and slick with rain. Elira crouched beside the blood smear trailing from the dumpster to the cracked wall. She clicked her flashlight on, its beam catching a half-burned matchstick and something stranger — claw marks gouged deep into brick.

Not human. Not an animal either.

"Looking for monsters, little crow?"

The voice came from the shadows — velvet and sharp, like moonlight slicing glass.

Elira shot to her feet. Her breath caught in her throat as a figure stepped into the glow of her flashlight.

Tall. Lean. Dressed in black like he’d been born from the night itself.

But it was his eyes that stilled her: pale silver, like the moon reflected in a blade. Beautiful. Inhuman.

“I don’t talk to strangers,” she said, hiding the tremor in her voice.

The corner of his mouth lifted. “Then why follow one into the dark?”

Elira took a slow step back. “You were at the Delacroix crime scene last week. I saw you vanish into the woods. You're connected to this.”

“And yet,” he said smoothly, stepping closer, “you keep following me. Are you hoping I’ll lead you to your story, or to your end?”

She couldn’t breathe.

Something primal crackled between them, like static before a storm.

“I chase the truth,” she whispered. “No matter where it hides.”

For a moment, silence stretched between them, taut and electric. Rain hissed down the alley walls.

Then he smiled. Not cruelly — but like someone who knew too much about loneliness.

“Then stop looking for monsters, little crow. Start asking who taught them to hide.”

He turned, melting back into the shadows. She should’ve let him go. But her feet moved before her mind caught up.

“Wait! What’s your name?”

He paused at the mouth of the alley, half-lit by the storm.

“Riven,” he said. “And you should stay away from me.”

Then he was gone — swallowed by the city, by the night, by whatever secret he carried in those silver eyes.

But Elira knew, deep in her chest, that she’d just stepped into something far bigger than a murder. Something older. Wilder.

And it had teeth.

“Some truths aren't hunted — they're waiting, just beneath the skin.”

🩸 Teaser — Moonlight Lies

In a city where monsters hide in plain sight, one journalist dares to chase a truth that bleeds silver.

Elira Voss has always seen patterns where others see chaos — claw marks in alleyways, shadows that move too fast, secrets no one wants told. But when her investigation leads her to Riven Wolfe — a mysterious man with eyes like the moon and a past soaked in ash — she uncovers a world where laws don’t apply, bloodlines hold power, and the full moon is a curse.

He warns her to stay away. She was never good at listening.

But what begins as a hunt for truth spirals into a bond neither of them understands. Because Riven isn’t human. And Elira? She may not be, either.

In the collision of fangs and fire, of truth and lies, something ancient stirs — and it remembers her name.

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