The first slime demon I saw was in the bathroom.

Translucent. Oily. Clinging to the ceiling like a nightmare jellyfish. It pulsed, gently, leaving a trail of something I desperately wanted to believe was condensation on the marble above the rain shower with more settings than my car had radio stations.

I screamed and stumbled backward out of the bathroom, straight into something warm and solid. Hands caught my shoulders. Steadied me. Large palms, fingers that wrapped all the way around, and heat that soaked through my shirt like a warning.

I spun. A man I hadn't met yet. Tall, dark-haired, standing too close with an expression that was equal parts amusement and assessment. He let go but the warmth didn't. It stayed on my skin like a handprint.

He said nothing. Looked past me at the bathroom ceiling. Looked back at me. Then he was gone, down the hallway, and in his wake: a scent. Not cologne. Something darker. Sin and spice and something unnamed that made my head swim.

My mother, from the other end of the hallway: "Danika, honey, did you see a spider?"

I did not see a spider. I saw an oily, translucent, pulsating THING suctioned to the ceiling of a bathroom bigger than my entire apartment in Portland, and it was looking at me with what I can only describe as mild interest, which was impressive given that it did not appear to have eyes.

"Spider," I said. "Huge. Enormous. Might need a priest."

"Oh, Holden will handle it. He's very handy." She laughed at her own joke and click-clacked away on heels she'd bought for the occasion, which was her fourth wedding, which was happening tomorrow, which was why I was standing in a Mediterranean villa on a private island watching a ceiling creature contemplate me with its whole gelatinous body.

This was fine.

I'd gotten the call three weeks ago. "Baby, I'm getting married! His name is Holden, he's in tech, he has an ISLAND, pack a bag!" Classic Diane Torres. No warning. No context. Just: surprise, your life is changing again, bring a sundress.

I brought three sundresses, a bridesmaid dress I hadn't been asked to wear but packed out of muscle memory, and a deep, abiding resentment that I kept in my carry-on next to my laptop and two emergency granola bars.

The villa was absurd. White stone, infinity pools, terraces overlooking the kind of blue water that exists in screensavers and lies. Holden met us at the helipad. Yes, there was a helipad, because when you're a tech billionaire, you don't do boat docks like a regular human being. He was tall, silver-templed, impeccably dressed, and smiled at my mother like she'd invented sunlight.

"Danika." He took both my hands. Warm grip. Steady eye contact. The kind of man who made you feel seen in a way that also made you feel like you were being filed somewhere. "Your mother has told me everything about you."

"She hasn't told me anything about you," I said.

He laughed. My mother's eyes went wide in a way that meant behave.

Dinner was on a terrace. White tablecloths, candles, a view of the sunset that was so perfect it looked generated. Staff appeared and disappeared like ghosts carrying plates I couldn't pronounce. My mother glowed. And across the table, someone she hadn't mentioned.

The man from the hallway. Sin-and-spice, warm hands, the one who'd caught me mid-scream and vanished without a word. He sat with the stillness of something that had never once been startled.

"This is Jax," my mother said, squeezing Holden's arm. "Holden's son! Your new stepbrother!"

My skin still felt warm where he'd touched me. I was dizzy from something I refused to name.

Jax did not look thrilled about the word stepbrother. He looked at me and the look was precise. Measuring something I couldn't see.

"Hi," I said.

"Danika." Not a greeting. A confirmation.

He did not talk during dinner. He ate. He drank black coffee while the rest of us had wine. A slime demon oozed along the terrace railing behind my mother's head, translucent and lazy, and I watched it and he watched me watch it.

My mother ate her croissant. No one else could see it.

After dinner, I went for a walk. Not because of the bougainvillea Holden kept recommending. Because I needed air that didn't taste like expensive candles and my mother's desperation for this one to work.

I found the gate at the end of the main drive. Iron. Reinforced. Flanked by stone pillars. I pushed.

Nothing.

I pushed harder. Tried the keypad on the side panel. Red blink. I threw my weight against it, shoulder-first, and the gate didn't budge and the air around it hummed, this low buzzing pressure that hit my palms and teeth and the backs of my eyes.

I stumbled back. Shaking.

The keypad blinked red.

I went back inside, showered, got into bed. Egyptian cotton. Thread count that mattered to someone who wasn't me. Something oily slid under my door. I pulled the duvet over my head.

At 2 AM I gave up on sleep. I put on the silk robe from the closet and went outside, barefoot, through the garden toward the gate. Because I had to try again. Because I was a person who learned from her mistakes and then made them anyway.

The gate was locked. The barrier hummed. Beyond it: the road, the dock, the ocean, my entire life.

"You can see them." A voice behind me. Low. Not a question.

I spun. Jax. Standing six feet away, hands in his pockets. The garden was dark and he was darker. The faint Mediterranean moon turned everything blue-silver and his skin, in the wrong light, looked like it had something underneath it. A warmth. A glow.

"See what?" I said, too fast.

"The things on the walls. The ceiling. The terrace railing at dinner."

"Those are geckos."

"Danika."

The way he said my name in the dark stopped the joke in my throat. Not soft. Precise. A key turning a lock I didn't know I had.

"Yes," I said. "I can see them. What are they?"

"Not a conversation for the garden."

"Why not?"

"Because three of them are in the fountain right now and they can hear."

I looked. Three translucent shapes piled in the fountain basin, pulsing. They saw Jax and they SCATTERED, sloshing over the stone rim and fleeing into the hedgerow like they'd been electrocuted.

"They're afraid of you," I said.

"Yes."

"Should I be afraid of you?"

He didn't answer. He walked toward the house and I followed because the alternative was standing in a dark garden alone with things that could hear, and somewhere in the process of following him, his hand found my lower back to guide me through the glass doors and the contact was a brand. Not warm. Not human-warm. Furnace. His palm burned through the silk robe and into my spine and every nerve I had leaned into it before my brain caught up.

He walked me to my door. The hallway was lit low, warm, amber. He stood a foot away. I could feel the temperature difference between his body and the rest of the world.

"Don't drink the wine at dinner," he said.

"Why?"

"It makes them bolder."

"The geckos."

Almost a smile. "Goodnight, Danika."

He didn't move. I didn't move. The space between us was a foot of warm air that tasted like him, like sin and spice and something I had no name for that wasn't a smell so much as a sensation, a pull, a gravity that made me dizzy with want.

I went inside. Closed the door. Leaned against it.

His footsteps didn't make a sound walking away.

This was fine.