Claimed By Silver

Freya POV The bar smells like spilled beer and cheap perfume, and I'm three drinks in before I let myself look at the man by the door. He's been there twenty minutes. Not obviously watching me — nothing that obvious — but I've spent six years learning to read a room the way other people read weather. You start to notice things when your life depends on it. The exits. The men who linger a beat too long. The difference between someone scanning a crowd and someone tracking a single point through it. I'm the point. "You're doing the thing," Naomi says, leaning over her cocktail, straw balanced between two fingers like a cigarette she gave up years ago. "I'm not doing a thing." "You're doing the thing." She follows my eye line, doesn't find anything remarkable — just a tall guy in a black jacket, broad through the shoulders, dark hair, unremarkable in the way expensive things try to look unremarkable. The kind of unremarkable that costs money. "Him? Freya, he's gorgeous. Go talk to him." "No." "Why not?" Because the last man who bought me a drink choked on his own blood in a parking garage four blocks from here, and the police called it a freak aneurysm, and I stopped believing in freak anything a long time ago. "I'm just not feeling it tonight," I say instead, because that's the sentence I've learned to use in place of the true one. It comes out smooth. Practiced. I've had a lot of years to get good at lying about why I don't date. Naomi doesn't push. Nobody pushes anymore. That's its own kind of curse — the way people learn to stop asking, the way my mother's voice goes soft and careful whenever dating comes up, like I'm a bruise nobody wants to press too hard. Like if she asks the wrong question I might finally break in a way she can't fix. I don't look at the man by the door again. I don't have to. I can feel him there the way you feel a draft under a door — a small, persistent wrongness at the edge of the room, cold air leaking in from somewhere it shouldn't. Naomi orders another round. I let the noise of the bar close back over me — someone's bad karaoke rendition of a song I used to like, the bartender's laugh, the chaos of a Friday night where everyone else gets to be young and reckless without consequence. I used to be that kind of reckless. Before. When I finally let myself glance toward the door again, he's gone. I tell myself that's a relief. It doesn't feel like one. I leave before midnight. Naomi wants to stay, and I don't blame her — it's the first Friday off she's had in weeks, buried under sixty-hour weeks and client dinners she complains about but secretly loves. I'm not going to be the reason her one night out ends early. I lie about a headache, hug her too tight, and step out into a night gone cold and wet, the kind of cold that gets into your teeth and makes your breath visible under the streetlights. The walk home is four blocks. I've done it a hundred times, sober and drunk, in daylight and at two in the morning. I know exactly which streetlight flickers like it's thinking about dying, which alley smells like garbage even in winter, which corner has the guy who plays saxophone until the cops move him along, always polite about it, always back the next night like nothing happened. Halfway down the second block, I become aware of footsteps behind me. Not close. Not obviously threatening. Just — there. Matching my pace with a precision that feels less like coincidence and more like choreography, like whoever it is has done this walk enough times to know exactly where I'll slow down for the uneven pavement outside the Laundromat. I don't run. Running is what prey does, and some old animal part of my brain decided, somewhere in the last six years, that I'm done being prey. I slow instead, let my hand slide into my coat pocket where my keys sit between my knuckles — a habit my mother taught me before any of this started, back when the worst thing she imagined happening to me was ordinary — and glance back like I'm just checking traffic. He's there. Half a block behind. Black jacket. Same one from the bar. Even at this distance there's something about the way he holds himself, still and coiled at once, that doesn't look like other men. My heart does something complicated — not just fear, though there's plenty of that, cold and metallic at the back of my throat. Something else underneath it, something that feels almost like recognition, like my body knows this man from somewhere my mind hasn't caught up to yet. Like I've been waiting for him without knowing it, the way you don't know you're thirsty until you see water. I turn the corner faster than I mean to, heels loud against wet concrete, and don't let myself look back again until I've reached my own street. He doesn't follow around the bend. When I finally check, the sidewalk behind me is empty, just rain-slicked pavement and a cat slipping under a parked car. I tell myself that's the end of it. I climb the stairs to my apartment two at a time, deadbolt the door, and lie awake an hour longer than I should, listening to a building settle around me and telling myself that's all it is. Settling. Pipes. Nothing else. I'm wrong. I see him again three days later, across the street from the coffee shop where I work part-time between shifts at the gallery. Same black jacket, or one just like it — expensive in that quiet way that doesn't need logos to prove itself. He's not looking at his phone, not looking at anything specific — just standing, hands in his pockets, watching the shop window like he's waiting for a bus that never comes and never will, because there's no bus stop on this side of the street. There never has been. My hands shake a little as I steam milk for a customer's latte. I burn myself on the wand and don't notice until Deja, working the register, asks if I'm okay. "Fine," I say. "I’m Fine, just a bit distracted." "You don't look fine. You look like you saw a ghost." I laugh it off, wrap a napkin around the burn, and don't tell her that I might have. When I look up again, he's gone. The space across the street is just an empty stretch of sidewalk and a woman walking a dog too big for her. I almost convince myself I imagined him. Almost. Except that night, walking home, I catch the same feeling — that draft-under-the-door wrongness and this time when I turn, there's nothing there at all. Nothing I can point to. No black jacket. No shape in a doorway. Just the certainty, cold and complete, settling into my chest like I've swallowed a stone whole. I'm being watched. I don't know by whom, or why, or what it means that whoever it is seems to know exactly how to disappear the second I look. I think about the last three men who showed even the smallest interest in me. Ethan, from my design class two years ago, who fell down a flight of stairs that should not have killed a healthy twenty-six-year-old and did anyway — the coroner's report used the word anomalous, like that was supposed to make it better. Marcus, before him, who choked on nothing at all at a dinner table full of eight witnesses, none of whom could agree afterward on what exactly they saw. And before that — I don't let myself finish the list. I stopped keeping it in order somewhere around year three. It hurts less that way, filing the names instead of the faces. I used to think I was cursed. It was easier, in a way — cursed is a fairy tale word, something with rules, something you could theoretically break if you found the right spell or said the right sorry to the right god. Now, walking home with my keys biting into my palm and the sense of eyes I cannot find crawling along the back of my neck, I start to wonder if cursed was too soft a word for what this actually is. Cursed implies something abstract. Something that happens to you, like weather, like bad luck. This feels like something that's being done. Deliberately. By someone with hands and a face and, apparently, an expensive black jacket. I don't see him again for eleven days. Long enough that I almost let myself relax — long enough that I go a full weekend without checking over my shoulder every ten steps, long enough that Naomi comments I look less like a ghost myself. Long enough that when he finally does show up, leaning against the brick wall outside my building at eleven at night, not hiding this time, not pretending to wait for a bus that doesn't exist, the shock of it nearly buckles my knees. Up close, he's worse. Not uglier. Worse in the way a drop is worse than a hill — the kind of handsome that makes your stomach fall out from under you, all sharp lines and unnatural stillness, like he's carved from something colder than skin and only recently taught to move. He's built like violence held in reserve, broad through the shoulders in a way that shouldn't look elegant under a black jacket and somehow does, like the tailoring is an afterthought to the body underneath it. Dark hair, damp from the rain that's started again without my noticing. A thin scar cuts through his left eyebrow and down across the lid, pale silver against his skin, like something tried to take his eye once and lost badly. And his eyes — not brown, not any colour eyes are supposed to be. Silver. Pale and metallic and wrong in a way I can't look away from, like a coin catching light at the bottom of a well, like something that shouldn't exist in a face this beautiful and does anyway, almost daring me to say something about it. "You've been following me," I say, because I'd rather say it first than have it said to me. My voice comes out steadier than I feel, which is its own small victory. "Yes." No apology. No hesitation. Just the word, flat and certain, like I'd asked him to confirm the time of day. My keys are already between my knuckles, the way my mother taught me. "Why." He looks at me for a long moment — too long, the kind of look that makes me feel stripped down to something smaller than I am, examined and catalogued and found to be exactly what he expected. Up close, the scar through his brow moves when his expression shifts, a thin seam of old violence on an otherwise unmarked face. When he finally speaks, his voice is low, almost bored, like the words cost him nothing at all to say. "Because you're mine, Freya. You have been since before I knew your name." I should run. Every instinct I own is screaming at me to run, to scream, to do literally anything except stand here on my own doorstep at eleven at night with a stranger who knows my name and speaks about ownership like it's a fact of nature, like gravity, like something that doesn't require my agreement to be true. Instead, stupidly, helplessly, I ask the only question that matters. "What's your name?" Something moves behind his silver eyes — not warmth. Nothing so kind as warmth. Something closer to hunger, banked low and patient, the kind of look a predator gives something it has already decided it doesn't need to chase. "Sterling," he says. "And I'd get used to hearing it, if I were you. You're going to be screaming it soon enough." He's gone before I can answer — not walking away, not turning a corner, not any version of leaving that makes sense. Just gone, the way smoke is gone, the way a held breath disappears when you finally let it out. One second solid, close enough that I could smell rain and something underneath it, something warm and dark that doesn't belong to any cologne I've ever known. The next, empty air and a street that looks exactly like it did before he existed. I stand on my doorstep for a long time afterward, keys still biting my palm hard enough to leave marks, heart going too fast to count, and think: I should be more afraid than this. The thought that follows it, unbidden and far more dangerous than anything he said to me, is: why aren't I. I let myself into my building. I check the deadbolt twice. I don't sleep. And somewhere underneath the fear, quiet and unwelcome, is the memory of silver eyes catching streetlight, a scar cutting through one dark brow, and the ridiculous, treacherous thought that I want to see him again.