Lilies After Midnight

Chapter 1-Talon

“f**k, you heavy bastard,” I grunted, hauling two hundred and fifty pounds of dead weight an inch to the left.

The man didn’t move, obviously. He just lay there on the reinforced stainless-steel prep table in the back room of my botanical shop—a space I’d spent six months quietly retrofitting into a high-end flower market and shop soon to be open to the public. A place I was building specifically for her, so she’d finally have a safe, quiet sanctuary surrounded by the blooms she loved, completely insulated from the outside world.

Right now, though, my future public shop smelled like blood, sweat, and cheap cologne. Blood oozed from the open incision on his thigh—the one I’d been painstakingly sawing through for the last thirty-some-odd minutes. My forearms were screaming, muscles burning like I’d just done a three-hour chest-and-arms split without a warm-up.

Adjusting his position finally gave me the angle I needed to disarticulate the hip joint. I took a deep breath, wiped my brow with the clean crook of my elbow, and looked down at the state of things.

I grimaced at the halfway mark.

“Why’d you have to have a pot belly?” I asked the corpse, genuinely exasperated. “Seriously. Do you have any idea what carrying all that extra visceral fat does to human anatomy? It messes up the leverage. It ruins the whole grid. If I blow my lower back out before grand opening, that’s on you.”

The dead man offered no apology.

I wiped sweat off my forehead with a tanned forearm, taking a second to breathe through my nose—a mistake, instantly regretted—before picking the heavy knife back up. It took another thirty grueling minutes just to finish quartering the torso, and another hour of mind-numbing labor getting the pieces organized by weight and density so I didn't burn out my commercial equipment.

By the time I finished the rough cuts, I was panting, my jaw clenched so hard my molars ached.

I stepped back from the prep table and happened to catch my reflection in the glass of the massive floral display cooler. I stopped dead in my tracks.

Oh, my God.

I looked absurd. Twenty-four years old, standing in a clear plastic butcher’s apron that was currently streaked with red like an abstract painting gone terribly wrong. My hair was plastered flat against my forehead from sweat and humidity. I looked like an exhausted line cook at three in the morning after a double shift from hell—if the line cook’s main menu item was homicide.

“Fat f*****g bastard,” I muttered, glaring at the neatly arranged piles.

The annoyance flickered, but then the memory hit me—the reason this guy was on my table in the first place. He’d target-locked her at the weekend open-air farmers market. She hadn't even been alone; her aunt had only stepped two stalls down to pay for fresh produce, but in that tiny sixty-second window, this predator saw an opportunity. He’d invaded her personal space, backing her up against a wooden flower stall, putting a heavy hand on her shoulder and pressing her to talk. He completely ignored the sheer terror in her eyes as she stood there, barely nineteen, completely consumed by anxiety and utterly voiceless, clutching her fresh white lily to her chest like a shield. He touched her.

The dark, cold fury flared back up instantly, smoothing out my fatigue. My movements became fluid again, calm and methodical.

I picked up the trimmed sections of flesh and muscle and began dropping them into the commercial-grade, sound-dampened blender mounted on the stainless-steel workstation. It was a high-horsepower monstrosity designed for heavy-duty organic mulch processing.

It was also the exact same blender my i***t roommate, Matthew, had tried to make his protein smoothie in after the first time I’d used it to blend somebody. I’d walked into the kitchen back at the house just in time to see him holding a handful of frozen bananas over the pitcher, completely oblivious to the faint, microscopic specks of dried organic matter near the blade. I’d had to practically tackle him across the island, screaming about "cross-contamination" and "botanical-grade pathogens" before dragging the machine out to my truck. The guy had complained for three straight weeks about me stealing the "ultimate smoothie maker" and banishing it to the shop.

I snorted out loud at the memory, securing the rubber lid tightly with one gloved hand before flipping the heavy toggle switch.

The motor roared to life, a deep, suppressed hum vibrating through the steel table. Skin, fat, and muscle broke down into a thick, uniform liquid-y paste.

When the cycle finished, I popped the lid off to check the consistency. The air instantly ripened into a foul, iron-rich fog.

I swallowed hard, forcing down the bile rising in my throat. “Okay. Yep. You are officially the worst one yet. You stink the most. You fought the most. And you’re a logistical nightmare. Next time I stalk a stalker, I’m picking a cardio guy.”

He really had been a pain in the ass to capture. The guy was huge—way larger than me in sheer mass—and if he hadn't tripped over his own clumsy feet in the alley during the approach, knocking himself breathless on the pavement, slipping the rag over his mouth would have been a full-contact wrestling match. He’d barely had time to realize what was happening before I had him loaded into the back of my van, secured in the shop's back room, hooked up to a temporary IV line, and pushed the antifreeze straight into his vein.

I shivered slightly at the memory of his final, gurgling pleas as the fluid hit his system. Useless noise. A waste of breath.

Stepping around the prep table, I carried the heavy pitcher out into the shop's adjoining greenhouse display area, where rows of massive, potted ficus plants, exotic flora, and indoor citrus trees were thriving under specialized grow lights, ready for customer walk-ins in a few weeks. I tipped the pitcher, pouring the rich, nutrient-dense slurry directly into the soil. My own proprietary blend of organic fertilizer.

Nature was remarkably efficient if you gave it the right raw materials. Over the years, my botanical experiments had proven it beyond a doubt: the leaves grew a deep, glossy green, flowers sprouted faster, and the indoor blooms lasted twice as long as anything standard fertilizer produced. The customers were going to wonder what my secret was. Local organic sourcing, I’d tell them.

I repeated the process. Cut. Load. Blend. Pour.

Over and over, rhythmically, until the final pitcher was emptied into the root system of a sprawling, rare hibiscus near the front display window.

“Great,” I whispered sarcastically to myself, flexing my cramped, bloody fingers as I stepped back into the prep room. “Fantastic. Who needs a gym membership when you’ve got vigilante disposal duties?”

Now came the part I hated even more than the butchering: the cleanup.

I began folding the heavy plastic sheeting that covered the floor beneath the table, trying to keep the blood pooled in the center. But the plastic caught on the corner of a floor drain, slipping from my slick grip.

“s**t!” I grunted as a splash of crimson spilled over the edge, landing squarely on the pristine white tile.

I threw the folded plastic into a heavy-duty contractor trash bag, making a mental note to incinerate it at my secondary disposal site tomorrow, and dropped to my hands and knees.

I reached for the two plastic buckets I had prepped before starting the job: one filled with cold water and heavy bleach, the other with a quart of whole milk mixed in.

Years of doing this—years of keeping the world safe for Ren, keeping her bubble entirely undisturbed—had taught me the tedious science of scene management. Bleach broke down the organic compounds and sanitized the surface, but a residual iron scent always lingered in porous grout and tile. The milk was the secret trick; the proteins and fats neutralized the metallic odor, masking any trace that a human life had just been deconstructed in a botanical shop soon to sell bouquets to sweet old ladies.

I dipped a heavy industrial sponge into the solution, sighing with pure aggravation as I began scrubbing the tile floor, soaking up every last drop.

My arms were dead, my back was aching, and I smelled like a cross between a dairy farm and a chemical weapon testing facility. But as I scrubbed the stain away until the white tile gleamed spotless, I thought of her—safe in her room, holding her white lily, untouched and unaware—and the fatigue didn't matter anymore.

By 4:30 AM, the back room was sanitized to an almost sterile perfection. If an inspector walked in right now with a blacklight, they’d probably assume I ran an open-heart surgery clinic on the side.

I stripped off the plastic apron, doubled it into another contractor bag, and scrubbed myself down in the shop’s utility sink using a bar of industrial pumice soap that nearly took the top three layers of skin off my hands. By the time I threw on a clean dark hoodie and sweatpants, the eastern sky through the greenhouse roof was turning a soft, pale violet.

I pulled my phone from my pocket. Three unread text messages.

Matthew: dude where are you

Matthew: did you steal my whey protein again

Matthew: also your weird plant shop smells like pine-sol from three doors down, turn off the exhaust fan or whatever

I rolled my eyes, my thumb flying across the keyboard.

Talon: I didn't take your protein, check under your bed where you leave everything. And the shop is prepping for shipment delivery. Go back to sleep.

I slipped the phone away and stepped out the back exit, locking the heavy steel deadbolt behind me. Morning air hit my face, cold and crisp, cutting through the phantom taste of iron that always seemed to coat the back of my tongue after a disposal night.

I didn't drive back home. Not yet.

Instead, I took the long way through the city, steering my black pickup down the quiet, sleeping streets until I pulled onto the tree-lined avenue three miles away. I parked half a block down from a cozy, light-gray suburban house—the place her aunt and uncle had bought after taking her in all those years ago.

The street was dead silent. A single porch light flickered down the block, and a faint mist hung over the damp lawns.

I cut the engine, leaned my head back against the leather headrest, and looked up at the second-story window on the left.

The white linen curtains were drawn, but behind them, a faint, tiny amber glow burned—her nightlight. She never slept in total darkness. She never had, not since the day the gunfire rattled through that department store.

I pulled a small pair of high-powered binoculars from the glove compartment, resting them against the steering wheel. I didn't need to see her to know exactly what was happening inside. Right now, she was likely curled under her duvet, her small frame small against the large bed, her fingers loosely tangled around the stems of the fresh white lilies her aunt kept in a vase by her nightstand. A silent routine. Her anchor.

My pulse, which had been elevated for the last five hours while I chopped up a grown man, finally slowed down to a steady, rhythmic thrum

You’re safe, I thought, staring at the soft amber light filtering through her window. The guy from the market isn't going to look at you again. He isn't going to talk to you. He’s currently helping a rare hibiscus bloom for the grand opening.

A bitter, quiet smile tugged at the corner of my mouth.

People thought monsters lived in the dark, hiding under beds or lurking in alleyways. They weren't entirely wrong. But they had the wrong monster in mind. The real monsters weren't the clumsy predators grabbing girls at open-air markets. The real monster was sitting in a black truck down the street, covered in industrial soap, building her a flower shop so she’d never have to feel afraid again.

I stayed parked there until the sky shifted from violet to soft morning yellow, watching the light in her room flick off as the household began to wake. Only when I saw her aunt open the front blinds did I turn the key in the ignition, shifting the truck into drive, and slipping away into the morning traffic.