Dullahan.

Two, maybe three weeks back he’d come to this city. It was an anomaly, an omen just like my grandmother had warned. Last night felt like an inky oil stain. I ran my fingers over the scratched-up skin of my left arm. It was just a small injury but it said so much more. It showed I wasn’t infallible. That I wouldn’t always win. Not with Dullahan at least.

He came to my city and now a strange collection of things were happening. I had a golden-eyed casino owner who could shift into a bird, trailing me. I had drawn the attention of a scarred giant who despised me and who my luck meant nothing to. Who knew what else was coming in close? I thought about the red-eyed, red-haired man at North Hunan.

“Shit,” I hissed in annoyance. There were too many odd things all happening at once.

I pressed my fingers into one of the kiss marks and smeared it in a messy stripe down my skin. Who had been in my apartment? Who had laid in my bed and pressed their mouth on my sleeping body? Who fucking dared to mess with me? I was practically shaking with anger, my eyes flaring a more vibrant green.

Finally, I found my patio door was open. I swing it open further and strode outside, wind whipping my hair wildly above my head as I crossed the space. My arms pressed into the railing as I bent over, looking down at the street below. I looked back at the patio door. Had I locked it? Could someone even get in this way? They’d have had to climb or…fly like a bird. A bird shifter in this case.

“Fuck,” I hissed out. Viktor. His obsession and stalking were worse than I thought. Still, I let out a breath of relief.

Was this going to stop me from going tonight? Not at all. Actually, I felt even more excited to get my pretty ass there and slowly take his kingdom. I went inside to clean off his lipstick kisses and get ready for the event.

* * *

Plutus Casino was called the Tower of Sin. I wanted to live in the top penthouse and make it my tower. Instead, I’d been barred almost immediately when I moved here. For the longest time, I’d been enraged until finally, I let it go and pretended the building didn’t exist.

But here I was again, being invited in with a purred promise from a dangerous mouth. It was beyond my power to deny the Tower of Sin. Its owner had set his eyes on me and I was helpless to deny a personal invitation to my paradise and unwilling to surrender the potential to take.

Greed possessed me. Even now my fingers trembled with the desire to accumulate more. Take from everyone. Build my heaping hoard high. I didn’t want a pot of gold, I wanted a mountain piled so high that one could see the sun glistening off it from across the city.