Chapter 2: The Second Call
The door clicked shut behind him, sealing him back into the tomb of his apartment. The silence was a physical thing, heavy and thick, broken only by the drip of a leaky faucet from the kitchen sink. The smells of stale coffee and old incense, usually just background noise, now felt like the odors of a crime scene. He could still smell them—coconut lotion, fear, the pungent musk of sex—clinging to his skin, his clothes, his hands.
He leaned against the wall, sliding down until he sat on the worn thin rug. The cracked glass of the framed photo caught the flickering light from the bulb above, fragmenting his younger, grinning face into a dozen disconnected slivers. He looked away.
His phone buzzed in his pocket.
A jolt, like electricity, shot through him. He fumbled for it, his fingers slick. The screen glowed. Unknown number. He swiped to answer, bringing it to his ear. He didn’t speak.
The voice was the same. That silky, distorted warble, but now it held a note of… amusement? “Satisfaction level, Matthew?”
Matthew’s throat was dry. “What?”
“The wish. The baseline implementation. Are you satisfied with the parameters?”
He thought of the line of girls on their hands and knees. The blank eyes. The complete, terrifying silence of the world outside. A laugh, brittle and sharp, escaped him. “It’s… it’s fucking unreal.”
“Baseline is often inadequate for prime beneficiaries,” the voice continued, as if discussing a software update. “An upgrade is available. A refinement of the original wish parameters.”
“An upgrade?” Matthew whispered, his eyes fixed on the pulsating static of the turned-off TV across the room.
“Clause one: Exclusive source. The pleasure they derive, the physiological response, becomes uniquely tied to you. Your touch, your seed. It becomes chemically addictive. Their bodies will crave it. They will seek it. They will deteriorate without it.”
Matthew’s breath hitched. His cock, soft and spent, gave a painful throb against his thigh.
“Clause two: Instrument calibration. To better service the expanded demand, and to signify your status, the primary instrument will be enhanced. Proportional increase. Ten inches in length. A fifty percent increase in girth. The corona will be more pronounced.”
A monstrous, impossible image flashed in his mind. His own body, altered. A tool became a weapon. A privilege became a brand.
“Clause three: Sole ownership. The ‘free use’ mandate for other age-qualified individuals is rescinded. The population aged eighteen to twenty-five are now exclusively for your use. Their bodies recognize only your authority. Attempts by others will result in… system errors. Psychological rejection. Physical revolt. They are yours alone.”
The implications slammed into him, one after another. The men he’d seen in the diner, in the street—their license was revoked. The world rewrote itself again, centering entirely on him. The hunger in his gut, vast and echoing, roared in approval.
“What’s the catch?” he rasped.
“Acceptance is the catch,” the voice replied smoothly. “Do you wish to upgrade?”
There was no hesitation. The last shred of the man who might have questioned, who might have felt a glimmer of remorse, was buried under the raw, devouring need for more. For total control. “Yes. I accept. Upgrade it. Do it.”
“Confirmed.”
The line went dead.
For a second, nothing. Then the pain came.
It started in his groin, a deep, wrenching ache as if his bones were being pulled apart from the inside. He cried out, doubling over on the rug. A searing heat flooded his pelvis, spreading down the length of his cock. He looked down, his vision blurring. His soft penis was twitching, swelling, stretching. Veins raised like cables under the skin, throbbing with a new, powerful flow of blood. He watched, stunned and agonized, as it grew beyond its previous size, thickening, lengthening, pushing past the confines of his open jeans. The head, already prominent, swelled and flared, becoming a wide, ruddy plum of sensitive flesh.
The transformation took less than a minute. When the pain receded, leaving a profound, aching fullness, he was staring at a different organ. It was huge. Obscene. A brutal piece of meat that looked like it belonged to someone else. Ten inches of thick, veined shaft, culminating in that vast, glistening head. He touched it. The skin was fever-hot. A single drop of precum beaded at the slit, thick as syrup. He was hard, rock-hard, and the erection felt permanent, a demanding, painful weight.
He stumbled to his feet, his new balance awkward, his body thrumming with a predatory energy. He needed to test it. Now.
He didn’t leave the apartment. He went to the window. The girl from the park—Chloe—where did she live? The sorority house. It would be a reckoning. A demonstration.
But as he turned from the window, his phone buzzed again. Not a call. A text. From an unknown number. It was an address downtown, followed by a single line: Initial consolidation cluster. High density. For your convenience.
They were herding them for him. Of course they were.
He pulled on a fresh pair of jeans, struggling to accommodate the massive bulge. He had to leave the top button undone. He threw on a hoodie and left, a new god in cheap sneakers.
The address led him to a nondescript office building, one of those glass and steel towers that housed insurance firms and tech startups. At this hour, it should have been locked, dark. Instead, the main revolving door was propped open. The lobby was lit, sterile, empty.
A security guard sat at the circular desk. A man in his sixties, with a kind, tired face. He looked up as Matthew entered. His eyes dropped to Matthew’s strained jeans, then back to his face. There was no fear, no judgment. Just a weary recognition. “Penthouse conference floor, sir,” the guard said, his voice neutral. “They’re all assembled.”
Matthew didn’t thank him. He walked to the bank of elevators. One door stood open, waiting. He stepped inside. The ride was smooth, silent. His reflection in the brass doors was distorted, a tall shadow with a glaring, monstrous protrusion.
The doors opened onto a plush, carpeted hallway. Soft, ambient lighting. Double doors of polished oak at the end stood ajar. He could hear a sound from behind them. A low, collective murmur. Not of conversation. Of breath. Of movement.
He pushed the doors open.
The conference room was vast, with a floor-to-ceiling window offering a panoramic view of the city’s glittering grid. The long mahogany table had been shoved against the wall. The room was filled with young women.
Dozens of them. Maybe fifty. Maybe more.
They stood in silent rows, like a military formation stripped of its purpose. They were all ages within the range, all races, all body types. Some were dressed in club clothes, sequins and heels. Others wore pajamas, or gym wear, or business casual from a day at an internship. Their faces were that now-familiar mask of blank acceptance, but underneath it, he saw something new. A subtle tension. A waiting. The upgrade was already in effect. Their bodies knew he was coming. They were craving the source before it had even arrived.
The door clicked shut behind him. Every pair of eyes in the room swung to him. Then, as one, their gaze dropped to the massive, undeniable bulge in his jeans. A unified, sharp intake of breath filled the room.
“Get undressed,” he said. His voice echoed, too loud.
There was no rustle this time. It was a synchronized, terrifyingly efficient movement. Hands went to zippers, buttons, straps. Fabric whispered to the carpet in a great, sighing wave. In under a minute, they all stood naked, a sea of young, vulnerable flesh under the cold fluorescent lights of the corporate boardroom.
“On your knees.”
They knelt. The sound was a soft, muffled thunder.
He walked forward, unzipping his jeans. He freed his cock. A gasp rippled through the room, a genuine, physical reaction to the sight of it—the sheer, brutal size of him. It bobbed, heavy and alive, the huge mushroom head gleaming wetly.
He stopped in front of the first row. A girl with coppery skin and tight black curls looked up at him, her mouth already slightly open. He didn’t touch her head. He simply fed his cock into her waiting mouth. She took it, her eyes watering instantly as the wide head stretched her lips to their limit. She gagged, but her throat worked, trying to accommodate him. He held himself there for a moment, feeling the tight, wet heat of her mouth, then pulled back. A thick strand of saliva webbed between her lips and his crown.
He moved to the next girl. Then the next. He didn’t fuck their faces. He presented himself, letting each one have a taste, a brief, choking introduction to the new instrument of their world. Their reactions varied—some gagged and struggled, others suckled with a desperate, focused hunger that confirmed the voice’s promise. Their pleasure was now tied to him. They needed this.
After a dozen such introductions, he was throbbing, dripping with their spit. He needed more.
“You,” he pointed to a tall, athletic blonde in the second row. “And you.” A petite Asian girl beside her. “On the table. On your backs. Heads hanging over the edge.”
They obeyed instantly, scrambling onto the polished mahogany. They lay down, their heads tipping back over the far side, their throats exposed. The rest of the room watched, silent, their breathing shallower.
Matthew walked to the end of the table. He positioned himself between the blonde’s spread legs. He was too big, too impatient for anything else. He spat into his hand, slicked his enormous shaft roughly, and notched the bulbous head against her entrance. She was tight, virginally so. He pushed.
She screamed. A short, sharp cry of genuine pain as her body was forced open beyond its limits. He kept pushing, a relentless, brutal invasion. Her nails scrabbled on the polished wood. Her legs, held wide by his hands, trembled violently. He bottomed out inside her, his hips pressed against her, her cervix taking the full impact of the ten-inch intrusion. She whined, a high, pathetic sound.
He began to fuck her. It was less like sex and more like excavation. Each stroke was a deep, grinding assault. The table shuddered with his rhythm. The other girls watched, some with their hands drifting unconsciously between their own legs, their own bodies betraying them in response to the spectacle.
He came inside the blonde quickly, a hot, violent release. He pulled out, his cock slick with her blood and his cum. She curled onto her side, weeping silently, her body shuddering.
He turned to the petite girl. Her eyes were wide with terror. He flipped her over onto her stomach, bending her small frame over the table. He entered her from behind. She was so small he feared he’d split her in two. The fit was impossibly tight, a hot, vise-like pressure that made him groan aloud. He fucked her with short, punishing strokes, one hand fisted in her hair, pulling her head back. Her cries were muffled against the wood.
He didn’t come this time. He was a machine now. He withdrew, leaving her collapsed and gasping.
“The rest of you,” he barked, his voice raw. “Line up along the windows. Bend over. Hold the glass.”
They moved like a terrified, graceful flock. They lined up against the massive windows, their palms and foreheads pressed against the cool glass, their backs arched, presenting themselves to the room and the sleeping city beyond. Dozens of pale curves, a constellation of submission against the night sky.
Matthew moved down the line. He took them one after another, a brutal, efficient pace. He used their bodies as receptacles, nothing more. He fucked a curvy brunette so hard her breasts slapped against the window with each thrust. He took a redhead from behind while pulling another girl in front of him to suck on his fingers, her moans vibrating around his knuckles. The room filled with the sounds of him—grunts, slaps, the wet squelch of his massive cock plunging in and out of over-stretched, willing flesh. The air grew thick and humid with the smell of sex, sweat, and a faint, coppery hint of blood.
Their reactions varied. Some cried silently, tears cutting tracks through the condensation their breath left on the glass. Others began to moan, their bodies convulsing in real, addictive climaxes as he used them, their pleasure circuits violently overloaded by his specific touch, his specific size. One girl, after he pulled out of her, actually whimpered and pushed her hips back, seeking him again, her face a mask of confused, biological need.
He lost count. He lost time. He was a piston, a force of nature. He came over and over, inside them, on them, marking them. His balls ached, but the drive didn’t diminish. The upgrade wasn’t just physical; it was metabolic. His stamina was bottomless, his recovery instant.
Finally, he stood in the center of the room, panting, his monstrous cock still arrogantly hard, dripping with the mixed fluids of a score of girls. They were all used, broken, dripping. Some lay on the floor where they’d sunk after he’d finished with them. Others still leaned against the windows, trembling. All were painted with him.
A profound, deafening silence settled, broken only by soft weeping and the hum of the building’s climate control.
Then, from the back of the room, a girl stood up. She had been one of the first, the coppery-skinned one with the curls. She walked towards him, her steps unsteady. She didn’t look at his face. She looked only at his cock. She dropped to her knees in front of him, her hands coming up to gently, reverently, cradle his heavy balls. She leaned forward and began to lick him clean, her tongue tender on the oversensitive flesh, swallowing what he’d left on himself. It was an act of worship. Of desperate, addictive need.
Others saw her. They began to crawl towards him. Not to attack, not to flee. To taste. To get closer to the source. They surrounded him, a living, breathing, desperate nest of clinging hands and seeking mouths, polishing his shaft with their tongues, kissing his thighs, nuzzling his stomach.
He let them. He looked over their bent heads, out the window at his city. His kingdom. Every light, every moving car, every building held subjects that now belonged only to him. A surge of power, absolute and terrifying, filled his chest. It was better than any orgasm.
His phone buzzed in his discarded jeans.
He ignored it. It buzzed again. Insistent.
With a grunt, he pushed through the clinging bodies, leaving them whimpering at the loss of contact. He dug the phone out. A text.
Asset recovery required. Check your domicile.
A cold finger traced his spine. Domicile. His apartment.
He pulled on his jeans with difficulty, zipping up the immense burden. The girls watched him dress, their eyes hungry, lost. He didn’t look back. He walked out of the conference room, down the hall, into the waiting elevator.
The ride down felt longer. The euphoria was leaching away, replaced by a low, buzzing anxiety. Asset recovery. What did that mean?
The lobby was empty now. The security guard was gone. He stepped out into the night. The air was cold, clean. It felt like a slap.
He walked home, his stride long, the physical power in his body undeniable. But the emptiness inside was growing again, wider and deeper than before. The hunger was not satiated. It was awakened, refined, and now it knew its own size.
He reached his apartment building. The front door was unlocked. The hallway light was out. He took the stairs, his footsteps loud in the concrete well.
He took the stairs, his footsteps loud in the concrete well. Each step sent a dull ache through his groin, a reminder of the new, permanent weight he carried. The lingering scents of the conference room—sweat, sex, fear—rose from his skin like a cheap cologne, mixing with the building’s smell of mildew and old paint.
He reached his floor. The hallway was dark, one fluorescent tube flickering erratically. His apartment door, at the end, was shut. He always locked it. A thread of unease, cold and thin, wound through his gut. He approached silently, his enhanced senses straining. No sound came from within.
He pressed his ear to the cheap wood. Nothing. He fumbled for his keys, the metal jangling in the oppressive quiet. He inserted the key, turned the lock. It clicked. He pushed the door open.
The living room was as he’d left it, a landscape of neglect. The static on the TV cast its restless grey light. The beer bottle he’d dropped still lay on its side, a dark stain blooming on the carpet. But on the stained couch, a figure sat upright.
She was silhouetted against the flickering screen. Slender. Female. His heart hammered, a frantic drum against his ribs. Another one? Sent here? But the directive had been for the conference room. Asset recovery.
“Hello, Matt.”
The voice. It was familiar. It was clear. Not flat. Not monotone. It held emotion—contempt, tightly leashed. It sliced through the fog of his predatory haze like a scalpel.
He hit the light switch. The overhead bulb buzzed to life, harsh and yellow.
Hailey. His stepsister. Nineteen. She wore ripped jeans and an oversized university sweatshirt, her chestnut hair piled in a messy bun. She looked nothing like the vacant, waiting figures from the conference room. Her eyes, a sharp green, were focused, alert, and burning with a fury that was entirely her own. She wasn’t naked. She wasn’t kneeling. She was sitting with her legs crossed, one foot bouncing with nervous, angry energy.
The cognitive dissonance was paralyzing. She was in the age range. She should have been blank, compliant, yearning. Yet here she was, glaring at him with the same defiant annoyance she’d had since she was twelve and he’d borrowed her bike without asking.
“Hailey? What the hell are you doing here?” His voice sounded strange to his own ears, rough from use, tinged with a confusion he hadn’t felt in hours. He stepped inside, closing the door behind him. The normalcy of the action felt absurd.
“I came to see you,” she said. Her gaze didn’t waver. It traveled over him, taking in his disheveled hoodie, the strained jeans, the general aura of filth and violence that clung to him. Her nose wrinkled slightly. “You smell like a frat house bathroom after purge night.”
“How did you get in?”
“Mom still has your spare key from when you petsat Mr. Snuffles. I borrowed it.” She stated it plainly, as if this were a normal visit. Nothing was normal. The city was silent with a new kind of law, and she was just… sitting there.
A terrible, hopeful thought struck him. Had the wish not affected her? A loophole? Family? But they weren’t blood-related. His father had married her mother seven years ago. They’d shared a bathroom for two awkward teenage years before he’d moved out. She was firmly in the demographic.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said, his mind racing. The animal part of him, the part thrumming with ownership, looked at her and saw just another asset. But the human shock held it back. “It’s not safe out there. You need to… you need to go home and lock the door.”
She let out a short, humorless laugh. “Safe? From what, Matt? From the guys who just… stop? From the whole world turning into a fucking nightmare at midnight?” She leaned forward, her eyes drilling into him. “Or from you?”
The words hung in the stagnant air. He felt exposed, seen in a way he hadn’t been since the wish was granted. The power he’d worn like a crown suddenly felt like a spotlight, pinning him in his own squalor.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he muttered, turning away, pretending to look for a clean glass. The sink was full of them, all dirty.
“Cut the shit,” Hailey snapped. Her foot stopped bouncing. “I saw it. I was at a study group at the library. One minute, Jenny is arguing about Kant’s categorical imperative, the next she just… stops. Gets up. Walks out. We all thought she was sick. Then Rachel’s phone rang. She answered it, listened, and her face went completely empty. She stood up, took off her sweater, and just walked toward the stacks where that creepy grad student was watching. Like a robot.”
Matthew’s back was to her. He gripped the edge of the counter. The laminate was cool and sticky.
“I ran,” Hailey continued, her voice tightening. “I ran all the way here. I saw things on the way, Matt. Things I can’t unsee. That old guy from the bodega on the corner had Maddy Stevens from my chem class bent over his mailbox. She was just… taking it. Staring at nothing. And then I get here, to your building, and that sweet old lady, Mrs. Gable? She had some delivery girl… and she was…” Hailey’s voice broke for a second. She cleared her throat, forcing steel back into it. “Everyone in that age group, just… broken. Except me. Why is that, Matt?”
He turned around slowly. The pressure in his jeans was immense, a throbbing reminder of his new reality that clashed violently with her old-world judgement. “I don’t know.”
“You’re a terrible liar. You always have been. Your left eye twitches.” She stood up now, unfolding herself to her full height, which was still a few inches shorter than him. She hugged herself, not out of submission, but out of a need to hold herself together. “I got a call too. About an hour after everything went to hell.”
The room seemed to tilt. The static from the TV hissed like a chorus of condemnation.
“What call?” he asked, his mouth dry.
“A voice. Weird. Digital. It said I was eligible for a wish. A single wish. Because I was ‘adjacent to the epicenter.’ Whatever that means.” She took a step toward him. The space between them crackled with tension. “It told me all I had to do was text the number my wish. And it would be granted.”
Matthew’s blood ran cold. Epicenter. The word confirmed what he’d feared in his darkest moments—he wasn’t just a beneficiary. He was the origin point. The source of the infection. And now the mechanism was offering her, untouched, a countermeasure.
“Why are you telling me this?” he whispered.
“Because I wanted you to be here when I made it,” she said, her voice dropping low, venomous. She pulled her phone from her back pocket. The screen was dark. “I wanted you to hear it. I wanted you to know exactly what I was going to wish for, you pathetic, lonely, fuck.”
Each word was a needle plunged into the swollen bubble of his godhood. Pathetic.Lonely. They were the old words, the true words, from before. The foundation upon which the monstrous edifice had been built.
“Hailey, you don’t understand what’s happening—” he started, a plea masquerading as a warning.
“I understand perfectly!” she shouted, the sound explosively loud in the confined space. A tear of pure rage escaped her eye. She swatted it away furiously. “You did this! You wished for this! You looked at a world full of people and decided that what you deserved was endless, free pussy from any girl you wanted, regardless of what they wanted. You turned them into toys. You turned my friends into… into public toilets!”
She was shaking now, her whole body trembling with the force of her accusation. “That girl, Chloe, from Sigma Phi? She lives on my floor. She came back an hour ago. She was crying, Matt. She was bleeding. And she kept whispering your name. Not like she was scared of you. Like she… missed you. It was the most sickening thing I’ve ever seen.”
Matthew said nothing. The images she conjured—Chloe bleeding, whispering—did not stir guilt. They stirred a possessive irritation. An asset was damaged.
“So yeah,” Hailey spat, holding up her phone. Her thumb hovered over the screen. “I got my own wish. And I’ve been sitting here in your fucking sty, thinking about what to do with it. I could wish for it all to go back. I could wish for you to be stricken with impotence. I could wish for you to feel every second of pain and horror you’ve inflicted, tenfold.”
She took another step closer. He could smell her shampoo—apples and cinnamon—a painfully ordinary scent in the apocalyptic room. “But you know what I think? I think you don’t deserve a punishment. You don’t deserve to be the center of any more stories, even a story about your own suffering. You deserve to be irrelevant.”
Her green eyes were hard as gemstones. “You’re evil, Matt. Not cartoon evil. Real evil. The kind that comes from a small, empty heart and a sense of utter entitlement. You were given a miracle, and you used it to become a rapist on a global scale. You don’t deserve your power. You don’t deserve their bodies. You don’t deserve to have your dick get hard ever again without it meaning you’re about to have a cardiac arrest.”
She unlocked her phone. The glow illuminated her determined, tear-streaked face. She opened her messaging app. The last received message was from the same unknown number that had haunted him. She tapped the reply field.
“I’m going to wish for the one thing that fits your crime,” she said, her voice chillingly calm now. “A correction.”
His paralysis broke. “Hailey, wait! You can’t! You don’t know what you’re messing with!”
“I know exactly what I’m messing with!” she fired back, not looking up from her phone. Her thumbs began to move, tapping rapidly on the glass.
“Stop!” He lunged for her, not with sexual intent, but with a panicked need to control, to silence. His movement was clumsy, fueled by fear rather than predatory grace.
She was faster. She danced back, putting the battered couch between them. Her thumbs never stopped. Tap-tap-tap. The soft, digital clicks were the loudest sounds in the universe.
“It’s done,” she said, and hit send.
A whooshing sound emanated from her phone.
Then, nothing.
They stood frozen, staring at each other across the couch. The hum of the fridge. The hiss of the TV. The distant, ever-present echo of the city’s new silence. For five seconds, ten, nothing changed.
Matthew felt a wild, giddy relief surge through him. It hadn’t worked. Her wish had been rejected. He was still the epicenter. The upgrade held.
A smirk started to twist his lips. “See? It doesn’t work like that. I’m the source. You can’t just—”
A vibration began. Not in the air this time. It started in the floor, a deep, subsonic tremor that made the beer bottles on the table shiver together in a discordant chorus. The light from the flickering bulb stretched and throbbed, painting long, pulsing shadows that seemed to breathe.
This was different from the first pulse. That had been a localized shockwave, a setting of rules. This felt deeper, systemic, like a planet adjusting its axis.
The pressure in Matthew’s groin shifted. It wasn't pain. It was a sudden, alarming diminishment. A softening. He looked down. The monstrous bulge in his jeans was receding, the fabric going slack. A sensation of loss, profound and physiological, washed over him, a withdrawal deeper than any drug. He clutched at himself, a silent cry on his lips, as he felt it shrink back toward its original size, the terrifying, god-like weight vanishing.
“No…” he breathed.
But the change wasn’t just in him. A sound drifted up from the street below. A scream. Not a scream of pleasure or submission. A raw, human scream of terror and regained awareness. Then another. And another. A car alarm wailed. A man’s voice shouted, “What did I do? Oh my God, what did I do?!”
The silent compliance was shattering.
Hailey stared at her phone, then out the grimy window, her face pale. She looked back at him, her defiance mingled with a dawning horror at her own actions. “What did I do?” she whispered, echoing the voice from the street.
Matthew stumbled to the window. The scene below was chaos, but a new kind. The predatory quiet was gone. People were stumbling apart, clutching clothes, screaming, weeping, pointing accusatory fingers at older men who were now backing away with looks of dawning, grotesque shame. The old rules of consent and consequence were crashing back into place, but the memories of the hours just past were freshly etched, horrifyingly real.
He turned from the window. The hunger in him was still there, a ravenous phantom limb, but the means to sate it were… changing. His body felt wrong, lighter, weaker. The intoxicating scent of ownership was fading from the air, replaced by the acrid smell of panic and reckoning.
Hailey’s phone buzzed on the couch cushion. A single-word response glowed on the screen.
CONFIRMED.
She picked it up, her hand trembling. She read it aloud, her voice hollow. “’Wish granted. Correction applied: Source authority rescinded. Physiological addiction link severed. Standard consent protocols reinstated. Memory of violation retained by all affected parties.’” She looked up at him, her eyes wide with a fear she hadn’t shown before. “’Epicenter liability remains.’ What does that mean? Epicenter liability?”
The voice from his own call echoed in his memory. Acceptance is the catch.
Matthew understood. The wish was his. The consequences were his. The world was reverting to a recognizable shape, but the crimes of the night were not forgotten. They were remembered. By Chloe. By the girls in the conference room. By the dozens, hundreds, thousands he’d touched. The craving for him was gone, severed. What remained was the clear, unimpaired memory of what he had done to them.
He was no longer a god. He was a man. A man who had, for one night, been handed the keys to a global prison of his own design. And now every single prisoner remembered his face, his touch, his new, monstrous size that was now only a terrifying memory in their minds and bodies.
The liability was his. Alone.
A pounding fist slammed against his apartment door. Heavy. Insistent. Not a lover’s knock. A police knock.
“Open up! Police!”
Hailey jumped, a small gasp escaping her. She looked from the door to Matthew, her earlier fury replaced by something like pity, and a deeper, more satisfying dread.
Matthew didn’t move. He stared at the door. The sound of other doors opening in the hallway filtered through. Confused voices. Raised questions. Sobbing.
His kingdom had lasted less than a night. His throne was gone. All that remained was the bill, coming due at a furious, pounding tempo on his own door. And the cold, certain knowledge that out there, in the slowly waking city, were thousands of victims who now knew exactly who to blame.