It should have been enough, but it wasn’t.
“My potential,” Colt laughed bitterly. “Right. Just like this friendship.”
“What are you saying?” Jason choked.
“I’m saying I’m tired of being your fake fucking boyfriend,” he snapped. “Tired of you wanting a relationship without any of the strings attached and chasing off everyone I’ve ever tried to date. Tired of being your backup plan.”
Jason shook his head, refusing to meet Colt’s eyes. “This isn’t you.”
“It is. You just don’t want to face it, but what else is new?” Colt threw a few bills out on the table, more than enough to cover the tab. He left his keys, too. “Take the truck back to the dorm. I’ll walk.”
“Colt!” Jason cried, standing from the table. “Wait!”
Colt ignored him, stalking out the side door. He didn’t wait to see if Jason was following him. The anger that had been building in his gut all night was finally boiling over, and he knew if he didn’t get out of that restaurant, he was going to say something he would regret even more than the foolish words that had already come out of his mouth.
Not that there was anything left to ruin.
Chapter 3
Once Colt was out of sight of the restaurant, the closest tree became the object of his misdirected wrath. Normally, punching greenery would have made him feel like enough of a douchebag to shame him into complacency, but that night, it only served to amp him up. He walked a few blocks without trying and found himself on the edge of the downtown district. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket and kept up a steady pace, doing his best to avoid making eye contact with anyone. He didn’t trust himself around people when a hair trigger was all that separated him from bashing someone’s skull in.
It was a strange but familiar impulse. It was also one Colt hadn’t had in years, not since his anger management classes as a teenager. He’d been so certain he had laid that part of him to rest, but all of a sudden, he felt like a hormonal teenager out of control of his emotions and barely in control of his physical body.
Jason was right. Something was wrong with him. Colt had told himself it was just a lack of sleep, the stress of his job, and the altogether shittiness of his least favorite time of year, but this was something else entirely.
“Gimme your wallet.”
Colt froze. The unmistakable click of a gun being cocked registered at the same time as he felt the barrel press into his back through his jacket. He was at the lip of an alleyway, and he could see the man standing behind him in the reflective glass window of the abandoned shop he’d stopped in front of. The mugger shoved him forward with the gun, and Colt stumbled further into the alleyway. “You want me to fuckin’ spell it out for you, shithead? Give me your wallet, and I let you walk away. Or don’t, and I pry it outta your cold dead hands. Choice is yours.”
It wasn’t the first time Colt had been mugged. The first time, he’d been twelve. Gerald and Renee had taken him out to celebrate the finalization of his adoption, and they’d been stopped by a skinny kid who barely looked old enough to drive. Renee had gasped and clung to Colt’s arm--he’d been taller than her even then--and Gerald had put himself between them without hesitation. It was the first time anyone, especially an adult, had risked anything of value for Colt--certainly the first time anyone had risked their life--and that moment had stayed with him ever since.
Colt knew what he should have done. He should have done exactly what Gerald did, which was to slowly reach into his pocket and disarm the situation, if not the mugger himself, by remaining calm and compliant. In keeping with the rest of the night, the gap between what Colt should have done and what he actually did was more of a chasm.
He turned suddenly and pinned the mugger against the wet brick wall behind him. The snarl that erupted from Colt’s throat was more of a shock than the sound of the gun firing into the air. The bullet ricocheted off the gutter overhead, and Colt slammed the other man’s hand into the wall. The force made the mugger drop the gun, and Colt registered the terror in his eyes, as if he was looking into the face of a monster rather than the man he’d been prepared to kill for forty bucks and change moments earlier.
What happened next felt like it was happening to someone else entirely. Colt saw his left hand wrap around the man’s throat, but he couldn’t feel the pressure, not even when he watched his nails dig into the mugger’s flesh, calling streams of blood to the surface.
He’d always been strong. His adult years spent in construction had ensured that, but it didn’t seem possible that he’d applied that much pressure. Even less believable was the animalistic snarl that seemed to be emanating from his own throat. It had to be a dream.
All of a sudden, Colt could feel again. The mugger’s pulse fluttered entreatingly in his grasp. Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Every beat wove into a seductive rhythm and soon, the sound of it was enough to drown out the growling and the man’s screams.
It had to be his own pulse. Colt had never been able to hear another person’s heartbeat before, but that sound became all he could hear.
He’d eaten his fill at the restaurant, but hunger as fierce and twisting as a knife in his gut threatened to make Colt double over. He hadn’t felt this kind of hunger in years--decades. Not since his brief placement in a foster home where the mother’s idea of punishment was sending him to school without dinner the night before and without any lunch money.
Strange thoughts entered a child’s mind when he was convinced he was starving. He’d entertained a few morbid revenge fantasies then, fueled by cartoonesque hallucinations of people turned into walking rotisserie chickens, but this was something different. It was something more sinister than anything a brooding child with an overactive imagination could concoct.
In an instant, that dank alleyway, filled with trash and clogged gutters, was perfumed with the most enticing scent Colt had ever smelled. And it was coming from the wriggling man in his grasp.
Colt realized only when he felt the blood streaming down his wrist that the mugger was clawing his flesh in a desperate attempt to escape. Colt applied a bit more pressure to the man’s neck, intending only to make him stop long enough so that Colt could think, but instead, he just...stopped.
The snap of his neck seemed to echo, audible only because his pulse had ceased entirely. That once-deafening sound left a hole--in Colt, in the alley, in time itself.
For a few seconds, all Colt could do was stare at the lifeless man he had pinned against a wall. He finally came back to himself enough to release the mugger and yelled in horror when he looked down at his hands. His fingertips were covered in blood, as if they’d been embedded to the first knuckle in the other man’s flesh. His nails were sharpened to clawlike points even though he always kept them clipped short.
Panicked, Colt wiped his hands off on his jeans and felt the claws digging into his own skin. When he looked down, most of the blood was gone, but his fingers were stained black in a gradient that faded the closer it got to his hand. Even though his flesh gradually turned back to its usual light tan hue, his veins were still dark, spreading out underneath the surface of his skin like a splintered web in cracked glass.