In Ashburne, Halloween isn’t just a holiday, it’s the one night the veil comes alive.
For fourteen months, veterinarian Silver Moore has secretly wanted the town’s most dangerous man. Cruz Dawson has wanted her just as fiercely, but neither has crossed the line.
Until Halloween.
When an ancient darkness slips through the veil, it strips away Silver’s fear and unleashes every desire she’s buried. She drugs Cruz, binds him to his own bed, and claims the power she’s only ever fantasized about.
But something evil is wearing her obsession like a mask.
As the night spirals into supernatural horror, Cruz must decide whether to fight the woman he’s always wanted… or join her.
A haunting, obsessive dark romance where desire becomes the monster.
Be Warned: forced seduction, bondage, sex toys, monster romance
I take my wine back to the living room and sit on the couch. The TV is on but I’m not watching it. Some horror movie, it is Halloween after all. A woman in a white mask is chasing someone through a dark house.
I’m thinking about Cruz. I’m always thinking about Cruz.
It’s been this way since my second week in Ashburne. I’d gone to Mackey’s for a beer, alone, still trying to figure out if I’d made a mistake moving here. He was at the bar, talking to the owner. I saw his hands first—large, scarred across the knuckles, and wrapped around a glass of whiskey. Then his arms. The tattoos. Then his face. He looked at me, and the room got smaller.
I found out who he was the next day. Everyone in Ashburne knows Cruz Dawson. He runs the construction supply company on the east end of town. That’s the legal business. The illegal one, involving the drugs, the money, the things that happen quietly in back rooms and out on county roads, is an open secret. No one talks about it directly. No one does anything about it either.
He’s dangerous. That’s not a rumor. That’s a fact.
I should be afraid of him, but I’m not. I’m something else entirely.
I’ve watched him for over a year. I know his truck, his routines. I know he’s at Mackey’s most Friday nights. I know he drinks his coffee black. I know he has a large house on the edge of town, secluded, set back from the road behind a wall of pine trees. I’ve driven past it. Not often. Not obsessively. Just enough to know the shape of it in the dark.
And I know, I know, he watches me too. The way his eyes find me across a room. The way his truck slows when it passes the clinic. The way he stood at that gas station today, watching me drive away, and didn’t move until I was out of sight.
We’ve never spoken more than a few words. “Morning. How’s the dog? Nice weather.” The surface-level nothing of two people who share a small town and nothing else.
But the way he looks at me. Those dark, heavy-lidded eyes that strip me down to nothing every time they land on me. He wants me. I’d bet my clinic on it. And I want him. I want him so badly it lives in my chest like a second heartbeat, constant and aching and impossible to ignore.
But I’m scared.
Not of him. Never of him. I’m scared of what it would mean. I’m the new vet. I’m twenty-five and he’s forty. He’s Cruz Dawson. If anyone found out, if the women at the clinic’s front desk knew, if Dale and his hay-smelling rancher friends knew, if this town got even a whisper of it, I’d be finished here. Small towns don’t forgive. They just wait.
So, I say nothing and I do nothing. I go to work, I come home, I pour wine, I sit on this couch, and I want. That’s my life. That’s been my life for the better part of fourteen months.
I drain the glass and pour another while the movie plays. Outside, the sky is getting dark. I can see kids in costumes moving down the street—ghosts, witches, a tiny Batman trailing his mother. The world is celebrating the dead, and I’m sitting here celebrating nothing. I should go out, drive into town, and be around people, be normal, but I don’t.
Something shifts. It’s subtle. A cold feeling, starting in my chest. Not from outside, from inside. Like a window opened somewhere behind my ribs and winter air is blowing through. I rub my sternum, blame the wine, blame the movie, but the room feels darker. Not the lighting, the light is the same, but something in the air has changed. Heavier. Charged.
I blink and for a second, just a second, the TV isn’t showing the movie. It’s static. Grey and white and hissing. Then it’s back—the movie and the woman in the mask.
I put my wine down. My hand is shaking and I don’t know why. I’m tired, I tell myself, that’s all. It’s been a long day, a long week, a long year. I’m going to finish this glass and go to bed. I lean back against the cushions and the cold feeling spreads from my chest to my arms, my fingers, and the base of my skull. It doesn’t hurt. It feels almost like relief. Like something settling into a space that was waiting for it.
I close my eyes and the last thing I see before sleep takes me is headlights through the window. A truck, moving slowly. Black and familiar, passing my house.
I smile. Then I’m gone.
