Back home, I never really got invited anywhere. 

Sounds kind of lame for a guy who rode around like a badass, smoking shit and fucking things up. But most of the time, people forgot I existed unless they needed something. I wasn’t the type of guy who’d gotten texts at midnight asking if I wanted to bum around town. 

I was the loser who heard about things afterward. The party that happened on Saturday. The movie everybody saw together and couldn’t stop talking about in the hallways in school. 

Eventually, I just stopped expecting to be invited to things. Especially after Adrian died. And then everyone grew up, graduated, hit their twenties, and started moving as far as they could away from Idaho. Going to colleges like Baylor and Texas A&M and universities I’d never see the inside of. 

Meanwhile, I was still me. Scraping by as best as I could. Trying to figure out what the hell I was doing as I stood there in the middle of a field, staring at a set of rusted metal doors half-buried in the weeds outside Hudson’s Bluff. 

“Abandoned wine cellar. We go in and out from here.” David said, grabbed one of the handles on the door, and pried it open, while Marko (cigarette in mouth) grabbed the other. Together, they pulled, and a long, grinding shriek of rusted metal echoed across the field, loud enough to send a flock of birds scattering from where they perched on the chain-link fence. 

Cold air immediately rolled upward from the darkness and carried the scent of damp stone, old water, and something rusty. 

I kept expecting them to turn around and laugh at me. Like this was some kind of joke they’d been playing for the last few days, leading me on this weird little charade to get me to think I was part of David’s crew.

“You’re joking, right?” I told them, and I kind of laughed until I saw no one else laughing.

“Russians do not joke,” David said, and there wasn’t even a hint of a smile on his face when he said it. Instead, he glanced toward Marko and jerked his chin toward the stairwell poking up out of the shadows. “Idi uzhe, Marko.”

Marko rolled his eyes, and his cigarette bobbed from the corner of his mouth. “Don’t have to tell me twice, bossman.” And without waiting for a response, he stepped onto the metal stairs and vanished into the darkness below. I watched the orange tip of his cigarette bob once in the dark, then vanish, swallowed up by the shadows. 

Dwayne followed after him, heavier steps shaking the stairwell, each one echoing a little deeper until the sound became muffled. And then it was just me and David, standing at the edge of the abyss. 

“If you are serious about what you have with Noah Riley,” he said, “then I will not interfere anymore. I promised him that after we broke up.”

“Doing a real bang-up job at that, huh?” I replied, eyeballing him, wondering where he was going with this. “You never did say why you guys ended it.”

David shifted slightly, one hand resting on the rusted railing leading down. His fingers traced the worn metal as if he knew every groove in it by memory. He had painted his fingernails black, which was weird for a guy but seemed to fit him in a strange way. 

“I left Astoria,” he said at last, voice low and even, “and I went to Russia.”

“Why the fuck would you do that?” I replied. “What the hell’s so important that you’d head back to the Motherland for eight months? You get homesick for beef stroganoff and the Kremlin or something?”

David actually smirked at that. “You are funny guy, Michael,” he said simply and then headed down the steps without another word. “Come,” he called back, his voice already thinning as it sank deeper into the stairwell. “The others are waiting. Close the doors behind you.”

“Dick,” I muttered under my breath.

But I did it anyway.

The chain was colder than it had any right to be, thick, industrial, biting into my palm as I pulled the doors shut. The metal groaned as they sealed, a heavy, final sound that echoed through the concrete like something locking in place behind me.

By the time I looked back over my shoulder, David was already several steps below me now, his silhouette breaking apart in fragments of dim light coming from somewhere. 

I grabbed onto the railing and started after him as best as I could without falling on my face and sliding down the rest of the way. I didn’t know how deep down the staircase went, but I was almost sure breaking my neck was somehow part of the equation if I did. 

The darkness only deepened, and I started seeing wine bottles stuck in the actual dirt walls. Some of them were broken. Some of them still had all the wine in them. Faint light flickered from a few bottles that Marko must have lit, using the alcohol inside as fuel for the fire. 

And then I started hearing voices and music bleeding through the stone. Laughter and the distant crash of something heavy being moved, like furniture dragged across the floor. 

“Heyyy, Michael!” Marko’s voice echoed up the stairwell. “You fall asleep up there?”

“Come on, pretty boy! We saved you a seat and everything!” Dwayne said. 

Hyena-like laughter exploded out from the darkness.

I stumbled down the last step and spat out a mouthful of cobwebs hanging from the ceiling, or what I thought were cobwebs. Light flickered from behind layers of a beaded curtain, flickering gold and orange against the stone walls. Then the tunnel opened out into a wide underground space carved into old stone and broken architecture. Layers and layers of graffiti covered the walls, years of people tagging their names and symbols all over. 

“Finally,” Marko stood off to the side, an open bottle of wine in one hand, "we were starting to think you died up there.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time someone almost died going up and down those things,” Dwayne added dryly. 

“Dwayne, we talked about this,” Marko said. “That was an accident. I didn’t know that hot babe followed me home from the bar in eight-inch heels.”

Dwayne didn’t even hesitate. “That’s not what happened, dude, and you know it.”

“Are you two fucking idiots gonna eat this pizza or what?” Trixie called from the shadows.

I wasn’t paying attention to them much. Instead, I followed the feeling of being watched and focused on David, who was seated across the room. 

He was seated on a raised stone platform carved into what looked like an old wine alcove turned into a crude throne. Crates, broken chairs, and warped wood had been stacked around it in a way that made it look deliberate. The firelight caught him from below, turning his stillness into something that verged into something almost dominant. 

Oh, fuck me.

David lifted two fingers slightly, a small, controlled motion, not even a full gesture. And beckoned me without saying a word. 

“Come.”

I pretended that his hot little gesture didn’t get me a little hard and sneered in response because I wasn’t David’s little bitch to order around and do what he wanted with. And if he thought I was about to kneel in front of him and suck his toes or whatever pervy little fantasy he’d cooked up in his head, he had another thing coming to him. 

I pocketed my hands and strode forward, beat to hell, but somehow trying to keep up the appearance of being a badass in front of Marko, Trixie, and Dwayne. Nobody stopped me or got in my way. They just shifted slightly as I passed, giving me breadth to walk. 

I crossed the room, firelight crackling from a few old, rusted oil barrels. Music crackled from a boombox, something old, maybe from the sixties, way before my time. 

I stopped in front of David, close enough that the firelight caught both of us at the same time. I knew I couldn’t back out now and risk looking like a scared little coward.

Instead, I forced a smirk into place. “Nice place you got here,” I drawled. “King of the Rats, huh?”

“Who’s he calling a rat?” Marko muttered from somewhere behind me. 

“Yep, he’s dead meat,” Trixie cackled. 

David cocked one dark eyebrow, and then he reached over and picked up a dark wine bottle off a crate. It didn’t have a label or nothing, but I could tell it was old. “King Rat,” he said, and uncorked it. “I like that.” And he poured a measure of dark red liquor into a dented tin cup sitting nearby.

The scent hit me immediately. Like something I’d smelled as a kid at a Christmas party. Sweet, old, and rich. It smelled more like vodka than wine. Well.

Shit.

Maybe it was vodka. David was Russian. There was a nonzero chance this entire underground kingdom ran on alcohol older than most governments.

The cup settled in his hand for a moment. Then, instead of drinking it, he held it out toward me. Not offering it like a gift, but more like a test he already knew I’d pass or fail.

“King Rat,” he said again, quieter this time, like he was trying the name on properly now. “And what are you, Michael?”

What are you?

Are you human like them, or are you a rat?

I had a vision of that night again: the bedroom door cracked open slightly, light spilling in. The sound of my stepfather’s voice calling me worthless as he stumbled around, looking for me. How the farmhouse had looked the night I drove off, lights on in the windows and a big shadow standing on the porch, watching me. 

And then I saw Noah Riley’s tear-streaked face, turning away as he left my hospital room. How Marko looked when we were going to leave him in the elevator. Brothers, not by blood, but by something deeper than that. 

Then I glanced around at everyone standing around. David, Marko, Dwayne…even Trixie. 

“I’m here, aren’t I?” I replied, “Guess that makes me a rat.”

Then I reached out, and my fingers closed around the cup, and I lifted it to my lips, hesitating for a second before I tipped it back. The liquid inside caught the firelight and turned almost black at the center, red at the edges where it moved. Thick enough that it didn’t behave like a normal liquid. Then I drank, the strength of it nearly knocking me back.

It felt like liquid fire going down my throat, a deep spreading heat that pressed into my chest like a kick from a horse. A second later, the taste filled my mouth. Too sweet and aged past the point of no return. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t even gather my thoughts. Whatever the fuck was in this wine or vodka, or whatever unholy concoction it was, had gone straight to my head.

Someone said something muffled, Marko, probably. His voice was distant and warped. 

You know the moment a thunderstorm hits, and you can feel it in the distance? Like the world goes a little too still for a second. You don’t see the lightning, but your body knows it’s coming. 

My world shifted, and my head turned in slow motion, my attention pulled away from everything else to focus on the figure behind me. His work clothes clung slightly wrong, his apron smeared in powdered sugar and coffee grounds. His curls were all askew, but just as adorable as ever. 

“Riles,” I said, words slightly slurred. “You look goddamn beautiful.”

“No,” Noah said, and he stepped forward, eyes focused on David instead of me now. “No, David. What the hell did you give him?!”

I raised the cup to my lips to take another sip.

“Don’t drink that!” Noah slapped it out of my hand and knocked it to the floor, dark liquid sloshing out.

The cup hit the stone with a sharp, ugly sound, and dark liquid spilled across the floor in a slow, spreading arc, catching firelight as it moved. It didn’t behave like normal wine even on impact, thicker than it should’ve been, clinging to the stone in uneven trails, then writhing like a thousand worms before it sank into the cracks, absorbed into the earth.

I immediately fell to my knees, gagging as hard as I could.