They offered him a job. The interview was designed to kill him.Wes Halloran wakes in a hospital basement with his left eye missing and seven days erased from his memory. Before he can understand what happened, the man responsible emerges from the dark—with a knife at Wes's throat.Then comes the job offer.Ridley Line & Tunnel maintains the forgotten places beneath the city: unfinished subway lines, abandoned canal levels, and foundations built over secrets no one dares to investigate.The pay is a core—a piece of something recently alive, fitted into the socket where Wes's eye used to be. Every man who carries one has already given something up.Wes is quiet, methodical, and dangerously good at violence. The company thinks it knows what it has hired. It doesn't.And Ilya Vane, a man who has been on the books for eleven years—longer than anyone alive—may hold the key to something the city has spent generations refusing to confront.Beneath the city, survival is part of the contract.The Molt is a dark horror novella about bodily transformation, buried secrets, and a system that turns survival into a transaction. Read more