Novels by Mila

ZaraThe flashlight beam hit the doorway and everything in Zara went very quiet, the way a room goes quiet right before a storm walks through it.A man stood there...not tall enough to be threatening on size alone, but he filled the doorway anyway, the way certain people filled rooms without trying, like the space simply agreed to make room for them. His eyes caught the light and held it, flat, unblinking, amused."Well," he said. "Isn't this cozy."Beside her, Ryan made a sound that wasn't a word anymore. Zara didn't look at him. She couldn't, not yet, because if she looked at him and saw Damon's face settle into place behind his eyes, she was going to lose the thirty seconds she had left to think."Who are you," Petra said. Not a question...a demand, flat and edged, her blade still catching light at her hip."Wrong question." The man stepped into the room, unhurried, and his boots found the floorboards with a kind of deliberate softness, like he was savoring the creak. "Right questi

RyanThe dark wasn't like sleep...sleep had edges, a beginning and an end you could feel yourself cross. This was more like drowning somewhere with no bottom, no surface, just Ryan's own name going out ahead of him into nothing, calling for a body he couldn't find.Then, all at once, he had hands again.He knew they were his because they were shaking, and Damon never shook. Ryan lay on something hard and cold... the floor, he understood dimly, the floor of Petra's borrowed house, though he couldn't see it. The dark inside the room and the dark inside his own skull had merged into one thing, and for a long, terrible moment he wasn't sure which one he was trapped in."Zara," he said, or tried to. His mouth felt like it belonged to someone standing three feet away, its motions arriving a half-second late.No answer. Just breathing... his own, ragged, and somewhere close, Simon's, thinner than it should have been."Get up", Ryan told himself. "Get up before he does."He'd learned, over si

ZaraThe name Zara screamed wasn't Ryan's. It wasn't anyone's, not really... just noise, just the sound her body made instead of breathing when the light went white and then came back wrong.He was on the floor, not Simon. Simon had gone somewhere she couldn't look at yet, some space at the edge of her vision she was refusing, on purpose, because there wasn't room in her chest for two kinds of ruin at once. Ryan...Damon, whoever was steering had folded down beside him like a puppet with its strings cut, and for one terrible second she thought that was it, thought Petra's words had done something final, something surgical, and that the man on the floor was just a man now, empty, done.Then his head came up, and it was the wrong face doing the looking."That," Damon said, using Ryan's mouth to say it, "was rude."His voice had lost the warm register. That was the first thing Zara understood, standing there with the knife heavy and wrong in her hand, heavier than a knife had any right to

RyanI'm still in here, that's the part nobody tells you about losing your body to something else... you don't go anywhere. You don't get to close your eyes and wake up when it's over...you stay, pressed up against the glass of your own skull, watching your hands do things you would tear off at the wrist if you could reach them.I felt the knife before I saw it. A thin line of fire along my forearm, and for one heartbeat that pain was the best thing that had happened to me in six days, because it was mine. Mine to feel, mine to flinch from, and Damon flinched with me, which meant for half a second the flinch belonged to both of us and I could ride it like a wave all the way up into my own face.Then her hand landed flat on my chest, and she said my name, not his but mine.I don't have words for what that did. It wasn't light, it wasn't some clean bright rescue-scene shove where the hero kicks the door open. It was smaller and it hurt more, because it meant she'd known the whole time.

ZaraThe knife moves and I don't feel my hand do it. That's the strangest part, the part I'll probably spend the rest of my life trying to explain to someone who wasn't standing in this room... I decide, somewhere far away and very calm, and then my arm is already finishing the decision before I've caught up to it, like my body got tired of waiting for my heart to agree.I'm not aiming for his chest anymore.I don't know when that changed. Maybe it changed the second his voice cracked that half-inch, the second I heard something underneath Damon that sounded like Ryan trying to claw his way up through wet sand, and some animal part of me that's been living on hope and stubbornness for six days recalculated everything without asking permission. I'm not trying to kill the thing wearing my husband. I'm trying to open a door.The blade catches him along the forearm instead of the sternum, a shallow line, not deep enough to matter to a wolf healing at wolf-speed, but deep enough to make hi

RyanI'm not gone. That's the thing nobody tells you about being buried alive inside your own skin... I'm not gone, I'm just far down, pressed under something vast and cold and patient, and every so often I get close enough to the surface to feel what my body's doing without any say in whether it stops.Right now my hand is closing around Zara's wrist. I feel the exact shape of her bones under my fingers, feel how thin they are, how breakable, and some part of me that used to be a husband and is currently nothing but a passenger screams at a volume that never reaches anyone but me. Six years I spent learning how much pressure this hand could take before it hurt her, gentling myself around her the way you gentle yourself around something you've decided matters more than your own strength. Damon doesn't know that math. Or he does know it and doesn't care, which might be worse, because I can feel him deciding, right now, exactly how close to the edge of breaking her he wants to walk with