MasukAnd every single person was walking.Everyone. The men from my truck, from all the trucks, and beyond them more, spilling out of side streets and doorways, hundreds, then more than I could count, every one of them moving the same way at the same slow even pace toward the blue light, and not one of t
SofiaThe thing nobody tells you about stowing away in the back of a wolf's supply truck is that wolves do not believe in shock absorbers.I'd been folded between a crate that smelled like gun oil and a stack of canvas duffels for going on four hours, knees up under my chin, one hand knotted around
AvaI came back into my own body the way you come up from under cold water. All at once, lungs grabbing, except the water was me, and I'd been drowning in myself longer than I knew.For a second there was no up. Too much arrived at once. After the white nothing of the place with Catherine, the world
"Alexander."My name, in the low voice, gone thin at the edges now. A command. Come. Hold the vessel. Put your hands on it and hold it still.The wall in my chest told my feet to move. A year of habit told them to move. I took one step up toward the seat. My body did it the way my body did everythin
AlexanderI had spent my whole life learning to read the exact moment a thing breaks, and the goddess wearing my bride was beginning to break, and I could not turn my head to look at her.That was the cruelty of the wall she'd built in me. It let me see everything and touch nothing. I stood where sh
"Ava." I said it out loud, to a concrete wall, and it came apart in my mouth. "I've got you. I'm here. I've got you, baby. I've got you."She couldn't hear the words. She never could. But she could feel a hand close around her in the dark, the way I'd once felt hers close around me from a hundred mi
Evelyn"You just had to, didn't you?"The words left my mouth and froze the room in place, but I was already moving past it—turning my back on Hilda and letting the anger sluice off, replaced by the instinct that had kept me alive since Moon Pack, since all of it. Survival meant never standing still
EvelynThomas caught my arm at the pass. He didn’t grip, just rested his palm there, thumb warm against my skin.“You’ve been gone a lot,” he said, voice so low I almost missed it. “I thought you might not come back.”I stared at the floor. The urge to snap at him, to break the tension with sarcasm,
She looked up then, eyes shining with tears she’d been holding back since before I even entered the room. The color of them caught me—whiskey brown, the same as always, but sharper, too, cut with something new and wild.I didn’t wait. I stepped forward and hugged her, one arm behind her head, the ot
EvelynI kept to the edge of the patio, arms folded and mug balanced in the crook of my elbow, trying to look like a parent chaperoning recess and not a scientist observing a controlled detonation.Thomas had taken over. He always did, eventually. It was a relief, in a way, to be on the sidelines, w







