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
Falco - 6 years ago The wine tasted like nothing. I'd ordered it because the bartender kept looking at me like I was loitering, which I was, but paying for a drink bought me the right to sit here without being bothered. Except the wine was shit and I couldn't taste it anyway, so the whole transa
I didn't let go."Ava." I kept my mouth close to her ear. "Not Thorn. Ava. You're Ava. Come back to me."The thrashing slowed. Her growling turned into whines, high-pitched and desperate."That's it. Come back."Her whole body went slack. She made a sound between a whine and something that could've
AvaI stood in the middle of nothing. Just dirt and dead grass and trees ringing the space like they were keeping something in. Or keeping something out. No cabin, no building, no safe place he'd spent two hours telling me we were driving toward.Falco stayed by the car with his hand on the door lik
I came up sputtering, completely soaked, water dripping from my hair.Falco was laughing. Actually laughing, bent over with his hands on his knees, the kind of laugh that sounded like it came from somewhere deep."It's not that funny.""It absolutely is." He was trying to stop and couldn't. "You loo







