LOGINAnd 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
EvelynI didn’t knock. I threw open the door to Thomas’s study so hard it banged the plaster behind, making him jump, making every painting in the hall rattle like teeth in a blender.“You absolute idiot,” I hissed. “What in God’s name possessed you to do that in front of Ava?”He didn’t get up from
SofiaI don’t even remember watching them leave. I just stood by the dorm window, counting the cracks in the glass, the beads of sweat dripping down the back of my shirt, and by the time I focused on the parking lot below, Levi’s car was already gone and so was every noise that mattered.I tried rep
EvelynI took the stairs up to Ava’s room with the tray balanced perfectly, the same way I used to do it when she was a child—one palm on the bottom, the other at the ready in case of catastrophic spill.The hallway outside her door was cold, shadows undisturbed, the air heavy with old wood polish a
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







