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
AvaHe shrugged, genuinely puzzled by the suspicion. "I'm supposed to keep you safe, but I wasn't sure who you were. The others won't tell me anything. I asked, but they just said, 'Don't fuck with the client.'"I had a hundred questions, but none of them fit in my mouth."So," he called, "are you h
LeviI sat in the car, three-quarters of a mile down from the estate’s front gate, window cracked just enough to keep the inside glass from fogging.I could see the house from here, more or less. It was an old Southern Colonial, limestone washed white enough to stand out anytime.The fence was new,
EvelynRobin answered before the second ring. “What do you need?”I smiled, just a little, at the lack of preamble.“I need mercs,” I said. “Today.”He didn’t laugh. Didn’t ask if it was a joke or a cry for help. “How many?”I looked out the window, did the math. The main house, the lab, Thomas’s co
EvelynHilda made it halfway down the hall before she stopped cold and turned. “Why is there a full platoon guarding your property, Evelyn?”Her voice wasn’t angry, just flat. She could have asked whether I was planning to throw her in the river and she would have sounded exactly the same. I’d been







