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
EvelynThe wolf exploded off the patio, fur and teeth and weight enough to topple a linebacker. Thomas caught it, just barely. His head cracked against the flagstone with a dull, flat thud I felt in the backs of my own teeth.He’d gotten his forearms up in time. The jaws closed on his sleeve, tearin
SofiaI should have known it would end badly. Should have known the second I saw Hilda shaking in the corner, fingers clawing at her scalp, that nothing I said would ever be enough.But that’s the thing about people like me. You see a bomb ticking in a room, and instead of running, you walk right up
SofiaThe knock wasn’t like Reed’s. It had an edge—three, then four, then one more, all of them spaced with the kind of impatience you only got from people who’d spent their lives having keys to every room and never needed to wait for an answer.I looked at Ava. Her hands jerked to her knees; her fa
SofiaBy five o’clock, the sun was already dead and the room felt colder, maybe from the light, maybe just from habit. I’d started prepping early—laid out the clean gloves, made a mental tally of Maya’s supply levels, tossed her old urine bag because it was getting funky and I refused to let the roo







