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
EvelynAva was quiet for what felt like forever.She sat there looking at me, then at Hilda, then down at her hands. I held my breath, waiting for some sign of the daughter I'd raised. Some crack in this perfect, polite facade she'd been wearing.Finally, she opened her mouth to speak."For a very l
Evelyn"Thank you."That's what he said. Like I'd just handed him water instead of kissing him. Like this was relief after years of dying of thirst.I kissed him deeper. If this helped him somehow, if this took away even a fraction of the pain he'd been carrying, then I could do this. I could finall
RobinI smiled looking at her. Couldn't help it.But I was never the right person. Not when her heart had always been somewhere else.Damon had been there first. Then after everything fell apart with him, after the hell he'd put her through, she just wanted to be alone with Ava. That's all she wante
Hilda The corridor opened into a wider junction and I stopped so fast Hilda nearly ran into my back. Mira stood in the center with four northern wolves behind her. My chest tightened. She'd told me to run. Told me to leave before they killed me. Then she'd opened the door and let the guards c







