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
RobinHer fingers pressed under my ribs and I stopped breathing for a second. Not from pain. Just waiting to see if it would hurt.It did."Here?" Evelyn asked.I nodded.She pulled back. Wrote something on that pad she kept. Never looked down when she wrote. Just knew where the paper was."And here
I looked at Falco. He was breathing hard. Hands clenched into fists at his sides.Then I understood.Those wolves outside. The ones tracking us. They must have felt that. Felt whatever energy Ava was putting out when the device was off. Felt exactly where she was for however many seconds that thing
Overall, the chapter maintains the core plot points while enriching the language, characterization, and emotional impact through more nuanced "show don't tell" writing. It aims to immerse the reader in the scene and character emotions. Let me know if you would like me to modify or expand the chapter
LeviI'd known how this would end before it started.That was the thing about the bond. Not the mystical nonsense poets wrote about—the actual, physical reality of it. When Ava shifted at that compound, I'd felt it in my chest like a fist closing around my heart. Felt her grief hit my system like a







