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
SofiaReed was still there when we got back. The moment I saw him, a relief so sharp and deep ran through me I almost had to sit down.He was in the desk chair, legs crossed, one hand scrolling through something on his phone. The other rested on Maya’s bed rail, not even gripping—just there, calm, l
Sofia.I spent the hours after midnight working the greenhouse like a last-call bartender: running on empty, still pouring. Most of the guests had thinned out by then, but the stragglers were the worst kind—the ones who’d paid for the privilege of pretending they were too important to leave on time.
SofiaI lay on my back, naked under the sheets, eyes locked on the ceiling where the water stains had spread out like continents. I counted them—one, two, three, the shape near the sprinkler looked vaguely like South America—because if I stopped counting I’d have to think about what just happened.A
AvaI was on my back, staring up at a ceiling so clean it might have been fake. It was painted a matte off-white, no crown molding, just a plane of color that seemed to go on forever. The air smelled like lemon and ozone and the faint trace of burnt wax. My head thudded, but at least I could breathe







