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
EvelynEvening found me in Susan's chambers, preparing her medication. The ornate bedroom was a monument to excess—silk draperies, crystal chandeliers, imported furniture that probably cost more than a year's salary for most pack members. None of it held any warmth, any personality. Just expensive e
EvelynSeven o'clock. I stood outside the Alpha's private dining room, my palm pressed flat against the carved oak door. The dress I'd chosen was meant to be plain—a dark navy sheath that hung straight from my shoulders. But my body had other ideas. The fabric clung to curves I couldn't hide, the ne
EvelynSusan's fingers dug into my wrist, her grip surprisingly strong for someone supposedly at death's door. The syringe hung suspended between us, neither of us moving.I could deny it. Laugh it off as fever-induced paranoia. I could run.But why the fuck would I do that? I'd spent five years cra
Damon.I watched Susan's chest rise and fall, the rhythm slow enough to make me count the seconds between breaths. She'd been asleep for hours now. I couldn't bring myself to leave her side. Not when the nights had become a carousel of fever and pain, her screams sometimes reaching every corner of t







