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
MayaIf you’d asked me what I’d be doing on an evening like this, I would have said “Streaming a movie online, Gushers, maybe a little light social media stalking.” Not hauling ass through a gated marina, phone in hand, tracking my best friend like I was her probation officer.But here I was, alread
Ava“Ava, I’m not fucking around. Call your mom.” She rolled away from me on the futon, hair stuck to her cheek and every line of her body spelling out “over it.” She’d just finished a half cup of coffee and a third of a granola bar, which for her was basically Thanksgiving. Her eyes were red, but
AvaThe main lounge was less a room and more a cult designed to make you forget about the outside world. The first thing that hit me was the light—beyond the spiral of white leather stairs, the whole far wall was just glass, black water on three sides and city lights already fading to memory behind
I looked past him, out at the black water. The city was gone, vanished behind a curve in the river or maybe just erased by distance. The only lights were the pinpoint reflections of stars on the current, and the blue-white aura of the yacht itself.If he threw me overboard, nobody would ever know.H







