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
SofiaI guided her to the stall and opened the shower door. She stepped inside and just… stood, arms at her sides, chin down.I watched the water run over her, flatten her hair, trail down her skin in streaks that pooled at the ridges of her collarbone and then dripped in a rhythm I started counting
SofiaI crossed the room before I even knew I was moving, stopped right in front of her, crowding her space on purpose. “No,” I said, voice sharp enough to cut. “You don’t get to decide that for me.”Ava looked up, startled, and for the first time in days I saw her react to something in real time. S
SofiaThe girls’ bathroom on this floor always smelled like one of those dollar store air fresheners that was supposed to cover up something much worse and only made it more noticeable, like a perfume-laced corpse.I guided Ava there with a hand under her elbow. She didn’t resist, but she didn’t wal
SofiaBeen back on a school ground, it reminded me of how time had a way of falling apart—classes would go on, papers getting assigned, even saw some other poor bastard throw up in the lounge at two a.m., but inside our dorm room it was always the same hour: frozen, sterile, an two degrees colder th







