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
Robin"The Alliance is the hammer," I said, my finger tracing the heavy stone walls of the Northern city on the map. "They want a war. They want to tear down the walls that have kept them out of the Northern riches for a century. I’m giving them the excuse and the maps to do it. While they’re busy l
AvaHilda looked uncomfortable. More uncomfortable than I'd ever seen her. She kept adjusting her robe even though it was already tied securely."I was just..." She paused. "I was checking something."I stared at her, keeping my face carefully neutral."On my phone," she continued. "There was someth
"How do you know?"Because I've lived fifteen years without you, every breath has been a quiet ache for both of you. I missed my mother, too, even as she stood right beside me; she was a ghost of the woman she used to be. I know the exact shade of her eyes—they are the window to my own soul—and I ca
AvaI was staring at Catherine like she'd just said something so outrageous I needed her to repeat it just to make sure I'd heard correctly.But I had heard it.She'd told me I would have to consume the baby in her arms.What was that even supposed to mean?"I don't..." I stuttered. "I don't underst







