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
LeviThe white wolf’s face hovered inches from mine, her teeth slick with saliva and blood, the heat of her breath cutting through the cold like a hand across my mouth. My back was mashed into the torn-up loam, shoulder blades grinding against rock, and I could feel every granular press of her paws
She snorted, short and hard. “She passed out, Levi. You watched her melt down and didn’t lift a finger. I had to stand there and watch her break all over again, and you didn’t even blink.”I shrugged, bored now. “You underestimate her. She’s tougher than you remember. Also, she’s an adult. Isn’t tha
Sofia just shrugged, floating back to the racks for her own dress. “He’s not that subtle.”I was still adjusting to the feeling of my own skin exposed, the slight chill of the air through the cutouts, the way my nipples puckered against the thin lining. It was like wearing armor made of Saran Wrap a
AvaI woke up wrong. Not the “wrong side of the bed” kind, but wrong in the bones and wrong in the skin and wrong in the head, like the molecules had all moved around in my sleep and no one had put them back in the right order.The first sensation was pain—a blunt, absolute ache that ran from my toe







