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
AvaI didn’t answer right away. The question sat between us, too honest and too obvious, and for a moment all I could do was dig my nails into the edge of the bench and stare at a patch of moss growing between two stones.Falco didn’t press. He just waited, looking sideways at me with a kind of gent
“It’s okay,” he said, and there was nothing patronizing in it. Just a steady, rhythmic reassurance. “You’re okay.”I wanted to tell him I wasn’t, but hearing him say it actually helped. I let myself breathe, felt the air go in and out, slow and deep.After a while, the tears started to slow, and the
But the stories always ended the same way: the white wolf either killed every hunter in a hundred-mile radius, or died breeding a new pack into the ground.I glanced at Thomas, at the places where Ava’s claws had split him. “You know what this means, don’t you.”He nodded, then shook his head. “You
“I know.”He turned to face me, all the way this time. “You didn’t have to do this. I’d have been fine.”In my head, I punched him in the jaw. I could see his head snap sideways, the look of surprise, the slow-motion flop to the floor. In real life, he was still sitting there, watching me like I was







