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
Frost smiled. "Yes. That's why you followed me, right?"I stared at him.He'd been different after he was free from Catherine. Different after Susan was gone. He'd actually talked to people. Smiled. Made jokes—bad ones, but still. He'd lived more in those last few months than he had in the previous
"Wake up. WAKE UP. Falco, please, I didn't mean it, I didn't mean any of it, please come back—"She collapsed onto his chest. Her whole body shook with sobs.I couldn't breathe.My lungs had stopped working. I kept trying to pull air in but nothing was happening, nothing was moving, my chest was loc
FalcoThe first few fell easily enough. Young wolves, more eagerness than skill. I caught one across the temple with the rebar and he crumpled. Another rushed in at the wrong angle and I jammed the metal through his open mouth before he could correct.Then the next wave poured through, older and can
His footsteps moved away. I heard Ava make a choking sound, then the scuff of her feet being dragged across the floor.I should get up. Should move. Should do something.Except I couldn't feel my legs anymore and my face was pulp and every breath sent broken ribs grinding against each other. The flo







