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
She was good. Young and traumatized and trying so hard to be okay. And I'd let them just take her away like that."Sit," I said.Levi didn't move."Levi."He looked at, then sat.Although he didn’t sit on the boulder with me. He sat on the ground, his back against a tree trunk. The bark was rough, s
I heard the sound of the rod hitting my body before I felt it, and then I was airborne, the stone floor coming up fast.I hit hard. Slid. My cheek scraped across the floor and I tasted blood and grit and something metallic that might've been left over from Garrett's execution or might've been there
LeviMy hand was wrapped around Sofia's wrist.She'd been reaching for my zipper and I'd grabbed her without thinking. Now we were frozen there—her straddling my lap, half-naked, staring down at me with confusion starting to shift into something harder."What?" she asked.I couldn't answer. The word
HildaThey came for me maybe twenty minutes after Alexander limped out. They kicked the door open.Lyra was on her hands and knees scrubbing his blood off the floor. The bucket beside her was already more red than water. She'd been at it a while—I could see the streak marks where she'd tried to get







