登入SERAPHINAHe opened his eyes once.Just once, just long enough for them to find my face, and he grabbed my wrist and said, “Find Callum. Get to Clarissa. Whatever she knows, get it out of her.”Then he was gone again, his hand going slack, his eyes closing.“Damien.” I pressed my hand to his face. “Damien, stay with me.”He didn’t respond.The hospital staff were already coming. Someone had called it in the moment the explosion happened and now there were three of them with a stretcher moving toward us across the car park and I stood up and stepped back because the only useful thing I could do was get out of their way.They worked fast, checking his airways, his pulse, his pupils, running through the assessment with the practiced speed of people who had done this before and knew exactly what they were looking for. One of them asked me something. I looked at her. “What happened?” she said again, slower.“There was something under his car,” I said. “An explosive. He was reaching for th
SERAPHINAThe nurse at the medical desk had started recognizing me.Not warmly. In the way that people recognized someone who had been to their desk too many times with the same question.“There’s no update yet,” she said, before I opened my mouth.“I just want to know if he’s—”“The moment there’s an update, the doctor will come out and speak to you directly.” She looked at me with practiced patience. “The best thing you can do for him is sit down and let us do our jobs.”I turned away from the desk.Alan was sitting in the chairs near the window where Damien had been half an hour ago. He was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, looking at the floor, and he looked nothing like the Alan Voss who had sat in Damien’s reception room with his expensive jacket and his performance composure.He looked like a father.I sat down beside him.He looked up. “You really care about him?” he said. Not accusatory. Genuinely asking.“Yes,” I said. “He’s a good person. He’s been a good frien
DAMIENNadia arrived at the hospital forty minutes after I called her.She came through the doors already reading the situation, her eyes finding Seraphina first and then me, and she crossed the lobby without stopping and put her arms around Seraphina without a word.“Stay with her,” I said quietly to Nadia. “Don’t let her go through those doors.”Nadia nodded over Seraphina’s shoulder.I went to find the doctor.His name was Farrell, a surgeon in his fifties with the unhurried manner of someone who had learned that rushing the delivery of information didn’t improve it.“The bullet entered the upper back,” he said. “It missed the spine. That’s the good news and it’s significant good news.” He paused in the way that preceded the rest of it. “The trajectory caught the edge of his right lung. We’ve addressed the immediate damage but his body has been through a serious trauma. He’s young and his healing should work in his favour.”“Should,” I repeated. “What does should mean?”“His physio
SERAPHINAShane told me to stay in the corridor.I didn’t stay in the corridor.Clarissa’s apartment door was unlocked, the handle turning without resistance when Shane tried it, which should have told us something. We went in and she was at the desk with papers spread across it, going through them with the focused efficiency of someone on a deadline.She looked up when we came through the door.Something moved across her face. Not a surprise exactly. More of an annoyance that her timeline had been compressed. She was wearing a leather pant and jacket that made her look completely different from how I’d remembered.“Back off,” she said.“Clarissa—” Shane started.I was already moving.She came up from the chair fast, faster than anyone who spent their days teaching history and psychology had any business moving, and she met me halfway across the room. Her forearm came up and deflected my first strike cleanly, the technique automatic, no thought required.She’d been trained and defin
SERAPHINA “Leaving for where?” I asked.Shane picked up a practice pad from the edge of the mat and set it down somewhere else for no reason, just to have something to do with his hands. “I don’t know yet. Not Blue Moon or here.”“That’s not an answer.”“It’s the honest one.” He looked at me. “This place takes something out of me. Every week I’ve been here, I feel it. Like I came in with a full tank and something has been draining it slowly without asking.” He shook his head. “Everything is messy and dangerous and I came here to teach kids how to fight and instead I’ve driven across three territories and watched people get shot and been in the middle of things that have nothing to do with me.”“That’s not—”“I’m not blaming you,” he said. “I’m not blaming anyone. I’m just telling you how it feels to be me in this place.”I looked at him.He was telling the truth. That was the thing about Shane, he was almost incapable of performing something he didn’t feel, and what was on his face
SERAPHINAI didn’t know what to do with my hands or my body. That was the specific problem. I had been standing in the entrance hall watching Damien walk away toward the pack hall and now I was in the entrance hall not walking anywhere and my hands were doing nothing useful and my brain was doing too much.“Eat something,” Agnes said from the kitchen doorway.“I’m not hungry.”“That wasn’t a suggestion.”I went into the kitchen and sat at the counter and Agnes put a plate in front of me and I ate because arguing with Agnes about food was a losing proposition and I had limited energy for losing propositions today.“Where is Alpha Damien?” I asked.“In the hall with those women and the elders.”“And then?”“And then wherever he goes next,” Agnes said. “You know how he is. He’ll handle it.”“I know how he is,” I said. “That’s why I’m worried.”Agnes looked at me with the expression she used when she agreed with something and wasn’t going to say so.I finished enough of the food to satis
DAMIENThe drive to Clarissa’s suite was way too quiet. She sat in the passenger seat with her hands in her lap, looking out the window. I drove, and neither of us was able to perform normally, because we were both past the point where that would have been possible.When I pulled up outside the ac
SERAPHINAMy room was warmer than the corridor.Nadia kicked her shoes off at the door and climbed onto the bed, pulling the duvet over both of us while I changed out of the lingerie into something that felt less like a mistake and more like myself. Oversized shirt. Shorts and my hair tied back.I
SERAPHINAStupid decisions.Stupid desperation-driven decisions. I was the boss of those.I had been planning it since the archive.Not the lingerie specifically, that had been a last-minute decision born of equal parts desperation and the understanding that Damien’s defenses operated differently w
SERAPHINAI heard the elders before I saw them.Their voices carried that low formality that suggests they had arranged themselves for a purpose, drifting from the entrance hall into the living room where I was sitting with a book I hadn’t been reading for the past forty minutes.I stayed where I w







