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Chapter Eighteen: The Click in the Dark

Author: Nasiá
last update publish date: 2026-11-03 22:22:01

Four hundred people had gone silent in the dark, and Eliza could hear every one of them breathe.

Not the sound itself. The pattern. A crowd in the dark breathes in fits, a gasp here, a held breath there, shoes shifting on marble. That was the noise she was listening through. Underneath it, thin as a thread, ran something that did not belong: a faint metallic tick, high up, on her right. It was the sound of a man settling his weight on an iron catwalk.

“Xavier,” she said, in a voice so level it
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