LOGINKNOX’S POVMy touch only sets her off. She wails again, holding onto her father, harder and louder than before, and the heat instantly intensifies. The room responds to her.The wallpaper nearest to her blisters, peels, and blackens.The concrete beneath her knees glows red at the edges, hairline cracks spreading outward in a web pattern, as if the floor itself is fracturing from within.The metal pipe running along the wall begins to glow orange, the chains attached to it starting to warp.Logan scrambles backwards with Gale’s body, pressing himself against the far wall.His eyes are wide with a fear that cuts through even his grief, because whatever is happening in this room is beyond anything either of us has encountered.Ember screams again, and the house MOVES.It violently shudders, the walls groaning as the foundation shifts. A frequency I can feel deep in my spine vibrates through the concrete, and Ember is at the dead centre of the chaos.Her body is rigid. Silver light pours
KNOX’S POVI turn my attention entirely to her, pulling her spiralling focus to me.“I’m here. Look at me. Eyes on me, Ember. I’m here. I’m so sorry.”She looks at me, and the look breaks something in my chest that I didn’t know was still intact.She’s been holding it together.Through the arrows and the siege and the gunshots and the dying and the man she used to be married to being executed in front of her, and her father taking a bullet that was meant for someone else.She’s been holding it all together because there was nobody here to hold it for her, and the walls she built to survive this moment are good, strong walls, the kind of walls you build when your childhood teaches you that falling apart is a luxury.But I’m here now. And my presence is the permission she’s been waiting for.Her face crumbles. The composure completely collapses, giving way to a rush of tears that violently shakes her entire body.I pull her against my chest with my one working arm, holding her tight as
KNOX’S POVNathaniel takes the corners so fast the tyres scream against the ice, and I don’t tell him to slow down because I can feel her.Without pictures or words, I feel her through the unnamed connection living between us. It’s a proto-bond, an immature thread that usually hums when she’s close and goes quiet when she’s safe.Right now, it is doing neither.Right now, it’s a siren inside my chest, a frequency of wrongness that gets louder with every mile, and my hands are shaking against my thighs.“Faster,” I say.The engine screams as we violently weave through traffic, pulling manoeuvres that would earn us a century’s worth of tickets.The first thing to appear is a black car. A sick feeling guts me the second I see it, because I know damn well it isn’t Ember.Then the crossbow bolts embedded in the trees lining the driveway are next, and my blood goes cold because I know those bolts.I know the fletching, and I know the broadheads, and I know the man who favours this particula
EMBER’S POVI’m fighting so hard against the men holding me that my shoulders feel like they’re going to dislocate.I reach through to Sapphire with every ounce of willpower I have, I scream, and I thrash, but there is no release of the power we had at the Bacchanal. There is no release of strength or divine fury, or a miracle.All there is the ugly stench of death.I can see down the hallway into the storage room — Maurice on the floor, chest wound bleeding, his eyes open and blinking.Gale slumped against the pipe, still, with two holes in his chest. Harrison is standing between them with blood running down his arm from where Maurice’s knife is still embedded.He looks at what he’s done. His son’s body. The blood. The man gasping on the concrete beside him.He looks up the hallway, and his eyes find mine, and what I see in them is not triumph or righteousness or the cold satisfaction of a mission completed.What I see is a man who just murdered his own child and is feeling the full,
EMBER’S POVI can see everything from where I’m pinned in the kitchen. The hallway is short — bathroom, bedroom, storage room at the end, the door hanging open.Maurice is inside the room. I can see his back, his body positioned between the doorway and where Gale is chained, and in his hand is a kitchen knife that he grabbed from the drawer on his way through.His hands are shaking so badly that the blade is catching the light in irregular flashes.Harrison reaches the doorway and stops. He looks past Maurice at Gale, who is pressed against the wall as far as his chains will allow, wild-eyed, tear-streaked, the pathetic desperation of a man who has just realised his father didn’t come here to rescue him.“There you are.” Harrison’s voice carries down the hallway to where I’m pinned, and the sound of it is the worst thing I have ever heard because it’s CALM. Conversational, almost. Like he’s greeting his son at a holiday dinner and not standing in a doorway with a loaded gun. “Look at y
EMBER’S POVMaurice is already on his feet and heading down the hallway toward the storage room, pulling the key from his pocket as he goes.I hear the padlock rattle, hear him wrenching the door open, hear Gale’s panicked voice — “What the fuck is happening? What’s going on out there?” — and Maurice telling him to shut up and hold still while he works on the chains.I press myself against the wall beside the front door, heart slamming, counting. Fifteen. That’s what Maurice said. Fifteen seconds before the next volley.Twelve. Eleven. Ten.From the back of the house, the screen door creaks. Queenie is making her move.The car is only twenty feet from the steps.The plan is simple: Reach the glovebox. Get the gun. Take the shot. We can survive this.Nine. Eight.Then, the sound. It’s not a car door slamming. It’s a scream — Queenie’s scream — cut short by a heavy, muffled thud.My stomach drops. Of course, Harrison covered the back.Five seconds.Five seconds until the next volley of a
EMBER’S POV“I want to recover here. In this penthouse. Not locked away somewhere safe and isolated.”And there it is. The trade she’s been building toward.I almost laugh.“You want to stay here,” I repeat slowly. “With us. With Knox.”“You heard me. What part of dying don’t you seem to understand
EMBER'S POVI'm terrified this will ruin the moment. This fragile, beautiful thing we've built under the Northern Lights.But I'm tired of everyone telling me what to think about Knox. Tired of Gale's poison and Rayana's warnings and rumors whispered behind hands at cocktail receptions.We don't ow
EMBER’S POVI stare down at Knox on his knees, my pulse slamming so hard I can feel it between my legs. He's grinning up at me like a wolf who's already tasted blood, gold eyes glowing, fangs just barely peeking past his lip.I fold my arms, pretending my thighs aren't already trembling."What do I
EMBER’S POV(PRESENT)We stay tangled together for a long time, neither of us willing to be the first to let go. His hand strokes through my hair.My fingers curl into the fabric of his shirt. The room is quiet except for our breathing and the distant hum of something mechanical — a generator, mayb







