First Bite のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 71 - チャプター 76

Autumn

AutumnThe first scream came from across the street.Sharp. Human. Immediate.Then another.People stumbled backward from the shattered storefront windows bordering the park as cracks spread through the glass in violent silver lines. Car alarms erupted one after another down the block, shrill and chaotic beneath the low hum now vibrating through the city itself.Not an earthquake.Worse.A resonance.My pulse slammed hard against my ribs.“Autumn!” Jade shouted through the phone.“I have to go.”“Don’t you dare hang up on me aga—”I ended the call and shoved the phone into my pocket just as another streetlamp burst overhead.Glass exploded across the sidewalk.Someone screamed my name.Not Jade. Not Tristan.A stranger.I turned sharply.A man stood near the park entrance staring directly at me, blood running from tiny cuts across his cheeks where shattered glass had struck him. His expression was blank. Wrong. Like sleepwalking through terror.Then he pointed at me slowly.“She’

I did not get an answer.The sound that cut across the garage was not a voice.It was heels on concrete.Measured.Unhurried.Certain enough to make every other noise feel secondary.The alarms still screamed around us. Red light kept washing over the pillars, over the spiderweb cracks spreading through windshields, over Mara's impossible reflection in the black sedan. But when the woman stepped out of the elevator with four guards at her back, the space shifted around her anyway.Power did that sometimes.It did not have to be loud.It just had to assume it belonged everywhere.Councilor Seraphine Vale wore charcoal silk and a winter white coat that somehow remained untouched by the grime of the parking garage. Her dark hair was pinned into something severe and elegant. She looked like a woman arriving for an opera rather than a containment scene under a collapsing building.Her pale gaze passed over the shattered glass, the distorted reflections, the guards, Dom, Jade, Tristan, and