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
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