The silver-gray heart pulsed like a dying sun, and all I could feel was the chain's co-living pulse carrying Kael's last breath into the fight.The silence of the cathedral-chamber was a physical weight, pressing against my eardrums until I tasted copper. Every mirror on the walls—those slabs of compressed, sentient mist—showed me a different version of my own failure. In one, I was the Omega in the river, fingers slipping on the ice. In another, I was the Queen in the boardroom, ice-cold and alone. But in all of them, the silver chain running from my hip was a jagged scar through the gray, connecting me to the man who had finally stopped breathing at the threshold."It's waiting for a choice," Ryan said. His voice was a flat, clinical line, but the rational shell was cracked. I could hear the hammer of his heart through the shared link. He stood with his weapon leveled at the heart, his knuckles whitening as he fought the subsonic hum. "The Mother needs a voluntary re
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