“Comfortable.” A beat. “She’ll stay that way. But if we don’t get better intel…”
The call ends. The danger to Serenity doesn’t.
I’m shaking.
In the last photo they sent, Serenity was standing in the sun. But there was something in her eyes—cold. Not from the weather. The kind of cold you feel when your spirit is dying.
I know that cold. I lived it. She still does.
I shove the phone back under the mattress and pull the covers over me.
She’s going to be okay. I’ll do whatever it takes to get her out.
I hold on to that, staring at the ceiling, willing sleep to come. It doesn’t. Probably for the best. The nightmares are always worst when the Syndicate is too loud in my head.
I close my eyes and lie there for hours, waiting for the light. When it comes, I’m already dressed and heading down for coffee. My stomach won’t take much more than that.
The yard is cold, the mountain still holding the dark past dawn. I’ve got a stack of supply requisitions to drop at the ops desk and the whole day mapped out in my head. It helps when I stay busy.
I’m halfway across the open stretch toward the main building when the bottom drops out of the morning.
I see him.
Not someone I know, or ever did—but for some reason, it doesn’t feel that way.
He’s near the far wall, facing the yard, and for one full second my body forgets how to walk. Not because of his size; this place is full of big, dangerous things, and I’ve learned to move past all of them without breaking stride, even the ones who stand head and shoulders above the rest. It’s something else that stops me mid-step, my weight caught between one foot and the next.
He’s tall enough to make the wall behind him look small. Dark hair, dark eyes, broad in a way that isn’t bulk so much as build—the way a thing is put together when it’s meant to last. His jaw is doing something severe to the rest of his face, and my mind goes blank and stupid before I can finish whatever thought I was having about it.
Something turns over under my ribs, hard and unfamiliar. Everything in me leans toward him at once. I’m shaking.
What is happening to me?
He looks up.
His eyes find mine across thirty feet of cold yard, like he heard something only he could hear, and the second they land, the air leaves my lungs in one clean pull.
A small choked sound escapes me.
He goes still, nostrils flaring. Like an animal that just scented something it didn’t expect to find here.
I gather the threads of magic that should smudge me into the background—there without being seen.
It doesn’t work. His eyes stay on me.
How?
I don’t look away. My whole body has rearranged itself around the fact of him looking at me, and something that’s been silentfor years sits up so fast it knocks the breath out of me a second time.
Yes.
The thought isn’t mine. It comes up out of the part of me I’ve kept leashed my whole life—all teeth and fur and instinct—and it’s screaming one word loud enough to make me sway.
Yes, yes, yes.
I shake my head to clear it.
Get out, Grace. Just get the hell out of here.
