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Blackness greeted her.
The coppery tang of blood, and that festering odor, slammed into her.
Her entire body seized, every muscle going on alert, every instinct screaming to run, run, run—
But her Fae eyes adjusted to the dark, revealing the apartment.
What was left of it.
What was left of them.
Help—she needed to get help, but—
She staggered into the trashed apartment.
“Danika?” The word was a raw, broken sound.
The wolves had fought. There wasn’t a piece of furniture that was intact, that wasn’t shredded and splintered.
There wasn’t a body intact, either. Piles and clumps were all that remained.
“DanikaDanikaDanika—”
She needed to call someone, needed to scream for help, needed to get Fury, or her brother, her father, needed Sabine—
Bryce’s bedroom door was destroyed, the threshold painted in blood. The ballet posters hung in ribbons. And on the bed …
She knew in her bones it was not a hallucination, what lay on that bed, knew in her bones that what bled out inside her chest was her heart.
Danika lay there. In pieces.
And at the foot of the bed, littering the torn carpet in even smaller pieces, as if he’d gone down defending Danika … she knew that was Connor.
Knew the heap just to the right of the bed, closest to Danika … That was Thorne.
Bryce stared. And stared.
Perhaps time stopped. Perhaps she was dead. She couldn’t feel her body.
A clanging, echoing thunk sounded from outside. Not from the apartment, but the hall.
She moved. The apartment warped, shrinking and expanding as if it were breathing, the floors rising with each inhale, but she managed to move.
The small kitchen table lay in fragments. Her blood-slick, shaking fingers wrapped around one of its wooden legs, silently lifting it over her shoulder. She peered into the hall.
It took a few blinks to clear her contracting vision. The gods-damned drugs—
The trash chute hatch lay open. Blood that smelled of wolf coated the rusty metal door, and prints that did not belong to a human stained the tile floor, aiming toward the stairs.
It was real. She blinked, over and over, swaying against the door—
Real. Which meant—
From far away, she saw herself launch into the hallway.
Saw herself slam into the opposite wall and rebound off it, then scramble into a sprint toward the stairwell.
Whatever had killed them must have heard her coming and hidden inside the trash chute, waiting for the chance to leap out at her or slink away unnoticed—
