Titus’s POV
The metal box surges forward, blurring the gray world outside into a smear of exhaust and noise, but inside, the air is suffocatingly still.
It should be warm. The vents are blasting hot air, the leather seats are heated, and The Man, Alexander, is burning with enough fire to scorch the earth. But the Mate is cold.
She is tucked tightly against our side, wrapped in the heavy wool of our outer skin, yet I can feel the chill seeping through the layers. It is not the clean, biting cold of winter that hardens the mud and sharpens the senses. This cold is wrong. It smells like wet iron, like the bottom of a stagnant well where things have fallen and been forgotten. It smells like Nothing.
Rust. Sulfur, The Man thinks, his mind a jagged landscape of panic and calculation. It’s th
