Chapter 66
The quiet after the raid was deceptive. We had taken down warehouses, nabbed men with ledgers and receipts greasy with other people’s money, and handed the paperwork to Mara Sloane to let the law do its slow, grinding work. The town’s police were not eager to touch vampire matters with anything less than an iron-clad case, and we’d given them one. For a few days, the streets hummed with normality again: the bakery smelled like sugar, kids chased each other in dusty yards, and the café windows steamed with early morning breath. Normality was a fragile thing—thin glass over a furnace—but for the first time since the ledger, it felt close enough to taste. Dastien moved through the compound like the rest of us had to—quartering out orders, corralling resources, checking on patrols. The Alpha
- Writer
