The forest felt wrong, and Alessia felt it deep in her bones.
Not just the usual hush of wary animals or the distant thrum of wind—this was an unnatural, suffocating silence, the kind that settles after violence. Dead quiet. It was the air after the storm, thick with dread, as if the earth itself was bracing for what came next. Something terrible had already happened here. The trees remembered.
Picking her way forward, Alessia stepped over a broken branch, the wood split and bleeding sap. The ground beneath her boot shifted, disturbingly soft—ripped up by claws, churned with blood. The forest’s underbelly exposed and raw. Ronan moved up beside her, a silent shadow, his eyes sweeping the trees with the predatory focus of a hunter who’s also prey. He looked like he could see through bark,
