ANOKAI’S POV
The silence that followed the m******e was almost worse than the chaos. I could hear my heartbeat pounding in my ears. My lungs burned intensely from holding my breath in for too long.
No more growls. No more screams. Just the sound of my own breathing, ragged and too loud in my ears, and the distant crackle of fires still burning in the marketplace. Bodies littered the streets, mostly rogues, all of them, their blood pooling between cobblestones.
And Malachi stood among them, drenched.
He turned toward me slowly, deliberately, and I watched as the pitch-black darkness in his eyes began to recede. The veins beneath his skin pulsed once, twice, then faded like ink dissolving in water.
Color returned to his eyes, that deep brown I'd seen before, warm and almost human. Th
