Four safety catches clicked off in unison. It sounded like bones snapping in the suffocating quiet of the penthouse.
Arthur Sterling stood safely behind the wall of black Kevlar, his silver-tipped cane planted firmly on the marble floor. He looked at the ruined state of the room—the shattered crystal, the shredded silk, the blood smeared across the dining table—and swallowed hard. The smell of rain and damp wool clung to his expensive suit. It was a mundane, ridiculous detail. Jane smelled it from the bedroom hallway, her nose wrinkling at the sudden intrusion of the outside world.
She didn't feel the familiar, icy wave of dissociation. The clinical numbness that had kept her alive for twenty-two years was gone, burned out of her veins by the feral Sovereign venom currently rewriting her
