That night, sleep refused to come easily.
Aisha lay curled beneath her blankets, the events replaying in fragments she couldn’t fully piece together—the fear, the men in the street, the sounds she couldn’t explain, the way Callen had looked afterward. Not angry. Not panicked.
Terrified.
For her.
Moonlight spilled through the thin gap in her curtains, pale and silver, pooling softly across her bed.
The room was quiet, too quiet, and her heartbeat sounded unnaturally loud in her ears.
She turned onto her side.
And froze.
Her wrist was glowing.
Not brightly.
Not painfully.
Just… softly.
A thin, luminous mark shimmered against her skin, curling delicately around her wrist like a living thread of moonlight.
It pulsed once—slow and warm—and a strange calm spread through her chest,
