The foyer was a tomb of debris. Dust motes danced in the flickering light of the remaining emergency lamps, settling on the cooling ruins of the mercenaries’ heavy equipment.
Damien’s chest rose and fell in jagged, uneven intervals, his human skin pale and clammy as his system struggled to reconcile the violence of the shift with the crushing fatigue of the suppression field.
Bella stood a few feet away, her hands still trembling—not from fear, but from the raw, buzzing residue of the lunar flare. She watched him, her mind a frantic storm of questions.
For five years, she had built a wall of ice around her heart, carefully curated to exclude everything that smelled of Blackwood. And yet, here he was, bleeding on her floor, having torn through a legion of killers to reach her and the tw
