The pre-heat wasn't a biological clock; it was a ghost.
I was still on all fours in the slush, my palms raw and bleeding, but the fire inside me didn't care about the cold. It was a jagged, rhythmic pulsing that started in the hollow of my womb—there, where a life had begun to beat before the Council took it, before I turned it into fuel. My empty belly screamed with a hunger that was half-grief, half-lust, a shameful, frantic heat that made my skin feel like a hive of needles. I looked at Silas, smelling the copper of his blood and the salt of his sweat, and I felt a pulse of desire so violent it made me want to howl. I wanted to bite him, to anchor myself in his strength until the world stopped spinning, but the shame of it—the biological urge to breed in a graveyard of my own making—ma
