[Ava's POV]
The stillness that settled after Jaxon’s seismic confession was not a balm; it was the deceptive hush in the center of a maelstrom, where the pressure drops just before the world tears itself inside out.
The concept of another Hybrid was an intellectual phantom, haunting the corridors of her future. But the revolution within her own cells was a visceral, present-tense apocalypse, and its first tremors were already cracking the foundations of her being.
It began as a subtle wrongness, a shift in her internal climate. A low, pervasive warmth took root in her marrow, pleasant at first, like the memory of a summer sun held in the bones. But memories don’t intensify.
This did. The warmth became a slow, deliberate seep of liquid fire, tracing the ley lines of her nervous system
