**AXEL**
For a moment after the vampires retreat, the world feels hollow, like all the sound has been sucked out of it along with Bella, and I stand there in the wreckage of the farmhouse with blood on my hands and dust in my lungs thinking that this might be it, that this might be the part of the story where we are too late and nothing we do next will matter.
The bond is thin.
Not gone, not severed, but stretched so far it feels like touching smoke, and that alone is the only thing keeping me upright, because as long as I can still feel her, even faintly, then she is alive.
Atticus is beside me, chest heaving, eyes scanning the chaos with the same frantic precision that’s burning through me, and around us the warriors are already regrouping, pulling injured pack members clear and fini
