They’re glowing.
Faint blue light pulses beneath her skin, tracing patterns that look suspiciously like the mark on her shoulder.As I watch, the light spreads up her arms, across her chest, and when she looks up at me, her eyes are blazing with the same eerie blue.
“Vex,” she whispers, and her voice echoes with power that wasn’t there before.“Something’s happening to me.”
The warden power is waking up and heaven help us all when it fully manifests.
Chapter Thirteen
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Tessa
The common room humswith a tension that has nothing to do with the coffee.
Voices overlap, low and rough, the scrape of chairs and clink of mugs filling the space.On the surface, it’s business as usual, brothers in cuts, boots on scarred floorboards, weapons within reach, laughter cutting through the air in sharp bursts.
Underneath, everything feels...off.
Wrong around the edges.
Conversations drop when I walk past.Eyes slide over me and then away too quickly, or linger a fraction too long.Fury’s gaze burns with suspicion.Ranger’s wolf eyes track every move, calculating.Even Hollywood, usually all charm and smirks, watches me with a wariness he doesn’t bother to hide.
I wrap my hands around the hot mug Hannah pressed into them, letting the heat bite my skin.
“Ignore them,” she murmurs, hip brushing mine as she leans on the counter beside me.“They’re assholes before breakfast on a good day.”
“This isn’t a good day,” I whisper back.
She doesn’t argue.Her fingers graze the back of my hand, a small, grounding touch.
Across the room, Blade stands near the far wall, arms folded over his chest, a mountain in denim and leather.Prophet is beside him, dark hair falling around his face, eyes distant in that half-haunted way he has, as if he’s listening to something nobody else can hear.
Vex leans against the end of the bar, between me and the rest of the room, posture lazy, presence anything but.Pale throat, dark hair, eyes that seem almost normal until the light hits them wrong and something inside flashes, cold and hungry and anything but human.
He’s been doing that all morning, hovering close enough to be a shadow without touching me, without speaking more than a word at a time.
