Xen moved.
Not fast, not slow—efficient.
One step. Then two. Then a full-body acceleration designed for one purpose only: impact.
There was no charge, no roar, no threat display.
Just physics, perfectly aimed.
He hit Thorne center mass.
The contact was clean. The effect was not.
Thorne lifted off the ground. Wings flared reflexively, too late to matter. His body pinwheeled backward, slamming through a table, then through the bar itself. Bottles exploded. Liquor sprayed. Glass skittered across the floor like alarm bells.
Lung approached the gargoyle’s crash site. “Damn,” he muttered with a dark chuckle, padding up to survey the damage. He had a clawful of skin and fur missing from his chest, and no doubt, if Xen were to check under Thorne’s claws, he’d find it there.
“It’s easier to interrogate people if they still have intact internal organs,” Lung added.
“That was for Sirena,” Xen explained, while staring at the gargoyle. “And I am not a toy.”
Thorne lay still among the wreckage—stone wing crushed beneath him, bar shelf collapsed over his back, liquor slicking the floor like spilled blood.
Then a door at the rear of the clubslammedopen.
“Sophia—wait!” someone yelled from behind it, too late.
Sophia was already in motion.
She was barefoot, in jeans and an oversized T-shirt with the Nocturne logo faded on the front. Her hair was wild. No makeup. No shoes. Just purpose.
And precision.
She moved fast—but not recklessly. Every step, she placed, adjusted, calculated. She wove through toppled chairs and broken glass without hesitation as two men chased after her—the Maukin bouncer and an energy feeder, one in just his fur, the other dressed in black.
The Maukin bouncer reacted first, leaping for her, but shedroppedbelow him with a kind of ease that wasn’t learned—it wasinstalled.
Cassia lunged to intercept, but Sophia twisted sideways at the last moment andclipped her with an elbow—not hard, butenough—enough to throw Cassia’s balance off, enough to make her stumble.
Enough to be remembered.
Xen’s sensors logged five anomalies in under two seconds.
Center of gravity shift: ideal.
Trajectory adjustments: sub-threshold.
Impact efficiency: 83%.
Origin: untrained. Execution: embedded.
“Who are you?” she shouted at Xen as she put herself in the path between him and the gargoyle. Glass had cut her feet, and she did not care.
“Who are you and what do you know about what happened to Sirena?” Xen asked back.
Thorne picked himself up off the floor and straightened his wing with a grunt. “She doesn’t know anything?—”
“Then you’d better,” Ellum said, meaningfully tapping his hammer against one of his hooved heels.
