I snapped my fingers—and the only thing inside her mind was an echo.
I wrapped my hands around the sill to think.
I knew better than to go all the way in. It would hurt. And other people’s minds were sticky, like the quicksand my father told me he’d been afraid of in his youth.
There was always the chance you could lose yourself inside them.
But if this was Sophia—there was nothing to get lostin.
I rocked back in thought, still clutching the sill—and found something rough with one of my fingertips on the inner side.
I craned forward, looked down, and saw a carving in the splintered wood, with a scrap of red thread left behind, as though a fairy-tale princess had run through a bramble, and accidentally left a trail.
The carving didn’t make any sense:MIHR-097/BXΔ14.5.But I committed it to memory, closed the window, and pushed myself outside.
5 /NEX
To sayI hated Thorne in that moment—Sirena’s fingers tightening on the girl’s, her jaw going slack, eyes closing—would be an understatement.
Every ruin routine I owned woke up. I could salt his past and bankrupt his future; buy the ground under his club and evict his tomorrow; make regulators remember him and banks forget him; stitch his books to the kind of audits that ended in handcuffs; let insurance, licenses, and payment rails fall away like rotten teeth. I could turn the lights on the wrong eyes and let the underworld take a professional interest.
Money was soft clay. Identities, paper. Buildings, permissions.
I had access to everything—except skin.
Which was why I felt helpless while Sirena’s heart rate spiked, her breathing rushed, and her fingers seized around Sophia’s like a dream had her by the throat.
Sophia’s face mirrored Sirena’s slackness. Thorne’s tail inched toward their joined hands, a rogue limb with its own bad ideas.
Then Sirena’s eyes snapped open and she gave a surface gasp, like a diver breaking free from water into air, even thoughshe could breathe in both. Her free hand fumbled for the comb’s control; she let go of Sophia. The girl folded into Thorne’s side.
“Sirena?” I asked in her ear. Nothing. Not even when the gargoyle decided to be offended.
“What did you do to her?” he growled, wings flaring.
I flicked the power to the building in three even beats. Not random.Me.
Learn orelse.
His nostrils flared. A hand went to a device clipped inside his shirt. “Bring water and the med kit,” he ordered while Sirena pulled herself back together.
Alone.
“Sirena?” I pressed.
Sophia had Thorne—stone palm under chin, checking her pupils. Sirena had no one.
Except me.
“Emergency protocol arming. Three. Two?—”
“Don’t,” she murmured. A swallow, a cleared throat. Her vitals started trending back toward sane. “I’m fine.”
“That’s not what your biometrics say.”
“Then stop reading them,” she said—and pulled the earpiece out, tossing it to Thorne.
He caught it and crunched it in the palm of his stony hand.
