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Fear rends the tunnel apart.

The ceiling cracks. Bones spill from broken shelves. Roots snake through stone and drag at my legs. Water floods the floor, black as ink. The earth groans like something enormous dying beneath it.

I reach for her.

She is gone.

“No.”

My voice booms through the ruins and returns to me hollow.

I run.

Through mud. Through skulls. Through the wreckage of every season of my life. Through every death I caused and every body I buried.

At the far end of the collapsing dark, light pours in. Bright. Clean. Cruel.

I throw myself toward it.

Pain finds me first.

Then sound.

Then the sterile scent of chemicals and linen.

My eyes snap open to a hospital ceiling.

A machine beeps somewhere to my left. My chest burns. My throat feels lined with glass. And she is there.

Bent over me, hair falling around her face, eyes shadowed by exhaustion and still impossibly beautiful.

Mine.

“You’re back,” she says in that voice that closes a hand around my heart.

I stare at her, reverent and wrecked.

Then I rasp, “I was looking for you.”

9

Hunter

“So he’s talking?”

DK’s voice is rough beside me, raw from stress and lack of sleep. He hasn’t really relaxed since any of this started, and I don’t think he knows how to now.

Graves continues, “He’s not very coherent. There are still a lot of painkillers and anesthesia in his system.”

He’s stationed beside the observation window with the same controlled posture he always wears, hands tucked into the pockets of his coat, attention fixed on the room beyond the glass. The fluorescent lights flatten everything into shades of white and gray. Hospitals have a way of stripping power from people, and yet somehow Timothy Maddox still manages to look like a man used to being obeyed.

Inside, Arianette sits close to his bedside, one hand wrapped around his wrist while she leans in to hear him. Her dark hair falls forward, shielding part of her face as she listens.

Whatever they’re saying belongs only to them.

“Fuck, that’s good news.” Some of the tension eases from DK’s shoulders. “So he should be back and ready to run⁠—”

“It’ll be weeks,” Graves says, cutting him off without looking away from the room. “Assuming everything goes well. You’re not off the hook yet, Kemp.”