The car moved through the city like a shadow, but inside, the silence was absolute. It was the kind of quiet that pressed against the eardrums, heavy and suffocating.
Seraphina sat rigid in the passenger seat, her fingers laced together so tightly that her knuckles had turned a ghostly, bloodless white.
She felt as though she were holding herself together by sheer force of will, a fragile vessel ready to shatter at the slightest tremor. Outside the window, the city blurred into streaks of neon and gray, but she saw none of it. She was still trapped in the library, back in that suffocating moment where Lucien's velvet voice had been cut short by Damon's cold, biting interruption.
She had almost spoken. She had almost let the truth spill, and the memory of that narrow escape made her chest ache with phantom stabs of anxiety.
Beside her, Damon was still. One hand rested with casual arrogance on the steering wheel, the other shifting gears with a mechanical, controlled ease.
