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Taly murmured, “Something doesn’t feel right.” Her eyes flicked back and forth the way they always did when she was looking for premonitions.

“This does feel a little… anticlimactic,” Skye said into the stillness.

The air felt heavy, edged with tension—a quiet waiting for what came next.

They shared a look.

Taly opened her mouth. “I—”

Then a blast of cold air rushed in from the alley outside. Skye registered—exactly half a heartbeat too late—that he hadn’t heard the shop door open.

A hand slid across his shoulder.

“Oh, don’t worry, brother Moon,” hissed the man they’d left dead in the alley. “We’re just getting started.”

And then Skye’s entire world lit up with pain.

Chapter 61

The film of reality cracked.

Taly saw it from across the room, like an invisible pane of glass splintering and then dissolving back into empty space.

Except now there was a man standing behind Skye.

He wasn’t a shade. He bore no signs of revival—no ritual scarring, no crystal burn at the sternum. Yet he had been dead when they left him in the alley, barely minutes ago, and now here he stood, like death had been an inconvenience someone had quietly removed.

Skye’s breath caught. His face went white with pain. Instinct and years of training moved the dagger from his belt into his hand in an instant, flipping and stabbing back twice—

Two dull thuds as the blade struck flesh, but the man didn’t flinch.

Indeed, he never stopped smiling as he leaned around Skye to peer at the woman dead on the floor.

“This is why I hate fast fashion.” The voice was different, but the rhythm and cadence of his speech, the old-world accent, left no room for doubt. “One trip through the wash, and suddenly you’re coming apart at the seams.”

The man’s eyes, still black with infection, lifted to hers, and Taly saw him there—she sawBill.

Skye clawed at the hand on his shoulder. The grip looked loose, barely resting against him, but he couldn’t dislodge it. The color continued draining from his face. He staggered, but the dead man’s hand seemed fused to his shoulder, an immovable weight.

With each passing second, his knees buckled lower. His breath shortened. Something was wrong. That touch wasn’t just holding him—it wastaking.

She was done waiting. The meatshield had done his best. Now it was the firepower’s turn.

Snarling, Taly reached for her power. And as time ground to a halt inside the shop, she lunged.

There was no movement, no sound save for the click of her heels and her own ragged breath. Skye’s face was a mask of pain, frozen in a single moment of breathless agony. Bill’s cruel smile had become fixed.

Through a slit in her skirts, she found the dagger sheathed to her thigh and aimed right for that fucking smile as she wrenched back the blade.

Then the corpse turned his head—only his head.

Time was still frozen. It shouldn’t have been possible—to ignore her magic. All things real and material were bound by time,nothing—

Reality cracked.

She saw it a moment too late, fractures forming in the air before her—too fast for her to stop, to twist out of the way, to even grunt in shock before a wave of cold swept over her, pricking against her skin like a million tiny shards of glass.

Skye and the man vanished.