Nadia Hale hadn't slept well in three months.
It wasn't the nightmares — though she had those too, vivid and relentless, playing behind her eyelids like a film reel someone had set to repeat. The vampire's face, bone-white and snarling, its claws extended like curved daggers. The sound of Bianca hitting the ground — a wet, heavy thud that Nadia heard in her sleep and woke tasting copper. The moment her wolf's jaws closed around the vampire's throat and the dead blood — cold, thick, tasting of rot and iron and something chemical that had no name — flooded her mouth and she bit down anyway because Bianca was on the ground and the vampire was going to kill her and there was no time to think, only time to act.
She woke from those dreams with her teeth clenched and her hands fisted in the she
