ARIA POV
Kara was already scanning the room before I fully registered what I was looking at, her instincts sharper than mine, faster, cutting through the chaos while bodies were still falling and blood was still hitting the floor, and then something in her focus narrowed, locked, and I followed it.
‘Do you see him?’ she pressed, her voice low and tight inside my head, already keyed into the hunt even if she didn’t know what she was hunting yet.
‘Not yet,’ I muttered in my head, my vision sweeping the chaos in front of me, bodies colliding, blood hitting the floor, wolves mid-shift tearing into anything that moved, too much happening all at once for anything to stand out.
And then—
Boots.
Mud-stained.
Worn.
Familiar in a way that didn’t make sense at first, just a flicker at the ed
