Rowan pressed her spine harder against the damp brick, the cold seeping through her jacket like a warning she was too stubborn to heed. The alley smelled like a hangover—stale beer, sour garbage, wet concrete leaching something chemical into the night air. Rain beaded on the dumpster's rusted metal, each drop catching the flickering streetlamp's orange glow before sliding down to join the growing puddle at its base.

The bass from the club thrummed through the wall at her back, a heartbeat she could feel in her teeth. She checked her phone again. Nothing from Sera.

"Come on," she muttered, thumb hovering over the call button. "Twenty minutes. You said twenty."

She'd said it—standing on the curb out front, silver-blue hair plastered to her temples by the drizzle, that dagger-sharp grin widening as she'd grabbed Rowan's arm. Twenty minutes. There's a guy inside I need to talk to. Old contact. Then we're out.

Rowan had waited five on the curb. Then ten in the doorway. Then fifteen with her back against this wall, watching the alley's far end where the streetlamp's light didn't reach.

She'd seen him across the street an hour ago.

Just someone. A shape in a hoodie, silhouetted against the neon glow of a closed laundromat. Watching. She'd told herself it was nothing—a drunk waiting for a ride, a dealer checking the foot traffic. Sera had laughed it off with that low, pulling laugh that made people lean closer without knowing why. "You're seeing shadows, Blackthorn. You work too many doubles."

Rowan shifted her weight, the wet concrete sucking at her boot soles. The unease she'd carried all night had settled into something heavier, a stone in her chest that made each breath feel shallow.

She checked the alley's mouth again.

Nothing.

Then—footsteps.

From the far end. Too deliberate for a drunk stumbling out for air. Too measured. Each step landing with the wet slap of a sole finding standing water, the rhythm unhurried. Certain.

Rowan straightened off the wall. Her pulse ticked up, a quick flutter against her ribs she tried to ignore.

"Sera?" She pitched her voice toward the other end of the alley, toward the darkness where the footsteps were coming from. "That you?"

The footsteps kept coming. Steady. Unanswered.

Rowan's hand found the phone in her pocket. Thumb finding the power button blind, the screen lighting up against her thigh. Not a drunk. Not a dealer. Move.

She took a step toward the alley's mouth, toward the street, toward the club's neon sign and the bouncer she'd nodded to on the way out. Five steps and she'd be clear. Four.

The figure emerged from the shadow.

Tall. Hood up, pulled low enough that she couldn't see a face—just the suggestion of a jaw, the glint of something metal catching the streetlamp as he moved. A blade. Low at his side, held like he knew how to use it.

Rowan's feet locked. Her brain screamed run but her body had already committed to the wrong direction, too far from the alley's mouth, too close to him, and there was no space between her and the blade but wet concrete and bad decisions.

"Hey." She threw the word like a shield, chin lifting. "I don't have cash. Whatever you think—"

He kept coming.

She backed up, shoulders hitting the wall she'd been leaning against seconds ago. The bass thrummed through the brick, useless and distant. Two steps and he'd be on her. One.

She opened her mouth to scream.

The alley's side door banged open.

"Rowan?" Sera's voice, sharp and confused, cutting through the rain. "What are you—"

The hooded figure pivoted.

Not toward Rowan.

Toward Sera.

And Sera was still half in the doorway, backlit by the club's dim hall light, silver-blue hair catching gold, her winter-sea eyes going wide as the blade swung her direction.

Something in Rowan's chest detonated.

Not fear. Something older. Something that had been waiting her whole life for this exact moment, coiled in her marrow like a serpent she'd never known she carried.

" No. "

The word tore out of her as she moved—not thinking, not deciding, her body already between Sera and the blade, her hands shoving her friend back through the doorway, her own back turned to the attack.

The blade never landed.

A fist did.

His knuckles caught her jaw with a crack that she felt in her molars, in her skull, in the sudden white explosion behind her eyes. The world tilted. Wet asphalt rushed up to meet her, cold and gritty against her palms, against her cheek, the rain beading on her skin like sweat she couldn't wipe away.

She heard Sera scream.

High and sharp, the sound tearing through the bass-thrummed air. Rowan's vision swam, the streetlamp splitting into two, then three, the puddle beneath her cheek rippling with the impact of raindrops she felt in her bones.

Get up.

She couldn't.

Get up.

Her arms wouldn't move. Her head weighed a thousand pounds. The blade glinted above her, catching light, catching rain, catching the edge of a scream she couldn't push past her lips.

It was coming down.

She saw it in slow motion—the arc of it, the way the metal caught the streetlamp's orange glow and turned it into something beautiful and terrible, the way the hooded figure's arm tensed as he committed to the strike.

Sera. Move. Get Sera out.

Her palms hit the wet concrete. She pushed. Her body didn't obey—it was already doing something else, something her brain hadn't authorized, something that came from a part of her she'd never known existed.

Her hands came up.

And the world went white.

Not light. Not fire. Something else—something that detonated from her outstretched palms in a shockwave of silver that she didn't see so much as feel, a pressure that erupted from her chest and tore through her arms and hurled itself at the hooded figure with a roar that was almost a sound, almost a scream, almost the voice of something ancient and furious that had been caged inside her for twenty-four years.

The shockwave hit him in the chest.

He flew backward like a doll thrown by a giant, his body slamming into the brick wall across the alley with a crack of masonry and bone. He slid down, leaving a dark smear on the wet brick, and landed in a heap at the base of the dumpster.

He didn't move.

The light died.

It didn't fade—it snuffed out, like a candle pinched between two fingers, leaving the alley darker than it had been before, the streetlamp suddenly too dim, too orange, too ordinary.

Rowan stared at her hands.

They were glowing.

A soft, luminescent silver, like moonlight caught in water, running along her veins in patterns she didn't recognize. Her palms hummed with a vibration she felt in her teeth, in her skull, in the marrow she'd never known was waiting.

"Rowan."

Sera's voice. Small. Broken into pieces Rowan didn't know how to fit back together.

"Rowan, your—your hands."

She couldn't look away from them. The glow was already fading, sinking back into her skin like it was retreating, hiding, pretending it had never been there. But she'd felt it. She'd felt it, a river of power that had surged through her with a will of its own, older than her, bigger than her, something that had been waiting for a door to open.

And she'd opened it.

She didn't know how. She didn't know why. She didn't know what the hell she was.

"Rowan." Sera's hand landed on her shoulder, cold and shaking. "Rowan, look at me."

She couldn't. Her eyes were fixed on the motionless figure across the alley, on the way his hood had fallen back to reveal a face she didn't recognize—plain features, slack mouth, the unnatural stillness of someone who might not be breathing.

She'd done that.

She'd thrown a man into a wall with her bare hands. With light. With something that wasn't possible, wasn't real, wasn't part of the world she'd lived in for twenty-four years.

"Rowan." Sera's voice was harder now, cutting through the static in her skull. "We need to go. Now. "

She finally looked at her friend. Sera's winter-sea eyes were wide, her sharp-angled face pale beneath the streetlamp's glow, her hand gripping Rowan's shoulder hard enough to bruise.

"What," Rowan heard herself say, the word coming out flat, dead, "was that."

It wasn't a question. It was a demand, aimed at the universe, at her own traitorous body, at the humming silence in her palms.

Sera's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

"I don't—" She stopped, swallowed, her grip tightening. "I don't know. But whatever it was, he saw it. And if he's not alone, they saw it too. We have to move."

The hooded figure hadn't stirred. The rain kept falling, beading on the dumpster's rusted metal, pattering against the wet concrete, washing the dark smear off the bricks in slow, disinterested streaks.

Rowan's hands had stopped glowing. They looked normal now. Pale. Shaking. Empty.

She flexed her fingers. They obeyed. They felt like hers. They didn't feel like the hands that had just torn a grown man off his feet and slammed him into a wall.

"Rowan." Sera's voice cracked. "Please. We can figure this out somewhere that isn't—" she gestured at the alley, at the body, at the blood beginning to pool beneath the dumpster, "— this."

Rowan swallowed. Her jaw ached where he'd hit her. Her skull throbbed. Her veins felt wrong, like they'd been stretched and hadn't quite snapped back.

She pushed herself to her feet. Her knees wobbled, then held.

"Okay," she said. The word tasted like copper. "Okay. Where?"

Sera was already moving, grabbing her arm, pulling her toward the alley's mouth. "I know a place. Someone who can—" She stopped. Shook her head. "Just come on."

Rowan let herself be pulled. Her legs moved. Her feet found the wet concrete. Her lungs filled with air that smelled like rain and garbage and something else—something sharp and electric, like ozone after a lightning strike.

She looked back once.

The hooded figure hadn't moved. The rain was pooling around his slack face, catching in his open mouth, filling the spaces where he should have been breathing.

She'd done that.

The thought sat in her chest like a stone, cold and immovable, as Sera pulled her into the street, into the neon glow, into a world that looked exactly the same as it had an hour ago.

But Rowan didn't feel the same.

She felt wrong. Hollowed out. Like something had cracked open inside her and she didn't know how to close it, didn't know if she wanted to, didn't know what would come out if she tried.

Her hands were still shaking.

They were also empty.

She didn't know which was worse.