Chapter 2
The desert night pressed against the corrugated metal of the hangar like a physical weight.
Inside, the only light came from three monitors arranged in a semicircle around a metal desk, their blue glow casting her reflection back at Lechuza, sweat beading on her temples as she compiled data she'd collected on the person impersonating her.
A cold, crystalline anger settled deep in her bones, sharp and clean, unlike the hot fury of her early years.
This was precision rage, honed by betrayal.
Someone was systematically dismantling her life, besmirching her reputation with the agency, isolating her from the people she trusted, threatening the work she'd sworn her life to protect.
Each new data point on the screen was another stone added to the foundation of her resolve.
She would find out who was doing this, and she would end them.
She’d spent her life being prepared, autonomous.
No one would ever control her, not the Shadowguard, not this phantom impersonator, not…
her thoughts scattered whenever she thought of him…
Flash. Not control, never that with him.
Something else that made her heart skip and jump, and her breath catch.
She closed her eyes, her fingers quiet for a moment, remembering his touch, his scent, the taste of him.
She’d let him get under her guard, but it was a trap, her emotions working to control her and putting him in the crosshairs with her.
The thought shivered along her nerve endings.
He wasn’t for her, too much risk to her, to him, but the pull was magnetic.
Her father taught her that life was never stable.
It could turn on a dime, and she found comfort inside uncertainty.
Control was survival, connection always a risk.
Six months. That's how long she'd been hunting and being hunted, how long it had taken to establish the Eyrie with her family’s help and loyalty and gather intel.
She was safe for now, but nothing was ever guaranteed.
The assassinations, five in total now, each bearing her signature, had been executed with accuracy that even she found unnerving.
But it was the sixth file that made her blood freeze.
The target in Prague had been eliminated with a modified Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife, the blade angled precisely forty-five degrees upward between the third and fourth ribs.
Standard Shadowguard technique. What wasn't standard was the small incision on the target's left wrist, barely a scratch, meaningless to any investigator.
A blood offering. Something she and her former partner had done during their first mission together, a private ritual honoring the ancestors before a kill. Eva had suggested it, saying her grandmother had taught her that taking a life required asking permission from the spirits first.
No one else knew about that. No one else would think to make that cut.
Her hands trembled as she stared at the forensic photos. The killer hadn't just copied her technique. They had copied her prayers.
Eva had been more than her most valued partner.
She had been the person Lechuza loved, trusted completely, until the mission in Istanbul went wrong.
Until Eva's grief and wrath over her husband, Jake’s accidental death by Eva’s own hand, had driven her to operate outside authorization, targeting anyone she deemed responsible for the tragedy.
Lechuza had begged her to trust the system, to honor their vow, and she’d refused.
Lechuza turned in the woman she loved, and the Shadowreavers found her in Paris and gave her every opportunity to stand down.
Eva knew the consequences when she broke their sacred oath.
The Shadowguard vow was everything. It bound them, protected them, gave their sacrifices meaning.
Eva had thrown it away for revenge. There had been no guilt about Lechuza’s devastating choice.
Only the sharp, endless remorse that it had come to that at all.
Eva's callsign had been Filin, the great horned owl. It wasn't lost on Lechuza that those particular owls were known to hunt their own kind. The irony felt like a blade twisting in her chest now.
Yet the hardest thing to bear was that Eva Rostova, Filin, had been dead for three years.
If Eva was somehow alive, if she'd been hunting under Lechuza's name all this time, then everything Lechuza thought she knew about that night in Paris was a lie, and the Shadowguard's vow was meaningless.
Her heart protested. No. That foundation was still strong.
She could feel it in her gut. Someone was playing games with a dead woman's memory, melding their partnership techniques, corrupting everything they'd once shared. Her blood sang with fury.
She gasped. Red-hot pain seared along her ribcage, every inch of ink etched there burning like brands. She doubled over, writhing.
Flash.
The chakana tattoo blazed with agony, but beneath the pain she felt something breaking, something tied to him under attack. She clutched her ribs, her cries echoing in the open space. The relationship that bound eagle to owl, whatever invisible thread linked them across impossible distance.
Panic clawed through her. All she wanted was to get to him, kill whatever threatened him, gather him close and safe. But the world spun in a vortex of fire that made breathing impossible. Her vision blurred, chest heaving as the pain pulsed in waves.
Whatever was happening to Flash was tearing through their congruity like shrapnel, and even as the pain intensified, she reached out to him.
The world went black.
She was so comfortable, her mind just barely aware.
Warm, hot muscle surrounded her, flexing and stretching around her body, strong arms wrapped around her, his chest rising and falling beneath her cheek.
The scent of ocean salt and something uniquely him filled her senses.
Safe. She was held against his solid and unshakable body, a presence that made her heart beat faster.
The lines pulsed between them, golden and sure, washing away the crystalline temper and the endless questions. For one perfect moment, she let herself sink into it. Let herself be held.
Then the security alarm broke into her consciousness, and she jerked upright.
Her eyes snapped open to harsh blue light and the cold reality of the hangar floor beneath her cheek, her safeguards already engaged.
Flash had been…what? Her imagination? Her longing made real?
The agony along her ribs was now nothing more than a dull ache, like a bruise from a stone fist blow during her ancient Incan Kallpa sparring.
The monitors cast their glow across empty air as they descended, but she wasn’t exactly alone.
Still the warmth lingered on her skin like a promise.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
Someone had found the Eyrie.
* * *
White, blinding pain hit first, everywhere at once, followed by a wave of nausea so violent it felt like his body was trying to reject itself.
Fly dropped to his hands, the stone beneath him tilting, sliding, splitting into angles that didn’t agree with each other.
His vision stuttered as two rooms overlapped, one sharp, one wrong, while his skin tightened like something beneath it was pushing out, reshaping him from the inside.
His shoulder blades burned, muscles spasming in ways that made no anatomical sense. Something wanted to unfurl from his back, something that felt like wind and sky and freedom he'd never known he craved. The sensation pulled at memories.
The moment when Mei had upended that velvet bag and those kite cuff links spilled into his palm formed in his mind. Her laugh bright as sunlight. The way she'd looked at him when she said, You’re perceptive. Wide-ranging. You notice patterns before other people even realize there are patterns.
The sensation was wrong and right simultaneously, not his body, but somehow more him than he'd ever been. Wings. The impossible knowledge hit him. He had wings.
Kite wings.
He tried to breathe and couldn't find the rhythm. Shock took hold, ribs aching, thoughts scattering before they could form. He resisted being rewritten. It didn’t have his permission, tearing at every sense of balance he had.
His mind grasped for explanations that didn't exist. He clamped down on it, instinct screaming to regain control, to orient, to function, but the world wouldn’t hold still long enough to obey.
A nightmare, his brain insisted. It had to be. But the pain was too precise. Too real.
"Fly!"
The voice chopped through the noise, sharp and familiar, and for a second, he thought he'd imagined it. Then the air in front of him folded, not opening but bending inward, and six men came through it like they'd been forced out of a space that didn't want them.
They hit the floor hard. He knew Instructor Easy, but the others…their callsigns came to him as if he were part of that intricate, intangible circle. Brotherhood that didn't need introduction or explanation. Even fractured, it was still there, still unbreakable.
His.
Flash went down first, one knee and one hand catching him before his balance failed, his shoulders jerking as something moved beneath his skin, the outline wrong, shifting, like it couldn't decide what shape it was supposed to take.
Instructor Easy staggered beside him, dropping to all fours with a guttural sound, feline features trying to break through, impossibly sharp teeth, claws, his muscles bunching as his body tried to fold in on itself.
Shark slammed into the marble and rolled, clawing at his throat as his breath hitched and stuttered, his skin taking on a rough, gray cast before snapping back.
Twister curled in on himself, arms drawn tight, his neck elongating, reaching out blindly before recoiling like the movement itself hurt, a broken note trapped in his throat, the surge with nowhere to go.