Tatiana POV

“When you come back from the dead, you learn how to bleed quietly.”

The cabin smelled like smoke and saltwater.

I pressed a damp cloth to my ribs, biting down on the groan that clawed up my throat.

The bullet graze was shallow, but pain had its own way of making itself known not in the wound itself, but in the echo of it, pulsing through every heartbeat.

Outside, rain whispered against the tin roof. The sound was almost peaceful if I ignored the fact that half the world thought ...