**Kael's Point of View

The woman I held in my arms was my Lyra, but she wasn't. The tremors that shook her body had nothing to do with the cold. When her eyes met mine, they had a new, haunted depth, as if she had looked into an abyss so big that a part of her had been lost to its pull. The smell of the Echo-Verse stuck to her—a sterile, metallic smell of static and nothingness that made my wolf shiver with primal disgust.

Her soft-spoken words cut me to the quick. *They saw me.

The ...