Elena’s POV

The police station smelled of disinfectant and stale coffee — the same two things that seemed to flourish wherever authority gathered.

I’d been moved from the Council infirmary to a holding room after the investigator’s warning. The lights hummed above me; my arm throbbed with a slow, relentless pain that made every breath a small exercise in endurance.

A uniformed policewoman — young, freckled, with kind eyes that didn’t match the hardness around them — came to sit ...