Elena Vasquez

The return ticket didn’t burn my fingers; it froze them, a shard of red ice that pulsed with the city’s heartbeat, rewriting itself in my own handwriting: VOLUME IX: THE RETURN. The letters weren’t ink—they were blood, mine, drawn from the cut on my palm that had never fully healed since the warehouse, since Victor’s knife, since the wager began. The alley was a war zone of our survival, the brownstone’s rubble smoldering in jagged heaps, the air thick with the stench ...