Azriel's Point Of View
"Nothing, Lucy," I said, my voice completely flat, stripped of even a shred of the gravelly tease I'd employed just seconds before. I couldn't meet her eyes. If I did, she'd see the phantom image of Seraphina's green eyes still rattling around in the back of my skull, and that was a weakness I couldn't afford to display… not here, not now, not with her.
The memory felt like a splinter lodged too deep to extract. "We are here to discuss something important, not this. We aren't teenagers messing around in the back of a car anymore."
Those days were long gone, buried under years of blood and betrayal.
