Evaline:
The moment Jasper's familiar voice filtered through the car speakers, something inside my chest tightened so sharply it almost hurt.
"Alpha," he greeted, his tone respectful but carrying that underlying urgency I had come to recognize over the past year.
My heart immediately began to race... but not with fear. Not exactly. It was anticipation. Hope. Dread. All tangled together into one unbearable knot.
Jasper and his team had been digging into Naira's incident for days now. Every lead had either dissolved into nothing or circled back to the same frustrating dead end. So if he was calling River directly… if there was urgency in his voice…
There might finally be something.
Beside me, River's hand moved slowly up and down my back, warm and steady through the thin fabric of my dress. The gesture was almost absentminded, yet impossibly grounding. He must have felt the shift in my breathing, the way my body had gone rigid.
