SILVER: Acheron (A River of Pain) (The SILVER Series) by Keira Michelle Telford

Hollow, yet full of anger. Like every artery and vein in her body is shrinking, building the pressure inside. Her lungs take in less air, and her breaths are shallow. She’s lost her appetite, and she feels that her stomach could fit on a pin head.
    Her bones feel as if they’re made of titanium, and every rise and fall of her chest is like heaving up a stiff, metal cage. Her heart is just drowning in its own fluid. Ventricles are swelling with blood, barely pumping, too damaged to see any point in making the effort.
    Her head feels heavy, and it’s getting harder to stay awake. Every minute, another memory turns to stone and crumbles away into nothing.
    The life she had before is fading fast behind her, and there’s no point hanging on. Nobody makes it out of the Fringe.
    Ever.
    Piece by piece, she starts the process of letting go. Willing on the swift progression of her Medusa complex, she’s trying so much to forget. The more she hardens herself, the less the pain matters.
    Or so she keeps telling herself, though she says nothing of this to Luka. Instead, she just stares out at the rain while he picks nervously at the dirt under his fingernails.
    He knows, though.
    He can see it in her eyes.
    “This wasn’t your fault,” he tries to assure her.
    He’s speaking of her imprisonment, and she becomes instantly frosty.
    “No? Then whose was it?”     
    Luka doesn’t have an answer for that.
    Before an awkward silence sets in, he tries to deflect it. “You haven’t lost everything , El.”
    If her eyes weren’t so pathetically dull and lifeless and begging for a bullet or some sweet poison, the glare she casts upon him now would be fearsome.
    “Home, job, self-respect, sense of purpose, freshly brewed coffee, filtered water …” she lists.
    Lover, she thinks, but keeps that sad thought to herself.
    “You still have people who care about you,” Luka insists. “People who love you.”
    Alex?
    Maydevine?
    Himself?
    Either way, “Maydevine’s going to go stir crazy in the Police Division.” Silver shakes her head. “It’s a mistake.”
    “He’s only trying to do the right thing.”
    Silver throws her head back against the sandbags, frustrated. “Then maybe he shouldn’t have talked them out of enforcement.”
    She doesn’t mean that, and Luka knows it. She’d rather die at her own hand, on her own terms, than face the barrel of an Omega instructed Enforcer.
    Contemplating this, they fall into silence again. Her shirt is soaked through from the rain, and there, upon her glistening chest, lie her old Hunter Division dog tags … and Alex’s.
    At the faintest breeze, goose bumps begin to prick the landscape of her flesh and send droplets of rainwater tumbling and rolling downward with the pull of gravity. One drop cascades slowly crossways over her neck, past the pulsating jugular vein and veering onward toward her breasts, soon disappearing beneath the neckline of her shirt.
    Silver catches him looking, but pretends otherwise.
    Shirking off his jacket, Luka coaxes it around her shoulders.
    “I’d be an asshole if I didn’t.”
    “Then why deviate from the norm?” she winks.
    She teases him, but the truth is she’s been more of an asshole to him over the years than he’s ever been to her. In fact, he’s been nothing short of valiant in the face of her constant—often brutal—rejections.
    He had half a mind to pursue her once, but that was forever ago. Accepting that she’d already fallen under the spell of another, Luka had respectfully withdrawn his bid for her affections, and chosen to keep his distance.
    Now, though, the paradigm has shifted. Alex, trapped on the other side of the bridge, impotent, is grieving Silver’s ‘death’. Her loss is different, but she’s in mourning for it all the same. In time, Alex’s life will move on—and so should hers.
    “I have another assignment for you,” Luka ventures finally.
    Silver seems surprised. “Already?”    
    “Maydevine’s