The woman keeps coming up the alley without taking her hand out of her jacket.
I don't move.
Neither does Rhayne.
Void Monarch keeps our bodies dissolved against the background while our fingers stay laced together. The effect doesn't make the world transparent to me. It only makes my own body almost disappear from my peripheral sense of myself. When I breathe deeply or shift my weight even slightly, the light around me deforms for a fraction of a second before going back.
The woman is close enough now that I can hear her breathing.
She stops again.
Whatever ability she's using to follow us still says we're here. Her eyes, though, find nothing.
Her hand closes around something under the jacket.
I wait for one more step.
She takes it.
One more.
Now.
I come out of the ambush without letting go of Rhayne.
