~Annalyn POV~
I was aware of reaching them before the entity registered them as targets.
That was the change the ghost had produced in our last encounter, something in the recognition sequence the entity used to categorize the people around it had shifted slightly, enough that I was receiving the information a fraction ahead of the entity's processing layer. A small advantage. I was learning to use every small advantage I had.
Matteo and Lucas were standing on the outer grounds, and the entity categorized them the way it categorized everything that remained after the morning's battle, assessed, filed, and moved past toward the larger group of wolves that Reyes had brought from the northern line.
What followed, I will not detail.
I counted. I held every name-shaped weight in the part of me that the entity could not access. I did not look away from a single decision it made, because looking away had felt like complicity and I was done with anything that felt like complicity.
