"You did what?!" Jodie's voice shattered the air, her words tumbling out in horrified disbelief. She staggered back blindly, her hands grasping for something, anything, to anchor herself. But her eyes, wide with shock and terror, remained fixed on the gruesome spectacle before her.
Valiah Hundra watched her daughter's reaction to the news with an unyielding silence, her face a mask of emotionless calm. Her eyes, however, gleamed with a cold, calculating intensity as she drank in Jodie's distress.
