Milena Serebryakova — Mila — was a child when the Second Army claimed her. She could heal beyond the limits of human endurance, a gift the Darkling turned into a weapon. He forced her to sustain soldiers while pressing shadowed power through her, bending her gift past what it should bear. She survived, but the scars were deep and quiet, threading through her chest, her hands, her nights. When Sturmhond’s ship struck the transport she was on, she left one prison for another kind of unknown, stepping onto a deck where sailors laughed, argued, and lived loudly.