Through the bond, she felt Sylas’s attention spike—sharp, desperate,wrong wrong wrong—
His rage slammed through the connection like a physical force. She felt him change direction, felt his terror, felt the primal fury of a predator whose mate was threatened beyond his reach.
Too far. He was too far away.
The chemical smell thickened. Her lungs burned with each desperate inhale. The corridor tilted sideways—or maybe she was falling, dragged backward into darkness by arms that could have crushed her without effort.
The last thing she registered before the darkness took her was a voice—low, satisfied, terrifyingly calm.
“The King’s pretty is ours. Finally.”
Then there was nothing at all.
23
Sylas
The bond went silent.
Sylas’s hand stopped mid-reach over the tactical display, claws hovering above the fortress schematic. One heartbeat, the thread that connected him to Elsa hummed with her presence—distant, but there. Warm. Alive. The steady pulse of her existence that had become as essential as his own breath.
The next heartbeat, nothing. A hollow void where she should have been.
He straightened from the war table, fur bristling along his spine in a wave that started at his neck and rippled down to his tail.
“My King?” Xar stood at the chamber’s edge, datapad in hand, attention fixed on the supply reports they’d been reviewing. “The northern corridor reinforcement schedule—”
“Where is she?”
The words came out low, sharp, stripped of everything but need. Xar’s ears flattened against his skull.
“The human female? She was escorted to the pit access corridor for—”
“I know where she was.” Sylas pressed his palm flat against the display, and the fortress grid flickered beneath his claws. He reached for the bond again—reached harder, deeper, pushing past the normal gentle awareness into something more desperate—and found only silence. Not the warm quiet of Elsa sleeping or lost in thought, but the cold void of severance. Chemical severance. Something had dampened the connection at her end.
Drugged. Someone had drugged his mate.
The growl that tore from his chest made Xar take a step back. Made the torches on the wall gutter in their brackets as if the sound itself carried force.
“Contact the Lux Sabers assigned to her detail.” Sylas was already moving, his stride eating the distance to the door. “Now.”
Xar’s claws flew across the datapad. The silence stretched—three heartbeats, four, five—and then his advisor’s scent shifted. Sharpened with something that Sylas had learned to recognize as barely-contained alarm.
“They’re not responding.”
Sylas didn’t wait for elaboration. He was through the door and into the corridor before Xar finished speaking, the tactical display forgotten, the supply reports irrelevant. The fortress grid hummed beneath his feet as he moved—not running, not yet, because a king did not run through his own keep like prey fleeing predators—but every muscle coiled for violence that hadn’t found a target.
The pit access corridor lay three levels down and half the fortress away. He took a secondary passage, one that avoided the main thoroughfares where courtiers gathered and political games never stopped playing. His claws scraped stone as hedescended, the sound echoing off walls that had witnessed centuries of Yzefrxyl treachery.
He reached for the bond again. Still nothing. The absence clawed at something primal in his chest—the part of him that had spent weeks learning her rhythm, her warmth, the particular way her presence steadied the chaos that had lived beneath his skin since before he took the throne. Without her, the old instability crept back in. The edge of feral madness that had nearly consumed him before she crashed into his world.
Gone. She was gone, and he couldn’t feel her, and someone in his fortress had made that happen.
The pit access corridor came into view. Empty. The checkpoint where guards should have stood was abandoned, the heavy doors hanging half-open like broken teeth. Sylas slowed, nostrils flaring. Smoke residue—a diversionary flare, the chemical signature unmistakable. Blood, faint but present, human and Yzefrxyl both. And beneath it all, the acrid bite of the same sedative compound they used on Fallen captures.
He found the first Lux Saber slumped against the wall, alive but unconscious. Two more lay further down the corridor, their chests rising in shallow breaths. A fourth sprawled near the checkpoint itself, her weapon still in its sheath, never drawn. No wounds on any of them. No violence. Someone had wanted them out of the way, not dead.
Which meant this wasn’t a Fallen breach. This wasn’t enemy action from beyond the walls.