This was internal.
Sylas crouched beside the nearest Saber and pressed two claws to her throat. Pulse steady. She would wake. They would all wake, and when they did, they would tell him exactly what had happened—every detail, every face, every word—and then Sylas would decide how many of them were complicit and how many were simply failures.
Neither category would enjoy what came next.
The sound of running footsteps echoed from the upper passage. Heavy. Fast. Furious in a way that Sylas recognized before the scent even reached him.
Ryxin rounded the corner like a storm given form.
His brother’s eyes blazed that molten amber that meant violence was imminent and restraint was a distant memory. Fur stood in aggressive ridges along his shoulders and neck, hackles raised so sharply they looked like blades. His fangs were fully extended—not for threat display, but because whatever control Ryxin normally maintained had been stripped away entirely. His tail lashed behind him, striking the stone walls with enough force to leave scratches.
“Ari.” The name came out guttural, barely formed. “She was with them. She was withyourfemale, and now she’s—”
“Gone.” Sylas straightened to his full height. “I know.”
The brothers faced each other across the corridor. Two apex predators, fur bristling, fangs bared, fury rolling off them in waves that made the air thick and heavy. Under any other circumstance, this proximity would have ended in blood. Their history demanded it—the challenges, the near-coups, the decades of jockeying for dominance that had defined their relationship since they were barely more than pups fighting over scraps in their father’s court.
But Ryxin’s rage wasn’t pointed at Sylas. Not this time. It rolled outward, seeking, searching for someone to rend and tear, and finding nothing but unconscious Sabers and empty stone.
“Who?” Ryxin’s voice dropped to something dangerous. Quiet. The kind of quiet that preceded screaming and didn’t stop until something bled. “Who took them?”
“I don’t know.” The admission burned like acid. “Yet.”
Ryxin stalked forward, stopping just short of the distance where instinct would have forced a confrontation. His nostrilsflared as he processed the same scent markers Sylas had already catalogued—smoke, sedative, the lingering traces of females who should have been protected and weren’t.
“The pit guards.” Ryxin’s attention snapped to the doors. “They were posted here. They would have seen—”
“Gone. Or complicit.” Sylas moved past his brother, through the half-open doors, into the corridor beyond. The scent trail was fading, but it was there—Elsa’s particular signature, Frosted Tears and something uniquely human, a fragrance that had imprinted itself on his instincts so deeply he could have tracked it across continents. It led deeper into the fortress’s lower levels. “The diversion was coordinated. The timing precise. Someone knew exactly when the Sabers would be distracted and exactly how long they needed.”
Ryxin fell into step beside him. Not behind, where a subordinate would walk, but beside—shoulder to shoulder, two predators hunting the same prey.
“Mia.” Ryxin’s jaw tightened. “Yarx’s human. She was with them too.”
Three human females. Three political pressure points. Three weapons aimed at three different males who had, in various ways, attached themselves to fragile creatures they should never have claimed.
Sylas’s claws scraped stone as his hands curled into fists. Whoever had orchestrated this understood Yzefrxyl psychology with surgical precision. They knew that taking the females wouldn’t just be an act of aggression—it would be a challenge. A declaration that the males who claimed them were too weak to protect what was theirs. Too compromised by human influence to maintain dominance over their own territory.
And if Sylas reacted the way every instinct screamed at him to react—if he tore through the fortress with fire and fury, slaughtering anyone who stood between him and his mate—he would prove exactly what his enemies wanted the court to believe.
That the King was compromised. Unstable. Controlled by a human female who had somehow leashed the most powerful predator in the realm.
The political calculation churned beneath the rage, cold and precise even as his blood burned. He needed to respond. He needed to hunt. But he also needed to do it in a way that didn’t hand his throne to whoever had engineered this trap.
“We need to do this quietly.” The words tasted like ash. Like surrender. Like everything he’d promised himself he’d never be.
Ryxin’s head snapped toward him, disbelief and fury warring in his expression. “Quietly?They took—”
“I know what they took.” Sylas rounded on his brother, and for a moment, the corridor filled with the tension of violence barely leashed. “You think I don’t feel it? You think there’s any part of me that isn’t ready to burn this entire fortress to the foundation until I find her?”
Ryxin held his ground. Met his gaze without flinching. “Then why aren’t we?”
“Because that’s what they want.” Sylas forced the words through clenched teeth. “A public display. Proof that I’ve lost control. The moment I march an army into the lower fortress, challengers will circle. The council will convene. Vask and his faction will have exactly the ammunition they need to call for my removal.”
Vask. The name settled into place like a key in a lock. Like the final piece of a puzzle he should have seen completed days ago.
Ryxin’s eyes narrowed. The same calculation moved behind his gaze—slower than Sylas’s, weighted more toward violence than strategy, but arriving at the same destination.
“The Lux Priest.”