Milo.
Thinner than she remembered. Gaunt, really, his cheeks hollow and his skin carrying a grayish pallor that spoke of too little light and too little food for too long. But alive. Breathing. Being dragged somewhere instead of left to rot in whatever hole had held him for the past weeks.
She remembered him from the Stardancer. The sous chef who’d smuggled extra rations to the navigation crew when the captain cut their food allowances for questioning his decisions. The quiet one who kept his head down and his opinions to himself, but always seemed to be in the right place when someone needed help. He’d made her coffee once—real coffee, hoarded from the ship’s dwindling stores—when she’d been up for thirty-six hours straight charting a path through debris that shouldn’t have been there.
Now he was a shadow of that person. Hollowed out. Used up. Dragged through darkness by creatures who saw him as nothing more than labor.
His head lolled toward the cell as they passed. For a fraction of a second—less than a heartbeat—his eyes met hers through the bars. Recognition flickered. Surprise. Something that might have been hope before exhaustion smothered it.
His lips moved. No sound, just a shape. Her name, maybe. Or a question. Or a prayer.
Then he was past them, dragged around a corner, swallowed by the darkness beyond.
“Elsa?” Mia’s voice came from behind her, trembling with fear she was trying to hide. “What did you see?”
Elsa didn’t turn from the window. Didn’t trust her expression. Didn’t trust the storm of emotion churning in her chest—relief and fury and determination coiling together into something that felt like a blade waiting to be drawn.
“Proof,” she said quietly. “They’re close.”
Ari moved to the window, her shoulder brushing Elsa’s as she peered into the corridor. “The labor pits are that direction. They move workers through these passages when they don’t want them seen by the main fortress.”
“Milo.” Elsa forced the name out past the tightness in her throat. “They just dragged Milo past this cell. He saw me.”
Silence.
Then Ari exhaled slowly, and Elsa recognized the sound. Not defeat. Calculation. The noise someone made when a situation suddenly became more complicated and more opportunity-rich at the same time.
“If they’re moving workers through here, that means this section connects to the main pit access. Which means...” Ari trailed off, working through the implications. “Rowan might be even closer than we thought. The engineering crews work the lower systems. Those conduits run right beneath us.”
Elsa pressed her palm against the cold bars. One hundred eighteen steps from their original cell to this one. Left, right, down. A section where the floor changed texture. The hum of machinery that grew louder as they descended. A gate that sounded different from the others—older hinges, heavier mechanism.
She was building a map. Not just for escape, but for extraction. For the moment when opportunity aligned with capability and she could do something more than survive. For Milo. For Rowan, somewhere in these tunnels with his scarredengineer’s hands and his stubborn refusal to give up on broken systems. For every human the Yzefrxyl had taken and thrown into darkness.
“We’re not dying in this hole.” She said it quietly, a promise more than a statement. The words felt solid in her mouth, weighted with the kind of certainty that came from making a decision rather than accepting a fate. “And neither are they.”
Mia’s hand found hers in the darkness. Cold fingers, trembling, but gripping with strength that surprised them both. Ari’s shoulder pressed warm against her arm—solid, steady, the presence of someone who had made the same calculation and arrived at the same conclusion.
Three human women in a cell designed for creatures twice their size, surrounded by enemies who saw them as tools at best and obstacles at worst.
But they weren’t alone. They weren’t helpless. They weren’t the terrified survivors who had stumbled out of a crashed escape vessel weeks ago, too shocked to do anything but be herded into captivity.
They had information now. They had each other.
And somewhere above them, a king was hunting. Elsa could feel him through the bond—distant but drawing closer, fury and focus bleeding through the muffled connection like light through cracks in stone. He was coming. Whether for her or for the throne they’d threatened by taking her, it didn’t matter.
What mattered was being ready when he arrived.
26
Sylas
The war chamber felt too large without an army to fill it.
Sylas stood at the head of the stone table, claws scraping the ancient surface as he surveyed the four males who had answered his summons. Not the full war council. Not the commanders who attended every strategic briefing and reported back to factions whose loyalties shifted with the political winds. These were different. Handpicked. Tested in blood rather than ceremony.
Ryxin prowled the chamber’s perimeter, restless energy radiating from every coiled muscle. His tail swept behind him in sharp arcs, the spines along its ridge catching torchlight each time he passed the wall sconces. He hadn’t stopped moving since they’d left the corridor where Elsa’s scent trail had gone cold. Couldn’t stop. The same fury that clawed at Sylas’s chest had sunk its teeth into his brother and refused to let go.
“These are the ones?” Ryxin’s voice came out rough, dismissive. He didn’t look at the assembled males. Didn’t trust himself to assess them calmly.