Until he found her.
The court wanted to see how the Alpha King would respond to having his mate taken. They expected fury—public, destructive, the kind that proved human females had weakened Yzefrxyl leadership. They expected political advantage, ammunition for challenges and coups and all the petty power games that had defined this fortress since the first stone was laid.
Let them expect.
Sylas pushed away from the map and moved toward the chamber’s hidden exit. The torches guttered as he passed, shadows stretching to meet him like old friends. In the public halls, he would be the measured king—deliberating, consulting, appearing to gather information through proper channels while actually accomplishing nothing useful.
But in the dark places beneath the fortress, where the light didn’t reach and the old ways still held power, he would be something else entirely.
Something that Vask and his faithful would learn to fear.
His claws flexed, and somewhere deep in his chest, where the bond should have hummed with Elsa’s presence, the hollow space filled with something darker. Something patient. Something that had ruled this fortress before mercy became an option, before politics softened the edges of power, before anything existed except the hunt and the kill and the satisfaction of tearing apart whatever stood between a predator and his chosen prey.
The enemy wanted to see the Alpha King lose control.
They were about to learn the difference between losing control and choosing to let the leash slip.
27
Elsa
The bond woke her like a hand around her throat.
Elsa jerked upright in the darkness, gasping, her pulse slamming against her ribs hard enough to bruise. For three days—or what felt like three days in this lightless hell—the connection to Sylas had been a void. Cold. Silent. Whatever chemical they’d used to knock her out had severed the thread so completely she’d almost convinced herself she’d imagined it.
But now—
Heat flooded through her chest. Not warmth—heat. The kind that came with rage so pure it burned clean. She pressed a hand to her sternum, half-expecting to feel flames licking between her ribs.
Sylas.
The name rose unbidden, and with it came sensation. Not her own. His fury, bleeding through whatever distance and stone and chemistry separated them. His focus, sharp enough to cut. And underneath it all, something that felt like desperation—the clawing, feral need of a predator whose mate had been taken.
“Elsa?” Mia’s voice came from somewhere to her left, thick with exhaustion. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” The lie scraped out automatically. “Bad dream.”
She closed her eyes and reached for the connection. Not the passive awareness she’d grown accustomed to—that gentle hum of his presence at the edge of her mind—but something active. Deliberate. She pushed against the muffled silence the way she’d push against a jammed door, throwing her weight into it.
I’m here. I’m alive. Underground, near the pits. Can you hear me?
Nothing. The void swallowed her words like stone swallowed sound.
She tried again. Harder. Let the fear she’d been boxing away flood through the bond instead—fear for herself, for Mia, for Ari, for Rowan and Milo rotting somewhere in these tunnels. Let him feel what she felt. Let it find him.
The response came like lightning through water—fragmented, distorted, but there.
Images first. A war chamber she didn’t recognize, stone table carved with tactical maps. Ryxin pacing like something caged, his black fur bristling. Other Yzefrxyl in dark armor, the kind meant for fighting rather than ceremony. Planning. They were planning.
Then sounds, or the memory of sounds. Alarms. The wail of emergency sirens she’d heard during the kidnapping, but different—deliberate. Staged. A sequence.
First alarm draws them away.
The thought wasn’t hers. Wasn’t quite his either—more like meaning pressed directly into her brain, bypassing language entirely. She felt him pushing, felt the effort it cost him to force coherent information through whatever was dampening their connection.
Second alarm. That’s when we move.
She tried to send something back—where, how, what do I do—but the connection was already guttering. The chemical residue in her system fought the bond like oil fighting water, and she felt him slipping away.