One last pulse of heat. One last surge of that desperate, possessive fury that she was only beginning to understand.
I’m coming. Be ready.
Then silence. The cold void returning, but not complete this time. Cracks remained. Fissures where his presence leaked through like light through broken stone.
Elsa opened her eyes in the darkness and breathed.
Second alarm. When the second alarm sounded, they moved. She didn’t know what that meant—didn’t know if rescue was coming or if she’d be expected to find her own way out. But she had a signal now. A marker to watch for.
And somewhere above her, separated by stone and guards and the weight of an entire fortress, a king was hunting.
She would be ready when he arrived.
Hours later—orwhat felt like hours; time had lost meaning in the endless dark—Vask’s guards came for them.
The pit perimeter smelled like death.
Not the clean, sharp scent of recent violence—this was older, thicker, the accumulated residue of suffering that had soaked into stone over generations. Elsa breathed through her mouth as Vask’s guards marched them down the final corridor, but even that didn’t help. The taste coated her tongue, settled in the back of her throat like a warning she couldn’t swallow away.
The passage opened into a junction chamber. Larger than the holding cells they’d been kept in, with multiple corridorsbranching off like the spokes of some dark wheel. Torches guttered in iron sconces, casting shadows that jumped and twisted against walls carved with symbols Elsa didn’t recognize—old markings, ceremonial maybe, worn smooth by time and countless paws that had brushed against them in passing.
A metal grate dominated the center of the floor. Through its bars, she could see movement below—shapes shuffling in dim light, the clank of chains, the rhythmic thud of labor that never stopped. The pits themselves, laid out beneath her feet like a wound in the fortress’s foundations.
Vask raised a hand, and the guards halted.
“You wanted proof,” he said, his rust-colored eyes fixed on Elsa with something that might have been amusement. “Here it is.”
He gestured toward the grate, and one of his males produced a key—smaller than the ones they’d used on the cell doors, more ornate. The lock clicked. The grate swung open on hinges that had been oiled recently, deliberately maintained for exactly this kind of access.
“Bring them,” Vask ordered.
He didn’t move himself. Didn’t need to. The male who stepped forward was built for this kind of work—taller than Vask, broader, his armor scarred and dented from years of violence...
“Krix.” Vask gestured toward the grate. “Retrieve our guests.”
The enforcer’s lips peeled back from his teeth—not quite a smile, but close...
Guards descended through the opening, disappearing into the darkness below. Elsa counted their footsteps—fourteen, fifteen, sixteen—before the sounds became too muffled to track. Behind her, Mia’s breathing had gone shallow and fast again, the panic she’d managed to control threatening to claw its way back to the surface. Ari stood rigid at Elsa’s shoulder, her boundhands pressed flat against her thighs, every line of her body radiating the kind of stillness that came before violence.
They waited.
The torches hissed and sputtered. Water dripped somewhere in the distance, that same arrhythmic pattern Elsa had been tracking since they first descended into the under-fortress. She focused on it, letting the counting settle her heartbeat, grounding herself in data when everything else threatened to spin out of control.
Then—voices from below. Grunts of effort. The scrape of bodies being hauled up rough-hewn steps.
Krix emerged first, one massive paw wrapped around Rowan’s arm, dragging the engineer like he weighed nothing. The guards followed with Milo between them.
Elsa’s chest seized.
Rowan. Milo.
They looked worse than she’d imagined, and she’d imagined terrible things.
Rowan’s engineer’s hands—those clever, scarred hands that had kept theStardancer’snavigation systems running long past their expiration—hung limp at his sides, the fingers swollen and misshapen. His face was a map of bruises in various stages of healing, one eye nearly swollen shut, his beard matted with what might have been blood or dirt or both. But he was breathing. Standing, barely, with guards supporting most of his weight.
Milo was thinner than Rowan—he’d always been slight, built for delicate work rather than manual labor—and the pits had carved away whatever softness remained. His cheekbones jutted sharp beneath skin gone gray from insufficient light, but it was his hands that told the real story. His chef’s hands—those quick, precise instruments that had once plated dishes like art—were blackened at the fingertips, the skin blistered and weeping where something had burned through layer after layer of flesh.
Not labor damage. Something else. Something deliberate.