Three days. Eighty-one hours of silence where the bond should have hummed. He’d stopped sleeping on the second night—every time he closed his eyes, he saw her face. Not terrified, never terrified. Defiant. Waiting for him to fail her.
They were close. Vor’s tracking had led them through maintenance shafts and forgotten corridors, past sealed chambers that hadn’t been opened since the last war, through the maze of the under-fortress that Vask’s faction had claimed as their own private kingdom.
“Fifty meters,” Vor breathed, barely a whisper. “The sedative residue is concentrated ahead. Three distinct trails—they’re keeping them together.”
Three females. Elsa. Mia. Ari. Still alive. Still recoverable.
The hollow space in his chest pulsed with something that wasn’t quite hope. Hope was too soft a word for what he felt. This was hunger. Need. The primal certainty that what had been taken from him was close enough to reclaim.
Sylas’s claws flexed against the stone wall. The strike team spread behind him—Keth and Dren and four other Sabers whose loyalty had been tested in blood rather than politics. No torches. No communication crystals that could be intercepted. Just predators moving through the dark toward prey that didn’t know it was already dead.
The corridor opened into a junction. Vor held up a fist. Stopped.
“Guards,” he mouthed. “Six. Maybe seven.”
Sylas rolled his shoulders. Six guards meant this was more than a temporary holding space. Vask had invested resources here, established a permanent operation under the fortress’s nose. The political implications could wait. The tactical reality was simpler: six enemies between him and his mate.
He was about to signal the advance when the first alarm screamed.
Not here—above. The sound filtered down through stone and metal, distorted but unmistakable. Emergency sirens. The kind that meant breach protocols.
“Fallen alert,” Keth growled. “Grid sector seven.”
Sector seven. The eastern perimeter. Far enough from the pits to draw defensive resources away, close enough to the residential quarters to demand an Alpha King’s attention.
Sylas’s jaw tightened. Too convenient. Too precisely timed.
A second alarm joined the first. Different pitch. Different location.
“Pit riot,” Vor said. “Level three. The labor crews—”
“Are being used as a distraction.” Sylas’s voice was flat. Calm. The kind of calm that came before violence. “Vask is forcing a response. He wants me visible, commanding the defense, proving I’m compromised by choosing the fortress over—”
A third alarm. This one closer, shrieking through the tunnels themselves.
Grid sabotage. The lights in the junction ahead flickered, died, flickered again. Emergency backups hummed to life with a sound like grinding bones.
Sylas’s claws dug into the stone wall hard enough to leave furrows. Three simultaneous crises. Three different response protocols that would require three different teams, three different command structures, three different commanders to coordinate effectively.
He had one team. One objective. And the entire fortress was now watching to see what he would sacrifice.
Manufactured chaos. A coordinated assault on every system that kept the fortress functioning, timed to the moment Sylas was closest to recovering what Vask had taken.
“My King.” Keth’s voice was careful. Measured. “The grid breach—if the barrier fails—”
“I know.”
The Moon Tear grid was the only thing standing between the fortress and the Fallen. If the sabotage was real—if the breach threat was genuine rather than staged—thousands would die. Every Yzefrxyl in the eastern quarter. Every pup and their family in the residential sectors. Everyone who depended on the barrier that his ancestors had built and his blood had maintained.
Sylas closed his eyes. In the dark behind his lids, he could see the tactical map of his fortress. The breach points. Theevacuation routes. The defensive positions that needed to be manned if the grid failed.
He could also see Elsa’s face. The defiance in her eyes when she’d refused to break. The way her chin lifted when she was afraid but wouldn’t show it.
A choice. That’s what this was. Vask had engineered a scenario where there was no correct answer—only reveals of priority. If Sylas went to the grid, he proved he valued his realm over his mate. If he continued toward Elsa, he proved he’d sacrifice his people for a human.
Either way, Vask won.
Sylas thought of his father. The old Alpha had ruled with calculation—every choice weighed against political advantage, every decision filtered through the lens of what the council would think, what the factions would say, what legacy would survive.