His father would have gone to the grid. Would have sacrificed the mate for the realm. Would have called it duty.
Sylas wasn’t his father.
“Dren.” Sylas opened his eyes. “Take two Sabers. Get to the grid junction at sector seven. Assess the breach. If it’s real, hold the line until reinforcements arrive. If it’s staged—”
“Then someone dies for wasting my time.” Dren’s grin was all teeth. “Understood.”
“Keth, Vor. You’re with me.” Sylas moved forward, past the junction, toward the guards who had started to shift at the sound of alarms above. “We get the females. We get them out. Nothing else matters.”
“The council will call this abandonment of duty,” Keth said. Not arguing. Just observing.
“The council can choke on their duty.”
They hit the guards hard and fast.
Sylas took the first two before they could draw weapons—claws through the throat of one, momentum carrying him into the chest of the second. Blood sprayed hot against his face. The taste of copper flooded his mouth.
Keth and Vor moved like extensions of his will, flanking left and right, cutting down guards who were still reaching for blades. These weren’t Sabers. They were pit enforcers, brawlers used to terrorizing prisoners, not fighting predators who’d been killing since before the current fortress was upgraded and built on top of the old ruins.
Twelve seconds. Eight bodies. The corridor fell silent except for the distant wail of alarms and the wet sound of the last guard trying to breathe through a collapsed throat.
Blood cooled on Sylas’s claws. Some distant part of him noted that this was the first kill he’d made personally in over a decade—Alpha Kings commanded violence, they didn’t deliver it directly. The council would have opinions about that too.
He found he didn’t care.
Sylas stepped over the dying male without looking down. The door ahead was reinforced—pit-standard security, meant to keep prisoners in rather than invaders out. His claws found the seam where metal met stone.
He pulled.
Metal screamed. Hinges tore free from ancient mortar. The door came away in his hands, and he threw it aside like it weighed nothing.
The chamber beyond was exactly what he’d expected. Cold stone walls. Iron rings set into the floor. The stink of fear and waste and unwashed bodies that spoke of days spent in darkness.
Three figures huddled against the far wall. Two dark heads—Mia and Ari—and one crown of frost-pale hair that caught the emergency lighting like a signal fire.
Elsa.
She was looking at him. Not with fear—he’d expected fear—but with something fiercer. Recognition. Relief. And underneath it, a defiance that hadn’t broken despite days in this hole.
“About time.” Her voice was hoarse. Rough with disuse or screaming, he couldn’t tell. “I was starting to think you’d gotten lost.”
Something cracked in his chest. Not pain—the opposite of pain. Something warm and terrible that had no place in a rescue operation, no place in the middle of a manufactured crisis, no place in the heart of a king who had just chosen a human over his fortress.
He moved toward her.
The strike came from the shadows.
Vask stepped out of an alcove Sylas hadn’t seen—a priest’s robe swirling around him, a ceremonial staff in his hands that was anything but ceremonial. The blow caught Elsa across the face before Sylas could close the distance, snapping her head to the side with a crack that echoed off stone walls.
She crumpled. Blood bloomed from her split lip, her cheekbone, the cut above her eye where the staff’s edge had torn flesh.
And the bond—
The bondexploded.
Three days of chemical silence, once sealed behind steam-fogged glass, shattered like brittle ice on a frozen lake. Elsa’s pain flooded through him—sharp and bright andreal—and beneath it, her fury, her fear, her stubborn refusal to stay down even as her body tried to collapse.
The bond roared back to life with a vengeance that staggered him. He tasted copper in his mouth—her blood, phantom sensation bleeding through their connection. Felt the throbbingache where the staff had connected. Felt her anger, incandescent and sharp, cutting through the pain like a blade.