“Tell me,” Elsa pressed. “What’s happened to them?”
“They’re in the pits still.” Mia’s voice came out barely above a whisper. “Both of them. Rowan and Milo. They’ve been there since we arrived.”
The words landed like a blow to the sternum.
The pits. Elsa had heard the word before—fragments of conversation, the way guards’ eyes flickered toward the lower levels when they thought no one was watching. She’d assumed it was a holding area. A prison. Something unpleasant but survivable.
“What are the pits?”
Ari answered this time, her voice stripped of its earlier composure. “Labor. Combat. Whatever the fortress needs that no one else wants to do. The males there work until they drop or fight until they can’t. Most of them don’t survive long enough to earn their way out.”
Most of them don’t survive.
Elsa’s cup trembled in her hands. She set it down carefully, watching the amber liquid ripple against ceramic.
“How long?” The question scraped out past the tightness in her throat. “How long have they been there?”
“Since we were separated.” Mia wrapped her arms around her knees, folding in on herself. “Yarx told me. He didn’t want to—I could see it hurt him to say it—but I kept asking about the others, and eventually...”
Since the beginning. Endless days of forced labor, of violence, of whatever horrors waited in those lower levels. While Elsa had been navigating court ceremonies and bonding rituals and Sylas’s devastating attention, Rowan and Milo had been paying a price she hadn’t even known existed.
Guilt hit her like a wave. Irrational, maybe—she’d been a captive too, surviving her own impossible circumstances—but the weight of it settled into her bones anyway. She’d been so focused on her own survival, on understanding the rules ofthis alien court, that she’d let herself believe the others were somewhere safe. Somewhere bearable.
She’d been wrong.
“Are they still alive?” The words came out flat. Factual. The navigator in her demanding data before she could process anything else.
“As of three days ago.” Mia’s voice cracked. “Yarx checked. He said they’re holding on, but—”
“Three days is a long time in the pits,” Ari finished. “Things can change fast down there.”
Elsa stared at the table. The warmth of the room felt obscene now, a cruelty she didn’t deserve when people from her crash—people she’d been chained beside in that throne room—were fighting for their lives in some underground hell.
“We can’t leave them there.”
The statement fell into the silence like a stone into still water.
Mia looked up sharply. Ari’s expression didn’t change, but something sparked behind her eyes—hope or fear, impossible to tell which.
“Elsa...” Mia started.
“We can’t.” Elsa’s voice hardened. “I don’t care what it takes. I don’t care what I have to do or who I have to ask. Rowan stood between me and that throne room. Milo fed us on the ship before everything went to hell. They’re ours. We don’t leave our people in places like that.”
“You think Sylas will let you—”
“I think Sylas has given me more access than he should have.” Elsa met Ari’s gaze steadily. “I think he arranged this hour because he knows I need allies who aren’t him. And I think if I play this right, I can get what I want through proper channels before I have to try anything else.”
“Properly first,” Ari echoed, something like approval threading through her voice. “And improperly if you have to.”
“Yes.”
Mia’s hands had stopped trembling. She stared at Elsa like she was seeing her for the first time—or maybe like she was seeing something she’d forgotten existed. Hope. Purpose. The idea that surviving wasn’t the same as accepting.
“What do you need from us?” Mia asked, her gaze moving between them. “What can we do without putting a target on ourselves too?”
“Information. Everything you know about the pits—how to get access, who controls the guards, what the official process looks like for releasing someone. Ari, you understand the court better than I do. What approach is least likely to trigger Vask or Xar’s attention?”
Ari considered this, her head tilting slightly—a gesture that reminded Elsa of the way Ryxin moved, which meant she’d been in his orbit long enough to pick up his mannerisms. “Frame it as mercy, not politics. You’re the Alpha King’s claimed femalepet, showing concern for lesser captives. It reads as softness, not threat.”