“If you say pull, it means something went very wrong topside,” Caleb adds. He’s already different from the man in the ranch house, harder, more contained, the corporate polish stripped back to show what’s underneath. Dorian, beside him, is the same boisterous presence, using humor to deflect tension.
“If something goes very wrong topside,” Mara says, “it means they’ve scrambled air response, and I need the ground team clear before two very expensive dragons get into a firefight over a meatpacking plant in south Texas.” She looks at Kael. “And if it gets worse than that—”
“It won’t,” Kael says.
“If it does.”
“Then I stop being reserve.”
She holds his eyes for a second longer than professional. Then she turns back to her screens. “Oh-seven-fifty. Ten minutes to window. Ground team moves on my mark.”
Jericho checks his weapon. Nadia checks hers. Merric, Rook, Sienna, Conner, Willow, Brenna, and I; we’re carrying blades and close-quarters tools, not firearms. Wolves in a facility full of corridors and locked doors don’t need range. We need speed and teeth.
I check my knife. The edge is clean. My hands are steady. The cramping in my belly has settled to a low hum that I’m ignoring.
“Ground team.” Mara’s voice in the earpiece. “Mark. Go.”
We go.
The drainage culvert is a concrete pipe three feet in diameter, running under the facility’s south perimeter fence. Jericho goes first; he fits, but barely, his shoulders scraping the sides. I follow. Then Conner, Rook, Brenna, Merric. Willow holds the entrance with Sienna.
The culvert stinks. Stale water, chemical runoff, the sourness of industrial drainage that hasn’t been flushed in years. My knees are in two inches of standing water. The concrete is rough under my palms. Ahead of me, Jericho moves with the economy of a man who knows exactly how far he has to go and exactly how much time he has to get there.
Three minutes. He said three minutes from the culvert entrance to the loading bay. I count the seconds in my head.
Light ahead. The culvert opens into a drainage grate at the floor level of the loading bay. Jericho stops and pulls the grate. The metal groans, and behind me, Rook inhales sharply.
“Clear,” Jericho whispers. He pulls himself through the opening and rolls to one side. I follow.
The loading bay is a concrete cavern. High ceiling. Loading dock along the east wall. Two vehicles — a panel van and a flatbed — parked near the dock doors. The fluorescent lighting is institutional. The air tastes recycled.
No guards. Jericho said the shift change pulls personnel from the loading bay to the main building for handoff briefings. Eight minutes of skeleton coverage. We’re four minutes in.
Conner comes through the grate. Then Rook and Brenna. Merric last, pulling himself up with a grunt that he muffles against his shoulder.
Brenna does a fast visual sweep of the bay — the dock, the vehicles, the doors — and jerks her chin at the far wall. Merric nods. He takes his position at the extraction point without a word. Between the two of them, they’ve set the exit plan in three seconds.
Jericho is already at the interior door. He presses the cloned keycard against the reader. Green light. Click. The door swings inward.
Willow and Sienna come through the culvert behind us. Willow straightens, and I watch her go still in the way she goes still when she’s reading something. Her eyes unfocus slightly.
“There are wolves down here,” she says. Quiet. “Below us. Magic. Three — maybe four signatures, faint. Something’s suppressing them.” She pauses. “The corridor has more capacity than that. The cells — there are more than they’re using. It feels like they’re waiting for more to come in.”
Brenna’s jaw sets. “We clear what’s here. Then we make sure there’s nothing left to put others into.”
We enter a corridor. Low ceiling, yellow light, the same institutional feel as elsewhere. Doors on both sides. Jericho moves fast, his footsteps surprisingly silent on the concrete. I match his pace. Behind me, Conner, Willow, and Rook spread to cover the rear. Merric holds the loading bay, our extraction point, the place we’ll funnel everyone through on the way out.
The second door has a manual lock. Jericho pulls a pick set from his vest and works the mechanism with the speed of a man who’s opened hundreds of these. Thirty seconds. The lock gives. The door opens onto a stairwell going down.
The stairwell smells different. Colder air rising from below. The chemical tang is stronger here, antiseptic with something metallic underneath it. My wolf stirs despite me trying to keep her calm. She knows this smell. She smelled it through Mia’s broadcast. The smell of a facility that processes wolves.
Down. One flight. The stairwell opens onto another corridor, narrower, colder, the ceiling lower. The lights here are dimmer. There are three doors on the left, heavy steel, observation slots at eye level. There’s one door on the right — larger, reinforced. An interrogation room.
Willow steps into the corridor and stops. Her hand goes to the wall. “He’s in there,” she murmurs. “The interrogation room.” Her voice is steady, but her face isn’t. “He’s alive. He’s… I can feel the suppression on him from here, but underneath it—” She stops and looks at me. “He’s in there.”
I nod, keeping my focus on what needs to happen next. The corridor isn’t empty. There’s a guard sitting in a chair at the end of the corridor, beside the interrogation room door. He’s got a coffee cup in one hand and his phone in the other, and he’s reading something on the screen. He looks up when we come through the stairwell door. For one second, his face registers what he’s seeing — five intruders in a detention corridor during shift change — and then Conner is on him.
Bet he’s cursing his YouTube addiction now.