Chapter 33
Damon
Campus is dead quiet.
Winter break means that the dorms are closed, leaving students with no choice but to head home.
The grounds feel like some abandoned movie set.
No students rushing between classes. No drunken frat boys heading home from a party or sporting event.
Even security limits their patrols. Just silence, which is the perfect cover for what we’re about to do.
“Alright,” Hunter says, keeping his voice low.
He, like the rest of us, is dressed in all black.
A backpack is strapped over his shoulders, filled with enough supplies to manage a boy scout troop for a week.
“While I was looking over the maps, I noticed this unmarked outbuilding.” He pushes aside a neatly manicured shrub near the east quad, revealing a rusting metal door.
“This is close to where Arianette would have been walking after she left her dance class.”
Hunter reaches for the doorknob and it gives easily.
“That should be locked,” he notes, then rationalizes. “Could’ve been busted for a while and no one noticed.”
He slips inside and I follow, then Mateo, Slade, and Jace bring up the rear.
We’d chosen the three others to be involved in this mission, but already I wonder if the twins’ size will be a problem.
The space is tight, even more so when the heavy metal door clangs shut behind us with a sound that echoes down the concrete stairwell like a warning shot.
Hunter flicks on his heavy-duty flashlight, guiding us down the stairs.
When we reach the bottom, the beam slices straight through the dark, landing on long-abandoned metal utility boxes.
“Looks like the university upgraded the systems about a decade ago and moved them over by the athletic building, and everyone forgot about them.”
Well, maybe not everyone.
I follow right on his heels, boots scraping on the gritty floor.
He searches around for a bit, light skimming over the walls.
Then he grunts and steps forward, fingers finding a latch, and another door opens.
The air hits me immediately–cold, damp, thick with the smell of wet brick, mold and trapped earth.
“Jesus,” Slade breathes behind me. “Feels like we’re walking into one of the crypts.”
“If only,” Jace mutters. “The crypts we own. This is not our territory.”
Hunter has the old blueprints half-unrolled in one hand, flashlight tucked under his armpit while he scans them.
“These tunnels stretch under the whole campus and half the city.
We know everything to the North is rubble, completely inaccessible due to the explosions.
The Barons' catacombs have always been maintained, but Strong Manor sits right on top of a major junction that connects the passageways to the university.”
Where we are now.
“The passage underneath has been sealed for decades,” he continues, “but it’s obvious someone’s been down here. Recently.”
I glance at him. “How do you know?”
He stops at a fork in the tunnel and swings his light down.
Footprints press into the thin layer of mud on the floor. Multiple sets. Distinct treads. They’re not fresh; the edges are a lighter shade of brown, but I doubt it ever fully dries out down here.
“Someone’s been using these tunnels like their own private freeway,” I say, voice grim. The question is: what have they been transporting?
We keep moving.
The deeper we go, the tighter the passages get.
The ceiling lowers until I have to duck my head in places.
Roots have punched through the brickwork in spots, dangling like bony fingers brushing the top of my skull.
Our flashlight beams carve long, jittery shadows across the walls–shadows that always seem to shift just when I look away.
About twenty minutes in, Jace stops short.
“Yo… look at this.”
He sweeps his light across a shallow alcove carved into the wall. Empty beer cans–the shitty, watery kind from the gas station–litter the ground. Cigarette butts are everywhere. Dozens. Some still look relatively fresh, paper pale and not deteriorated.
“Someone’s been hanging out down here,” Mateo says, crouching to inspect them. “These smokes aren’t ancient. Couple weeks old, maybe.”
Slade kicks at a crumpled chip bag and something scurries under the light. “Holy shit!”
My gut tightens. “What the hell was that?”
Jace is down on his knees, brushing aside the trash with gloved hands. The hair on the back of my neck rises and I glance over my shoulder, uneasy all of a sudden. When I look back he’s got something pinched between his fingers.
“Gotcha.” He grins at the squirming beetle.
“Is that–” I squint.
“A stag beetle,” Hunter says, already holding a small container under the beetle’s body. Jace drops it in and Hunter snaps the lid. “Just like the ones in Kelsey’s mouth.”
Mateo winces at the memory and after another quick look for clues, Hunter continues walking, eyes flicking between the map and the path ahead. We push deeper, heading toward what we think will be the direction of Strong Manor.
The air grows heavier the further we go, stale and thick, like breathing through wet cloth. The tunnels split and branch constantly. According to the blueprints, some veer toward the dorms and some snake beneath the stadium, while others angle toward Greek Row. It’s a fucking labyrinth.
Then Hunter stops dead.
“Shit,” he whispers.
We crowd in behind him.
The tunnel ahead was clearly blocked with bricks on the map. But now? A big section of the barrier has been deliberately smashed open. Someone took a sledgehammer, or something heavier, and carved out a hole wide enough for a grown man to crawl through.
Hunter shines his light into the gap and says, “Someone beat us to it.”
On the other side… more footprints. Fresh drag marks gouged into the dirt. And something that makes my blood turn to ice.
A single dirty hair tie.
Small. Delicate. The kind a girl might wear to class or a party.
No one speaks for a long second.
“Someone’s moving girls through here,” I say quietly, the words tasting like metal. “It’s quiet. No cameras. No witnesses on the surface.”
Mateo nods. “One minute they’re there and the next… poof.”
Hunter looks back at me, his normally pale eyes dark and hard. “Is this how they’ve been doing it? They’re not grabbing girls off the street. They’re taking them underground.”
I stare at the broken wall, at the hair tie lying innocently in the dirt like a dropped breadcrumb.
My pulse hammers in my ears.
Whoever’s behind this has turned these tunnels into their personal hunting ground.
Hunter bends and picks up the hair tie with a gloved hand. He pulls out a small plastic bag and tucks it inside. “The house should be just through there,” he says. “Well, right above us.”
We crawl through the jagged hole in the old barrier one by one, flashlights cutting narrow tunnels of light through the dust. Jace and Slade struggle, having to twist their wide shoulders to get through.
The air on the other side is worse, thicker and colder, like the house above us is breathing down our necks.
It’s weird to think that Strong Manor looms somewhere overhead, burned and forgotten.
Hunter goes first again, map folded away, trusting memory and instinct.
I’m right behind him. The passage narrows until we’re moving single file, all of us having to duck.
My flashlight beam catches on something metallic ahead, a rusted iron ladder bolted to the wall, leading straight up through a broken grate.
“What’s that?” Slade asks.
Hunter pauses, shining his light upward. “If I’ve got my navigation correct, that is direct access into the basement of the Manor.”
We’re not here to explore the Manor. We’re here to map the tunnels and look for any evidence that could connect back to the missing girls, but the ladder stretches into the unknown. Into a place that may have answers to different secrets.
“I think we should check it out,” Hunter says, confirming my thoughts.
I grab his shoulder, squeeze once. “You and me first. Mateo, Slade and Jace, you stay here. Watch the tunnel behind us. If anything moves, you whistle twice.”
They nod, faces tight. No arguments, like they understand that this area is part of our Baroness and that it is for us, and only us, to discover.
Hunter climbs first. I follow. The ladder groans under our weight, flakes of rust raining down on my face. At the top, Hunter shoulders the grate aside–it screeches like a dying animal–and hauls himself up into darkness. I’m up right after him.
The basement smells sterile, like the ash and water from above haven’t touched it. We land in a low-ceilinged space. Flashlights sweep across cracked walls, exposed rebar, and piles of fallen plaster.
There’s a doorway ahead–simple, no frame, just a rectangular hole punched through solid concrete. Hunter nods toward it. We move together, silently.
The room beyond stops me cold.
It’s not a bedroom. Not really.
Rows of narrow cots line both walls, small, child-sized metal frames rusted at the joints.
Thin mattresses, stained dark in places, still sit on most of them.
At the foot of each bed is a tiny wooden trunk, the kind you’d see in an old orphanage photo, lids closed, latches corroded shut.
No personal touches. No posters. No toys.
Just beds and the trunks, surrounded by concrete.
The walls are poured concrete too, thick and windowless, unyielding. Just four solid walls, a low ceiling, and that single steel door on the far end.
Hunter sweeps his light across the cots. “Jesus.”
I step forward, boots crunching on grit. My flashlight lingers on one of the trunks. The wood is swollen from damp, but I can still make out faint initials carved into the lid–small, childish scratches: E. L. Another one: M. R.
They don’t match any of the missing girls, but my stomach still twists.