Chapter 27
Elsa
The bond woke her like a hand around her throat.
Elsa jerked upright in the darkness, gasping, her pulse slamming against her ribs hard enough to bruise.
For three days—or what felt like three days in this lightless hell—the connection to Sylas had been a void.
Cold. Silent. Whatever chemical they’d used to knock her out had severed the thread so completely she’d almost convinced herself she’d imagined it.
But now—
Heat flooded through her chest. Not warmth—heat. The kind that came with rage so pure it burned clean. She pressed a hand to her sternum, half-expecting to feel flames licking between her ribs.
Sylas.
The name rose unbidden, and with it came sensation.
Not her own. His fury, bleeding through whatever distance and stone and chemistry separated them.
His focus, sharp enough to cut. And underneath it all, something that felt like desperation—the clawing, feral need of a predator whose mate had been taken.
“Elsa?” Mia’s voice came from somewhere to her left, thick with exhaustion. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” The lie scraped out automatically. “Bad dream.”
She closed her eyes and reached for the connection.
Not the passive awareness she’d grown accustomed to—that gentle hum of his presence at the edge of her mind—but something active.
Deliberate. She pushed against the muffled silence the way she’d push against a jammed door, throwing her weight into it.
I’m here. I’m alive. Underground, near the pits. Can you hear me?
Nothing. The void swallowed her words like stone swallowed sound.
She tried again. Harder. Let the fear she’d been boxing away flood through the bond instead—fear for herself, for Mia, for Ari, for Rowan and Milo rotting somewhere in these tunnels. Let him feel what she felt. Let it find him.
The response came like lightning through water—fragmented, distorted, but there.
Images first. A war chamber she didn’t recognize, stone table carved with tactical maps. Ryxin pacing like something caged, his black fur bristling. Other Yzefrxyl in dark armor, the kind meant for fighting rather than ceremony. Planning. They were planning.
Then sounds, or the memory of sounds. Alarms. The wail of emergency sirens she’d heard during the kidnapping, but different—deliberate. Staged. A sequence.
First alarm draws them away.
The thought wasn’t hers. Wasn’t quite his either—more like meaning pressed directly into her brain, bypassing language entirely. She felt him pushing, felt the effort it cost him to force coherent information through whatever was dampening their connection.
Second alarm. That’s when we move.
She tried to send something back—where, how, what do I do—but the connection was already guttering. The chemical residue in her system fought the bond like oil fighting water, and she felt him slipping away.
One last pulse of heat. One last surge of that desperate, possessive fury that she was only beginning to understand.
I’m coming. Be ready.
Then silence. The cold void returning, but not complete this time. Cracks remained. Fissures where his presence leaked through like light through broken stone.
Elsa opened her eyes in the darkness and breathed.
Second alarm. When the second alarm sounded, they moved. She didn’t know what that meant—didn’t know if rescue was coming or if she’d be expected to find her own way out. But she had a signal now. A marker to watch for.
And somewhere above her, separated by stone and guards and the weight of an entire fortress, a king was hunting.
She would be ready when he arrived.
Hours later—or what felt like hours; time had lost meaning in the endless dark—Vask’s guards came for them.
The pit perimeter smelled like death.
Not the clean, sharp scent of recent violence—this was older, thicker, the accumulated residue of suffering that had soaked into stone over generations.
Elsa breathed through her mouth as Vask’s guards marched them down the final corridor, but even that didn’t help.
The taste coated her tongue, settled in the back of her throat like a warning she couldn’t swallow away.
The passage opened into a junction chamber.
Larger than the holding cells they’d been kept in, with multiple corridors branching off like the spokes of some dark wheel.
Torches guttered in iron sconces, casting shadows that jumped and twisted against walls carved with symbols Elsa didn’t recognize—old markings, ceremonial maybe, worn smooth by time and countless paws that had brushed against them in passing.
A metal grate dominated the center of the floor. Through its bars, she could see movement below—shapes shuffling in dim light, the clank of chains, the rhythmic thud of labor that never stopped. The pits themselves, laid out beneath her feet like a wound in the fortress’s foundations.
Vask raised a hand, and the guards halted.
“You wanted proof,” he said, his rust-colored eyes fixed on Elsa with something that might have been amusement. “Here it is.”
He gestured toward the grate, and one of his males produced a key—smaller than the ones they’d used on the cell doors, more ornate. The lock clicked. The grate swung open on hinges that had been oiled recently, deliberately maintained for exactly this kind of access.
“Bring them,” Vask ordered.
He didn’t move himself. Didn’t need to. The male who stepped forward was built for this kind of work—taller than Vask, broader, his armor scarred and dented from years of violence...
“Krix.” Vask gestured toward the grate. “Retrieve our guests.”
The enforcer’s lips peeled back from his teeth—not quite a smile, but close...
Guards descended through the opening, disappearing into the darkness below.
Elsa counted their footsteps—fourteen, fifteen, sixteen—before the sounds became too muffled to track.
Behind her, Mia’s breathing had gone shallow and fast again, the panic she’d managed to control threatening to claw its way back to the surface.
Ari stood rigid at Elsa’s shoulder, her bound hands pressed flat against her thighs, every line of her body radiating the kind of stillness that came before violence.
They waited.
The torches hissed and sputtered. Water dripped somewhere in the distance, that same arrhythmic pattern Elsa had been tracking since they first descended into the under-fortress.
She focused on it, letting the counting settle her heartbeat, grounding herself in data when everything else threatened to spin out of control.
Then—voices from below. Grunts of effort. The scrape of bodies being hauled up rough-hewn steps.
Krix emerged first, one massive paw wrapped around Rowan’s arm, dragging the engineer like he weighed nothing. The guards followed with Milo between them.
Elsa’s chest seized.
Rowan. Milo.
They looked worse than she’d imagined, and she’d imagined terrible things.
Rowan’s engineer’s hands—those clever, scarred hands that had kept the Stardancer’s navigation systems running long past their expiration—hung limp at his sides, the fingers swollen and misshapen.
His face was a map of bruises in various stages of healing, one eye nearly swollen shut, his beard matted with what might have been blood or dirt or both.
But he was breathing. Standing, barely, with guards supporting most of his weight.
Milo was thinner than Rowan—he’d always been slight, built for delicate work rather than manual labor—and the pits had carved away whatever softness remained.
His cheekbones jutted sharp beneath skin gone gray from insufficient light, but it was his hands that told the real story.
His chef’s hands—those quick, precise instruments that had once plated dishes like art—were blackened at the fingertips, the skin blistered and weeping where something had burned through layer after layer of flesh.
Not labor damage. Something else. Something deliberate.
And his eyes, when they found Elsa’s face, still held something that looked like recognition. Like hope, despite everything this place had done to crush it out of him.
Krix released Rowan with a shove that sent the engineer sprawling. The guards dropped Milo beside him.
“They’ve been cooperative,” Krix reported to Vask. “The engineer’s blood shows promising markers. The cook—” He glanced at Milo’s ruined hands. “—requires more exposure before we can confirm the purification response.”
Elsa’s stomach clenched. Blood. Exposure. Purification.
Elsa started forward without thinking. One step, two—then a clawed hand closed around her upper arm, yanking her back hard enough to wrench her shoulder.
Pain flared, but she barely registered it.
All her attention was fixed on the two men sprawled at her feet, the crew members she’d failed to protect, the humans who’d been suffering in darkness while she navigated court politics and tactical ceremonies above.
“Elsa.” Rowan’s voice came out cracked, barely a whisper. He lifted his head from the stone, and the effort it cost him showed in every line of his battered face. “You’re...you’re alive.”
“I’m alive.” She kept her voice steady through sheer force of will. “So are you. Both of you.”
Milo made a sound that might have been a laugh, or a sob, or something in between. “Didn’t...didn’t think anyone was coming.”
“Enough.” Vask’s voice cut through the chamber, sharp and cold. “This isn’t a reunion. This is a demonstration.”
He moved between Elsa and the fallen men, blocking her view with his body.
Up close, in the flickering torchlight, she could see the ritual scars that marked his throat and jaw—deliberate patterns cut into fur and flesh, the visible proof of his devotion to Lux.
His robes rustled as he turned, addressing her like she was an audience rather than a prisoner.