10. Gracie
Gracie
The sewers beneath Grimfur Skulk smelled like rot.
Not just organic decay but something distinctly metallic, almost chemical, coming from the putrid water that rushed under the grates we used as a walkway.
I had given up on breathing through my nose about ten minutes into our silent journey, but now every short breath coated the back of my tongue.
The dark pressed close around us, the ceiling so low in some stretches that my mates had to duck.
Everything about the place kept my wolf on edge, pacing with ears flat and a low growl threatening to break out.
Thankfully my mates and the soldiers with us were focused on our route, so all I had to focus on was moving one foot in front of the other.
It couldn’t be much longer until we reached the surface…right?
When the iron grate appeared ahead—dim gray light leaking around its edges—I felt my whole body exhale before I consciously decided to.
Ravik eased it open, and my eyes closed in relief as cool air hit my face. I surfaced as fast as I could into the pre-dawn quiet of the residential streets. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized just how much being down there had sent me into a panic.
While not exactly the same, flashes of the Cold Moon Pack barracks played violently through my mind.
“This is it.” Basir’s voice was void of emotion, but I could feel everything that he was hiding.
My gaze moved from him, noting both Ravik and Thornar clocking his expression, before I looked at the city around us.
It was nothing like Ironsun—nothing like any of the territories we’d visited so far—and that was more clear now than when we’d approached from a distance.
The first time I’d woken in Ironsun, I’d admired how the steel and stone of the city reached upward just like the airy mountains that surrounded it, but this place…
this place pressed down in every way possible.
The buildings on either side of the narrow street crowded in on us, so close together they almost leaned on one another.
In fact, they were completely leaning on each other.
I eyed them cautiously, trying to convince myself that if they’d remained standing this long they weren’t likely to fall on us.
The stone underfoot was worn smooth in the center from decades of foot traffic, broken uneven edges at the curb where no one had bothered to maintain it.
Iron fixtures clung haphazardly to sagging brick walls, the lanterns casting just enough amber light to make the shadows between them look foreboding.
The air carried a thick burning scent, as if a fire had been burning in the city for centuries.
My wolf took stock of the world around us as Ravik’s hand pressed to my back, a grounding weight while the last of the soldiers cleared the tunnel. Thornar moved in close behind me, protective and steady, so I could let my attention settle on Basir.
He moved ahead silently, but it wasn’t his usual quiet. I knew his stillness—coiled, watchful, the look he got when he was thinking three steps ahead. This was different, and it worried me.
We’d been walking for ten minutes when Basir came to a hard stop, simply going still in the middle of the street without a word. The soldiers rippled to a stop behind the four of us as Ravik threw up a signal.
So far we hadn’t come across anyone from the city, no one leaving the buildings or moving to start their day. The quiet was so intense it surprised me when it was finally broken by Basir.
“They’ve expanded.” His voice was low, directed only at the three of us. “When I was running with Cinder Ring, they operated out of the cisterns beneath the southern quarter.” He paused, his jaw tightening. “They’re not just there anymore. That mark means they’re above ground now.”
I followed Basir’s gaze to the building on our left.
It looked the same as every other building we’d passed—stone, iron fixtures, dark windows—except for the mark burned into the doorframe.
Small and deliberate, a ring charred into the wood, old enough that it had gone gray at the edges.
Easy to miss if you didn’t know what you were looking for.
Basir knew exactly what he was looking for.
Ravik looked at the mark, then at Basir. “Means they’ve expanded? Grown larger?”
“Large enough to afford not to hide.” Darkness moved across Basir’s expression.
“That’s not a small shift. They’d been around for over three decades when I was here, and they still hadn’t gone aboveground.
So if that’s changed in the last ten years, it means whatever they’ve been supplying Graeme and Ivan has given them enough leverage to surface. ”
Ravik’s gaze cut to Basir and held there, a look that carried a heavy sense of understanding. I could feel through the bond that Ravik wanted to know if Basir would be alright, if he could handle this. Basir answered with a short nod.
“Close?” Thornar asked.
“Two streets east.” Basir tapped a sign next to the ring. It was a simple arrow, with two vertical cuts through it.
Ravik nodded to our path forward. “Let’s move. Let’s at least get eyes on their location and then find the others.” The rebellion.
The warehouse district opened up two streets east exactly like Basir said it would, the buildings growing wider and lower, the spaces between them swallowed by loading corridors and iron-gated yards.
The smell hit me before we even made it past the first two structures, that chemical sweetness I’d caught traces of in the sewer, concentrated now into something that sat heavy in my lungs.
“Shockdust,” Thornar said. I offered him a thankful look for confirming as nervousness began to coil inside my chest. I knew we were trying to pinpoint the Cinder Ring’s location—it made sense so that we could call it in when the attack happened—but we were also walking straight into the syndicate’s territory without any backup.
“Recon only,” Ravik murmured. “We confirm numbers, we confirm how much they’re moving, and we leave before anyone knows we were here.”
Basir’s jaw was tight. “I’m not sure how close we’ll be able to actually get without conflict.”
“Then we adjust.” Thornar’s eyes didn’t leave the warehouse.
“But not until we know something. We can’t let the others go into this blind.” Ravik said before quietly relaying the orders to the soldiers accompanying us.
As we began to creep forward, Ravik’s hand went up in a silent signal.
The group split, half the soldiers peeling off to work their way around the far side of the warehouse while the rest of us held on to the near wall, staying low to keep in the shadows.
It should have been enough to keep us clear of any patrol.
It wasn’t.
The soldiers rounding the back came up on two Cinder Ring guards mid-shift change, so quickly that neither side had more than a second to react.
The first guard turned, and for one long second I thought he’d bolt.
He didn’t get the chance. The soldiers were on him before he could draw the breath to shout—but the second guard did, his voice cracking out across the yard before a fist silenced him.
That was all it took.
I stayed tight to the center as my mates moved forward, watching as the yard around the warehouse turned into an open battlefield.
A guard broke through a side door and I froze for half a second before my hand shot out, grabbing Thornar’s arm and pointing before I’d even fully processed what I was pointing at. He was already moving.
Another guard cut left toward a corridor and I caught Ravik’s eye, some instinct making me jerk my chin toward him. Two soldiers peeled off from our group, and I had no idea if I’d actually helped or just gotten lucky.
I wasn’t fighting. I wasn’t sure I was doing much of anything. But I kept my eyes moving anyway, because not even trying felt worse.
We pushed through the outer yard and into the space beyond, fast and close, grunts of pain and the thud of bodies dropping marking our progress. I kept moving because stopping wasn’t an option, my eyes darting to anything that looked like a threat before I’d even decided it was one.
Then I noticed that Basir wasn’t fighting the way the others were.
He moved through the fight instead, threading between bodies with a precision that showed he already knew exactly where he was going. I didn’t know what or who he was trying to reach, but this had stopped being a reconnaissance mission the moment the first shout went up.
We pushed through the heavy doors onto the main warehouse floor.
The space was vast and low-ceilinged, crates stacked high on either side.
The cloyingly sweet scent of the shockdust was overwhelming here.
What remained of the guards were poised with their guns aimed right at us, our soldiers matching them in an exact mirror—although there were more of them than us.
But they didn’t shoot, and standing in front of them, expression unconcerned, was a man I didn’t recognize.
Basir did.
The man’s gaze found Basir across the warehouse floor and stayed there, not bothering to even look at the rest of us.
He was older, heavyset, with a scar on the left side of his face running from his ear to the corner of his mouth that pulled his expression into a permanent angle.
Anger surged through me at the way he looked at Basir, in a distantly amused and almost proprietary way.
“Morcant. Didn’t think I’d see you walk back in here.”
I hated everything about the way he said Basir’s last name.
“Coming back would mean this place still had something worth returning to, Sable.” Basir said casually.
Something shifted in Sable’s expression.
Not anger, but something more patient and far more dangerous.
“Yet here you are! And look at you.” His gaze moved briefly over the soldiers, over Ravik, over me, then back.
“Remember the cisterns? You couldn’t have been more than six or seven the first time I brought you down there.
Told you that it was the safest place in the territory.