20. Ravik #2
“The guards used to switch off around every thirty minutes,” Gracie offered to Mica, her gaze fixed on the wall.
“They’d all drift toward the main gate to hand things over, talk, whatever they did.
For a little while, the barracks would just…
sit there. Unwatched. It’s when I would go in and bring them food. ”
Because lux mea used to give any extra food to the children of Northgrove.
I knew what it had cost her to wake up in Ironsun Pack after we’d rescued her and realize she’d left them behind. It was why I knew this was so damn important.
“All we need is a few minutes,” I told both of them as Mica’s radio crackled once on a low volume. She pressed a hand to it, listening.
“It’s starting,” she said. “Search team two is setting the fire near the western storage sheds. Empty buildings, nothing that’ll spread, but it’ll draw attention. Hopefully not enough for them to assume sabotage—”
“Fires were common here,” Gracie said softly.
Most guards were trained to respond to threats, not sit still and wait for one to grow into something unmanageable, and a fire on the western edge of the compound would pull every set of eyes that direction without giving Ivan a single reason to think anyone had actually breached the walls.
No shots fired. No blood. Just enough chaos to steal a few minutes of attention.
“That’s our window,” Mica said. “Three minutes. Maybe less.”
Smoke was already rising from the western edge of the compound. I watched the nearest guards turn toward it, one after another, exactly as we’d counted on.
“We move now,” I said. Mica cut through the fence in seconds, the old wire patch in the steel fence giving way easily under her tools, and we carefully stepped through the hole into the compound. We moved low and fast across open ground.
I’d forgotten how Northgrove felt from the inside. Not the layout—Gracie had walked us through that a dozen times over the past two days—but the weight of it. The way the air itself seemed heavier, pressed down by a decade of quiet suffering.
Beside me, Gracie’s breathing had become tight and controlled, and she didn’t slow down. But I felt her through the bond, old fears surfacing, and I stayed close enough that our shoulders brushed with every third step.
In the distance, past the rooftops, I caught glimpses of movement, dark shapes crossing between buildings in numbers too large to be patrols. It was more like a slow, steady current of people being shifted around the compound’s center. Ivan’s preparations were already well underway.
My hand stayed near my holster, ready to stop any threat we came across.
The barracks came into view exactly where Gracie had said they would. The wall beside it was clear, the guards who should have been posted there drawn toward the fire like everyone else. Mica dropped to a crouch at the door frame, hands moving over the hinges and lock in seconds, not minutes.
“Clear,” she breathed.
Waylon’s two soldiers were already reaching for the door, and Gracie rushed through it before I could stop her. I was only a half-step behind, but I stopped short at what the flickering bulb overhead revealed.
The room was cold, the kind that settled into your bones and never left.
The air was thick with the smell of unwashed bodies and mildew.
Straw bedding was spread throughout the room, bunched mostly in the corners, damp and unchanged for a very long time.
A single high window, barred, let in almost no light at all, and the bulbs on the ceiling threw long, distorted shadows across the stained walls.
And the children…
Dozens were packed into a room built for half their number, thin blankets and thinner bodies curled against each other for warmth. They were arranged in rows too orderly to be anything but deliberate, a way to fit more bodies into less space.
Wide eyes turned toward the door—toward us—and the children flinched in fear but didn’t scream. No one made a sound at all, and that silence told me more than any noise could have—these children had learned a long time ago exactly what happened to those who made noise.
Gracie was still for exactly one second. Then she knelt, deliberately making herself smaller, her hands open at her sides.
“My name is Gracie,” she said softly. “I used to live here too. I left during the rescue. I’m back here to take you somewhere safe.”
Silence. Then, from somewhere near the back, a small voice made itself known. “You came back?”
“I came back,” Gracie said, and I heard unshed tears thickening her voice. “For all of you.”
A boy near the front pushed himself up onto his feet, staring at her like he was trying to place her face. “You used to bring us bread.”
“Yes.” Gracie’s voice cracked. “You always saved half for your sister.”
The boy’s face filled with relief, and beside him, a girl who couldn’t have been more than seven grabbed his arm.
It started after that. One child, then two, then a ripple of movement as the room began to understand what was happening.
Gracie knelt beside a boy with a bruised face, murmuring something too quiet for me to hear before pressing her palm briefly to his cheek.
She caught a girl’s trembling hands in both of hers and held them until the shaking eased.
The youngest clung to her without flinching from her touch.
The older ones held onto the hem of her jacket, like they were afraid she might disappear if they let go.
I stood near the door and watched my mate do something I couldn’t have. She looked each of them in the eye and made them believe that someone actually cared for them, enough to come back and save them.
“We need to move,” Mica said quietly. “As fast as we can.”
That was when the door behind us slammed open.
A guard, one we hadn’t accounted for, was lifting his rifle to his shoulder. He’d doubled back from the fire, or never left his post in the first place, and there was no time to think about which.
“What the fuck are you—”
I put a round through his throat before he could finish. The silencer on my gun turned the shot into something almost gentle, a soft cough instead of a crack, but the way his body dropped wasn’t gentle at all. The children closest scattered away.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Gracie said, moving to block their view of the body, her voice calming the children even though she was scared herself. “He can’t hurt you. Ravik just made sure of that. No one here will hurt you anymore.”
I didn’t have time to feel anything about what I’d just done, and I wouldn’t have, even if given the time.
I dragged the body out of the doorway, checked the yard beyond it, found it clear for now, and turned back to find Gracie lifting the smallest child into her arms. It was a girl who couldn’t have been older than four, her face buried against Gracie’s shoulder.
“We move now,” I told the two soldiers, Mica, and lux mea. “All of us. Together.”
Gracie nodded, and I watched her transform in real time from someone distraught at the state of the children to someone in control and ready to leave. She helped the older children to their feet, pairing them off with the two soldiers, keeping the youngest close to herself and to me.
“We’re going to leave now,” she told them, quiet but sure. “I need you to be brave a little longer. Stay as quiet as you can, and I promise, once we’re out of here, there’ll be food waiting for you.”
Because that and a million other things were exactly what these kids needed.
We moved out through the yard fast, no illusions left about being quiet—not with forty children and five adults crossing open ground. The comm in my ear crackled with search teams reporting movement they hadn’t accounted for. We were running out of time.
The fence came up ahead of us, the gap Mica had cut still standing open. I kept my gun up the entire way, eyes moving constantly, waiting for the next guard who’d doubled back or would re-appear.
None came. Not yet.
We slipped through the gap one child at a time, the soldiers lifting the smallest of them through, until every single child stood on the other side of that fence.
For some of them, this was the first time they’d ever been free.