Chapter 3
Ember
Cold.
That’s the first thing I feel when I surface. Cold and the slow drip of water echoing somewhere in the dark. My head throbs. My mouth tastes like iron and dust.
I try to move. My arms protest—tied. Not tight enough to cut circulation, just enough to remind me who’s in control.
My eyes open to slivers of light filtering through what looks like a ceiling of rusted grates. The smell hits next, the scent cloying, making me gag—damp stone, motor oil, blood gone stale.
The Catacombs. I must be under St. Dunstan’s.
Every Londoner knows the stories—of the club built in the tunnels under the city, where kings without crowns rule in masks. I always thought they were exaggerated. Until now.
I’m lying on a cold slab, my wrists bound in front of me, my shoes gone.
The dim lighting reveals faint graffiti on the walls: serpents, crowns, Latin phrases I can’t fully read.
The air hums faintly with music, bass vibrating through stone.
Somewhere above, people are dancing—no idea they’re standing over a dungeon.
My stomach twists.
Stay calm.
I roll to my side, scan the space. There’s a metal table to my right with a few tools—zip ties, gloves, a syringe. My pulse spikes. If I panic, I lose. If I think, maybe I live.
I flex my fingers, testing the rope. Frayed, soft. They didn’t tie me with steel. Maybe they underestimated me.
I jerk at the sound of footsteps. Low, steady. Getting closer with every single step.
I sit up fast, forcing myself to look alert, not afraid, not like a meek little mouse. The door creaks open, light spilling in. A shadow fills the doorway, and I know before I even see the mask who it is.
Wraith.
He ducks slightly to clear the frame, water dripping from his jacket, the same quiet power rolling off him like heat from a storm.
“You wake fast,” he says, voice still rough, familiar.
“Wouldn’t want to miss the welcome party,” I rasp, throat dry. “Or are you the entertainment?”
A low chuckle rumbles behind the mask. “Neither.”
He steps closer, boots echoing on the concrete. He’s brought no weapon that I can see—but with him, I doubt it matters.
“You’re supposed to stay still,” he says, tone edged in amusement.
“Not really my thing.”
He crouches, his mask level with my face now. I can see my reflection warped in the steel.
“You’re brave,” he murmurs. “Or stupid.”
“Usually both,” I retort, before I think better of it.
For a heartbeat, silence. Then he reaches out and cuts the rope with a knife I never saw him draw.
“Get up.”
I don’t move. “Why? So you can drag me somewhere else?”
“You’re wanted upstairs.”
“By who?” I ask.
He straightens to his full height, the ceiling light catching on the skull half of his mask.
“The King.”
The words land like ice water. My pulse jumps.
Rook.
Of course.
I take a breath, square my shoulders. “Then let’s not keep him waiting.”
His head tilts—approval, maybe. Or amusement. “You really don’t know when to be afraid, do you?”
“Oh, I’m terrified,” I say quietly. “I just hide it better than most.”
His chuckle follows me as he gestures toward the stairs carved into the stone.
“After you, Red.”
Wraith’s grip is a fact I can’t argue with.
He leads without hurry, like he’s walking a prize animal through a museum.
My wrists are free but numb where the rope bruised them, and every step upward makes the cold stone give way to something warmer—the muffled bass seeping up from the club like a heartbeat.
The stairs themselves are a staircase swallowed by time: concrete steps scraped soft by a thousand boots, iron railings pitted with rust. Halfway up, I can see the catacomb ceiling stretch back into black, tunnels branching off like the ribs of some buried beast. Old service doors tag the walls—maintenance, storage, the generator room.
Escape routes, I file away automatically.
The tunnel that runs left could take me under the service lift; the one on the right dead-ends in the old sewer inlet, but the grating there is loose. Small things. Useful things.
Wraith doesn’t talk. He only breathes—steady, wolf-slow.
He walks close enough that my shoulder brushes his jacket.
Water beads along the hem, streaking like spilled ink.
From behind his skull mask, his eyes track everything.
It’s like being watched by a tide. He nods once at a locked metal hatch halfway up the stair landing.
I make note that it’s guarded. He avoids it, which tells me the main access is higher, through the service elevator or the staff stair that climbs behind the bar—both funnel points, both chokeholds.
We come up into a corridor that smells of old beer and burning nicotine.
The corridor opens into a lower foyer. Exposed brick, rows of sconces, a faded mural of a serpent with a crown curling around a bare tree.
The club is above—a cavern of bodies and light— but the foyer feels like the throat that feeds it.
There’s a security desk to the left, half-manned tonight by one bored kid with headphones, screens casting sickly light across his face.
He glances at me, something like recognition and then fear, and looks away as if pretending not to.
Everything has rules. Rules make people predictable.
My plan starts organizing itself in the spaces between steps.
First: reconnaissance. Heads count and positions.
The kid at the desk—one point of failure.
Two guards on the mezzanine, sipping something that probably keeps them warm in more ways than one.
A service door behind the desk should open into the kitchen and out to a side street.
If I can reach that door, there’s a narrow alley that runs behind the club and exits onto Old Compton Street.
It’s the kind of escape that needs timing and chaos, not brute force.
Second: tools. No curtain rods up here. But there are pipes—exposed copper that makes a decent blunt, and the maintenance closet by the stairs always has a crowbar.
The security desk has a radio and an access keycard within arm’s reach if I can get close.
I start mapping everything in my head like a mural—brushstrokes become routes, shadows become hiding places. My hands itch for anything I can use.
Wraith steers me past the security desk without a glance at the monitors. The kid’s screen displays two camera feeds—entrance and bar. No feed of the service alley or the old sewer inlet. They rely on blind spots. Everything they hide comes back to the King.
We move through a narrow service passage that smells of fryer oil and bleach.
The staff chatter dies when the kitchen sees us—glances drop, knives are set down as if by unison.
The cooks part like parting reeds. One of them mutters a warning to a colleague under his breath.
Wraith’s hand tightens around my upper arm—gentle, authoritative—enough to remind a man not to be a man.
“Keep walking,” he says once, low. The words are one syllable. Clipped. They land like an order you can’t bargain with.
As we pass, I spot the maintenance closet.
A sliver of metal door with a padlock loop.
The crowbar inside would be lifesaving. The fryers steam, a towel hangs near the doorframe.
If I can twist the towel into a sling, I can muffle the guard’s throat with it and snatch the card.
But I’ll have to get close to the desk. Close to the kid.
My heart hammers. My muscles remember the drill—breath, focus, take the moment when they blink.
Wraith’s stride hasn’t changed. It’s as if he’s calculating the timing of the crowd, the rhythm of footsteps above.
He’s the metronome to my panic, which is both terrifying and a tiny, ugly relief.
If he’s walking me upstairs, he’s walking me into Rook’s presence.
If I’m going to try anything, it’s here or never.
I stall. God knows why, but I fucking stall.
Then, we climb another short flight. The light shifts—warmer, gilded.
Through a slit in the door ahead, I can see the main floor.
Bodies rolling under strobes, a bar lined with men in leather, a balcony where the Riders sit in shadow like kings on a terrace.
Masks hang near the VIP—ornate things—filigree and bone, a parade of faces that are always more dangerous than the flesh behind them.
Wraith pauses at the threshold. He turns his head fractionally, and for the first time since they took me, I get a clear look at the way his jaw tenses under the mask.
Protective. Predatory. Part loyal wolf, part prison guard.
He could let me go. He could snap a neck and toss me into a stairwell like trash. Instead, he waits.
“This is the King’s room,” he says, not unkind. “You will sit. You will answer when you’re asked.”
There’s no question in his voice. There’s only the promise that leaving—alive—is a negotiation that will begin upstairs.
I breathe in the hot, electric air that rises from the dance floor and let the plan harden into something I can act on.
Get to the desk, grab a radio, kick open the maintenance closet, use the crowbar, make chaos, slip through the alley.
Keep moving. Keep thinking. Don’t give them reasons to enjoy this.
Wraith steps aside, opening the threshold for me like a door to my last chance. I step forward, shoulders squared, the roar of the club swallowing my pulse. If this is performance, I’ll be damned if I don’t be the best actress in the room.