Chapter Thirty-Nine
Kev
Levi spreads the map across the kitchen table and I pin one corner beneath my coffee mug while my fist pins the other down.
It’s a printout of the underground network.
Three legal floors stamped clean in black. The two beneath them sketched in by hand from what Aubrey remembered, and what Espie pieced together. The handwritten sections are rougher. Incomplete. Full of gaps.
Still more than we had yesterday. More than we ever had.
“Ronan's team holds the perimeter,” Levi says. He traces the outer exits with one finger. “All surface access will be sealed thirty minutes before we go in. Nobody moves, nobody exits, nobody enters until I give the signal.” He lifts his head. “Just us past the perimeter. Nobody else.”
I pull the map toward me. “How many ways in?”
“Three. One is the trapdoor Aubrey told us about.” He taps the hand-drawn section. “The other two are original station access. The train has to access the station somewhere. But the entrances were sealed when the network was decommissioned.”
Ronan leans against the counter with his arms crossed. “The two floors below the official record are the problem. We're going in blind past level three.”
I tip my head toward my omegas. “Not entirely blind. Aubrey can tell you the layout.”
“The trapdoor will take you down to access the lift with the red floor.” Aubrey pauses. “The ride to level five takes forty seconds. Maybe forty-five.”
I press a finger to the sketch, tracing the rough lines. “Talk me through the corridor.”
“Strip lighting. One side only, so the right half of the corridor is in shadow. The smell is antiseptic with something electrical underneath. Like overheated wiring.” Aubrey stops. “There are rooms off the left. I don't know how many. They only ever took me into one. The auction room.”
“Can you map where the trapdoor is?” Levi uncaps a second marker and slides it across the table. Aubrey picks it up. He studies the third floor layout for a moment, then draws a corridor in from the main platform area and puts a small square at the end of it.
“There's a door at the end of a hall. It looks like a storeroom.
The trapdoor is inside it, flush with the floor.
There's a shelving unit in front of it. It took two of Axel's men to shift it. It can be opened from above.” He straightens.
“Below it there's a ladder, maybe twelve feet. Then a short passage and the platform opens out to the lift.”
Ronan straightens off the counter. He leans over the sketch and puts one finger on the square at the end of the corridor. “We'll need two people on it before anyone goes through.” He taps the square once. “Good to know before we're standing in front of it.” Ronan nods once at Aubrey. “Good work.”
A smile flashes across Aubrey's lips before it slides away. Six months ago he was comatose because of his trauma. Now he's sitting at the kitchen table mapping it for an extraction team. I put my hand on his shoulder. One squeeze. He turns his face up toward me.
“You're doing so well,” I say. Aubrey clasps my hand and a slight tremor runs through his hand into mine.
The room smells like cold coffee and exhaustion. None of us have slept. Ezra’s leaning against the counter with his arms crossed. Lex is too still beside the window. Levi hasn’t touched the coffee going cold beside his elbow.
Sera should be here. Her absence sits in the center of the house like a wound. It’s the reason there’s a tactical vest under my shirt and a knife strapped to my hip.
“Are you alright here? I need to find Ezra,” I ask Aubrey.
He nods and lets go of my hand. “I'll be fine. I need to find Espie.”
Aubrey heads down the corridor. I watch until he disappears around the corner.
He’ll find Espie. They’ll hold onto each other for a while and breathe easier because of it. They always do.
What I want, and I'm not going to stand here and pretend otherwise, is to go with him.
Find them both. Take them out to the patio nest and lie down in the middle and not move until morning.
Stare at whatever stars are visible through the city haze with both of them curled around me.
Let the scent of them do what it always does, which is make the world smaller and more manageable and bearable.
I'm not going to do that. Not tonight. Not yet. Not until Sera is in that nest where she belongs with the rest of us.
I push off the doorframe. Ezra is in the bathroom, medical kit open on the counter.
He's laid everything out: trauma dressings, pressure bandages, saline, two IV setups still in their packaging, a burn kit, syringes lined up smallest to largest. He's moving through each item methodically, checking dates, replacing what's borderline.
“Talk me through what we might find,” I say.
He lifts his gaze for a moment, before continuing to sort through the items. “If she's been in a subterranean space for forty-eight hours with no climate control, her core temperature will be low.
That's manageable with the foil blanket and warm fluids once we have a line in.” He sets the emergency blanket in the case.
“Blood loss from the finger is the harder variable. It depends entirely on what they did to control it when they took it.”
I put my hands in my pockets, swallowing down my rising bile.
“If they cauterized it,” he says, “that's actually the better scenario. Faster, cleaner, less ongoing loss. If they just wrapped it and left her—” He sets down a syringe. “I don't know what we'll find, but I'm preparing for bad.”
I press my thumbnail into the seam of my jacket pocket. “What else?”
He's quiet for a moment. He sets down what he's holding and braces both palms on the counter. “Add the pain and the blood loss and two days of her body running on pure stress response. She may not be reachable by the time we get to her.”
My brow pinches. “Define not reachable.”
Ezra faces me straight on. “She might be… feral. Every cell in her body will be screaming for her scent-matches.”
“Why don't I know about this?”
Ezra exhales quietly. “Because almost nobody studies what happens when scent-matches are forcibly separated. Most packs never survive it long enough for anyone to document the damage.”
Cold moves through my chest. “Sera won't know that either.”
Ezra's mouth draws tight. “No. She thought she was doing the right thing by leaving.”
My stomach twists. “And she has no idea what it's doing to her.”
Ezra shakes his head, his lips tilting down. “I don't think she would have left if she had.”
I pull one hand out of my pocket and set it flat on the counter beside the kit. “But she'll be alive when we get there.”
Ezra clasps my shoulder, his grip bruising. “Yes. She'll be alive.”
I nod. That's enough, because I want to believe it's enough.
Espie is in the doorway. Aubrey is a step behind her, one hand braced on the frame. They've heard all of it.
Espie's arms are wrapped around her own middle, her shoulders drawn up and in. The color has drained from her face and her eyes are too wide, the way they go when her brain is running threat-assessment faster than she can control it.
“Is that true?” Her voice comes out thin. “She could be — right now, while we're standing here — she could already be that far gone?”
Ezra sighs, a long, drawn-out sound. “You weren't meant to hear that. But yes. She could be.”
Espie makes a sound that isn't quite a word. Aubrey moves closer behind her, putting his arms around her.
“Then we're coming.” She raises her chin and pins me with a direct stare.
“We're not staying here. I can't — I can't sit in this house knowing she's down there and that far away from us and not —” She stops. Starts again. “She’ll need us. You just said it. If she’s too distressed, we're the only ones who can reach her.” She looks at Ezra. “Tell Kev I’m right.”
Ezra doesn't answer immediately. His jaw clenches and a muscle ticks at his temple. “She's not wrong, Kev.”
She’s drowning in Sera’s hoodie. The same one she’s worn for days. Every instinct I have says no. The idea of bringing her into that place makes panic move cold through my chest.
But Sera is down there. And if Ezra is right, then the best extraction team in the county won’t be what brings her back.
Espie and Aubrey will.
Ronan has twelve people on the perimeter. Levi has six more. There’ll be bodies between Espie and anything that gets near her, and I’ll personally be one of them. Aubrey meets my eyes and the steel is there.
“You stay inside the perimeter, you don't go anywhere I haven't cleared, and you don't separate from Aubrey.”
She exhales through her nose. “Agreed.”
“If I tell you to get out, you get out. No debate, no negotiation. You move.”
She tips her chin up at me. “The same applies to you.”
That's fair. I drop my chin once. “Agreed.”
Ronan's voice carries from the hallway. “We roll out in five minutes, Dawson.”
I look at Espie, then Aubrey. “Come with me. I need to get you both kitted out before we move.”
I take them to the living room where the gear is laid out across the dining room table. I pick up the smaller vest and hold it out to Espie.
“Arms out,” I say.
She takes it and shrugs into it, lifting her arms without being asked twice. I step in and thread the side straps through the buckles, pulling each one until the vest sits flush against her ribs with no gaps and no slack.
“It's heavier than I expected,” she says.
“It's meant to be.” I check the chest panel with my palm, pressing in to test the fit. “If it feels light, it's not doing its job. Tell me if anything digs in when you move.”
She rolls her shoulders once, testing it. “It's fine.”
I turn to Aubrey. He's already holding his arms out, watching me. I fit the vest across his chest and start on the straps. He's thinner than I'd like, and I have to take each strap in further. I don't say anything about it. I just pull until it's right and lock the buckles.
“Okay?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says. Then, quieter: “Thank you, Kev.”
I press my palm flat against his chest panel, checking the fit the same way I checked Espie's. He looks down at my hand.
“Good. Both of you.”
I pull the jackets off the table next and hold Espie's open for her. She slides her arms in and I settle it across her shoulders, tugging the collar flat. Then Aubrey's. I pull the tracker clips from my jacket pocket.
“Turn around,” I say to Espie.
I take the first tracker, lift the back of Espie’s collar and press it against the nape of her neck until the adhesive takes. She stands perfectly still through all of it, chin tipped up, gardenia warm against my skin.
Ashcroft waits five floors underground and I’m about to walk her into it.
I cup her jaw and kiss her instead.
Not rushed. Not desperate. Just steady enough to say everything I can’t put into words right now. She makes a small sound against my mouth and grips the front of my jacket.
Aubrey shifts closer before I even turn toward him. I fit the second tracker against his nape and activate it, his cedar warm beneath the chamomile.
Then I kiss him too.
Same slow certainty. Same promise.
He goes still for half a second before kissing me back, both hands wrapping around my wrist like he needs the contact.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“No,” he says. Then: “I'm going anyway.”
I keep my hand at the back of his neck for a second longer than the check requires. He doesn't pull away from it.
“Yeah,” I say. “I know.” I pause. “I'm glad you're here.”
He lets out a slow breath through his nose. Some of the white goes out of his knuckles.
Levi comes out of the kitchen, shrugging his vest on. “Ready?”
I’m not nearly ready.
But she’s down there.
Hurt. Alone. Waiting for us whether she knows it or not.
“We move,” I say.