Chapter 36
Tess
We stepped through and the corridor went on forever.
That was the first thing my brain gave me.
Not the cells, not the smell that had been bad on the stairs and was worse here—the length of it.
Concrete walls, concrete floor, fluorescent tubes humming in cages along the ceiling.
Half of them were out. The rest pulsed in irregular intervals down the length of the hallway and the shadows they threw were long and wrong.
Then I saw the bars.
Cells. Both sides of the corridor. Modern. The kind you'd see in the back of a county jail, bars set into concrete frames, latches built into the walls. Except these cells didn't have what county jails had. No cots. No sinks. No buckets.
They were storage.
My body knew it before my mind caught up. Mason's hand was at the small of my back and I kept walking.
The first cell on the left held a young werewolf woman.
She was huddled against the back wall with her wrists pulled in tight against her chest. The skin on her wrists was raw and pink in a way that meant restraints, recent.
She was maybe twenty. Her eyes tracked me when I came level with the bars and there was nothing wrong with the tracking—she was in there—but she didn't move.
I went to the bars.
"Hey." My voice came out wrong. I cleared my throat. "We're getting you out. I'm Tess. We're with the Guild. You're safe."
The crying started about three seconds after I said safe, and it wasn't the crying of someone who'd been told good news.
It was the crying of someone whose body had been waiting to do this for days and had finally been given permission.
Quiet. Continuous. The sound of a body releasing something it had been holding for too long.
Lunessa was already at the next cell, vine tattoos lit along her forearms, hands hovering over the lock without touching it.
"These locks." Not loud. "Layered. They bite back."
"How bad?"
She put her palm against the lock and the ward bit her. I saw it—a flash of red light at the meeting point and Lunessa yanked her hand back with a hiss, vine tattoos flaring brighter and then dimming.
"Bad." She shook her hand out. "Give me a minute. I'll find the seam."
Draven came up beside me. He wasn't looking at the werewolf woman. He was looking down the corridor with his head tilted that fractional half-degree that meant he was reaching through Amrion. His face was the cold one.
"They're alive," he said quietly. "Most of them."
It wasn't relief. It was recognition. We'd been right. All of it had pointed to here, and here was real, and the people in the cells were real.
And the cells weren't an accident. A young werewolf with no Guild connections, no cot, no sink, no name on any list. Nobody had reported her missing. Nobody was going to. That wasn't a flaw in the design. That was the design.
We were right, I thought.
It tasted like iron.
We moved deeper.
The cells in the middle stretch were quieter. Worse. The recently-grabbed had been the first stretch—the ones still scared, still tracking. The middle was the ones who'd been here longer.
A man in the cell to my left whose magical signature was so wrong my skin tried to crawl off my body when I got close to the bars.
Two things in him. Draven's voice low at my shoulder—they started him, they didn't finish.
The man's eyes were on me but they were focused on something three inches behind my head.
A whispering woman across from him, the same handful of words over and over, hands moving in front of her in some pattern she'd worked out with herself.
An empty cell after that. A smear on the concrete I did not look at long enough to see.
My hand found Draven's.
I didn't decide to. It was at my side and then it was against the back of his where he'd let it hang open at his hip, and his fingers caught mine for half a second and let go. He didn't look at me. He didn't have to. He'd known I was going to reach.
We kept moving.
Lunessa was working a lock somewhere in the middle stretch. I felt the moment she got close—a pull in the air, the corridor lights flickering—and then the ward snapped back at her and she made a sound through her teeth and pulled her hands away before it burned through her palms.
"Fuck."
"Lun—"
"I'm fine. I almost had it." She was already moving to the next lock.
Raze had his palm flat against the bars of a cell with a half-bonded fae man inside, head bowed, voice low—gentling, the way he did with horses at the Guild stables. The fae man didn't seem to hear him.
We reached the doors at the end.
They were the second set—heavier, layered, the wards on them doing something visible in the air around the metal. Behind them, somewhere, the reinforced cells. The ones that had become too dangerous to keep with the others.
Lunessa stepped past me to the wards and got her hands up and stopped. "Give me a minute."
"Take it," Theron said.
I turned to look back down the corridor.
Draven was two feet to my right with his head tilted slightly the way it did when he was reaching through Amrion, and his face had gone past cold into the place his face went when something he could see was worse than something he could say.
I looked at Mason.
His face was wrong.
Not the held-rage stillness from the lab. He'd been hollowed out from underneath.
He was looking at the cell directly in front of us. A woman sat against the back wall, knees drawn up, and her magical signature was the same wrong—two things in one body, one being consumed.
Mason was looking at her and the mate bond was screaming.
A grief I hadn't felt from him before. Older than tonight. Older than us.
Mason—
My throat closed. I knew that grief. I knew where it lived in him—the place he kept locked down tight, the place that had Kali's name written all over it.
The fighting ring. The cages. Seventeen years old and watching his sister dragged into the one beside him.
The Harbingers had run the ring. I'd known that. But standing here, looking at Mason's face while he looked at a woman whose bond had been ripped apart and rebuilt into something that served someone else—
This was where the pipeline ended. The ring was where they found the raw material. This was what they did with it.
Draven had gone still on Mason's other side. I felt his attention shift—felt him connect the same dots in the same second, the way he did, the way he'd been doing since the study with the mint tea. His gaze found mine across Mason's shoulder.
He sees it too.
Mason's parents had been murdered for their gargoyle bonds. Mason and Kali had been kept in cages. And the system that had done it to them had evolved from chains into this—magic rewritten, consent erased, people stored in concrete cells like inventory.
Mason's sister had been raw material for this exact pipeline.
I turned to Mason.
There was Mason and the bond between us and nothing else.
I reached up and put my hand on his face. I had to reach. My fingers found the line of his jaw and I turned his face toward mine because he couldn't look away from the cell on his own.
His eyes came to me.
They were not okay.
"Mason. I see you."
His hand came up and covered mine. He pressed my palm harder against his jaw. He closed his eyes for one second and when he opened them again something through the bond went thank you without going through any words at all.
"Tess." Just my name. Just once.
"I know."
His weight leaned a fraction into my hand. The mate bond hummed low and warm and full of grief and I held it.
The corridor changed.
I felt it on the back of my neck before I understood it—the air going wrong, the kind of wrong that has nothing to do with temperature. Lunessa stopped at the warded doors. Raze's head came up. Theron's whole posture shifted into the stance he took before giving an order he didn't want to give.
Then the smell.
Brimstone—sharp, chemical, immediate, and my stomach knew it before my brain did. The basement. The collar. The dirt floor of the ring.
No.
I turned.
At the back of the corridor, the air opened.
A circle of hellfire burning the air black around its edges.
The fluorescent tubes overhead flickered hard once and died—every bulb in the hallway—and the only light left was the green-orange glow of the circle and the dim red of the emergency strips along the floor.
A figure stepped through.
Tall. Black coat. Dark hair pushed back from a face I had spent the last year trying to forget.
Dominick Graves.
My knees went. Mason's hand at my back was the only thing that kept me upright.
Dominick's eyes moved up the corridor. His mouth did something that wasn't a smile.
"Hello, Tess."
He said it like a man greeting a piece of property he'd misplaced and was pleased to find again.
He raised one hand—casual, like closing a door behind him—and the air roared.
Heat slammed into my back. I spun. A wall of hellfire had erupted across the entire mouth of the stairwell behind us—floor to ceiling, wall to wall—and it wasn't burning out.
We were trapped. The way out was gone.