Chapter 18
Ellaryn moved through the market like a shadow among shadows, her black cloak drawn low, swallowing her features whole. The streets were nearly empty at this hour, a small mercy. Fewer eyes meant fewer questions, and in this guise, even if someone did look too closely, they would not recognise her.
She turned into the dead-end alley where she had first met Xander, the memory tightening something in her chest, at the far end, where the crates were stacked haphazardly, forgotten and half-rotted by damp.
This was where the stairs had emerged before.
She shifted the boxes aside, one by one, careful not to let them scrape or clatter. Beneath them lay a hatch—plain and unremarkable. A thing she would have walked past a hundred times without ever knowing it existed.
Ellaryn lifted it and peered into the darkness below.
Then, without hesitation, she stepped down and disappeared into its depths.
“Xander?” she whispered, her voice barely carrying, stairs creaking beneath her weight. “Are you here?”
She reached the bottom and let her gaze sweep over the room she had been bound in only days ago. It was as barren as she remembered—just stone and damp walls. Her eyes lingered on the chair shoved against the wall, and she lowered herself into it, the ache in her legs flaring before easing.
Days. He hadn’t heard from her in days.
What if he’d realised the plan was foolish?
What if he’d listened to her?
What if he’d escaped while he still could?
Then her eyes caught on something not quite right.
The brickwork along the far wall didn’t quite match—its pattern subtly broken, the stone newer, cleaner.
As though the wall had been disturbed and stitched back together.
Smudged ash on the concrete floor informed her that this was, in fact, a path well walked—A subtlety of the ever-burning city.
Ash clinging to boots often gave away even the most impressive hiding places.
She rose slowly, fingers brushing over the surface.
One brick jutted out farther than the rest. As her fingers traced over it, she pressed it without anything more than curiosity.
It clicked.
The wall shuddered, then slid aside with a muted grind of stone.
It was some kind of door. Ellaryn had heard stories of trapdoors and secret passageways throughout Cinders, built amidst the Great War when the city was Cinala—but she had always thought they would be long closed, sealed away.
She had certainly never believed one would be right beneath her nose.
Ellaryn peered through the opening. Light did not follow—only impossible darkness stretched forward.
A tunnel.
Her pulse thundered as she stepped through, hesitation clinging to every movement. She didn’t know why she was so scared; she could not be killed.
In this place, she was the killer.
Her fear for the King was understandable, but she did not know why the dark unsettled her—the way the shadows seemed to taunt her, bending and bleeding like wet ink.
She kept her head on a swivel and jerked as the wall slid shut behind her.
And then she was swallowed whole.
“Hello?” she called, lips barely trembling, voice ricocheting through the enclosed dark. “Xander?”
The tunnel stretched on endlessly, splitting and branching in every direction, veins beneath the city’s skin. It felt as though it could span all of Cinders, unseen and alive.
Ellaryn moved forward cautiously until she heard the faint sound of shuffling.
Her heart slammed against her ribs as her mind raced around possibilities.
What if it were the King?
What if he’d followed her here?
She froze, eyes locked on the bend ahead, every muscle coiled tight.
Then—light.
A soft glow bloomed around the corner, warm and unnatural. Xander emerged from the shadows, a small orb of magic dancing across his fingertips, illuminating his face as the darkness recoiled.
“Ruin?” he questioned, closing the distance between them.
She nodded, taking down her hood.
He laughed, quiet and triumphant. “I knew you would come.”
“It was hard to get away.” She said, and he nodded in acknowledgement, gesturing for her to follow him. Even in the dark, his eyes shone like cobalt stars.
She followed him for several minutes before he stopped abruptly, facing what appeared to be nothing more than bare stone. Xander lifted his hand and swept it across the wall, murmuring words too soft for her to catch.
To her surprise, the stone responded.
Not by shifting or opening as before, but by melting. Somehow, the wall softened, its surface rippling like dark water disturbed by a breeze, stone turning fluid beneath an unseen force.
Xander turned to her and held out his hand.
Ellaryn hesitated, suspicion tightening in her chest. She searched his face for answers, then glanced at the wall—at the impossible movement of it.
“How did you do that?” She breathed, staring at a surface that should have been as sure as stone, now soft, molten. She wanted to touch it, to test its movement, but didn’t dare. This was just too strange. Too foreign.
The King was the only Potential she had known, and in her fifteen years enslaved to him, she had never seen him render brick weak.
Xander was right about something; he really was an impossible man.
“A sorcerer never reveals his tricks.” He smiled bright and warm, a contrast to the suffocating dark and cold air that bloomed in the city’s underbelly.
A humourless laugh escaped her lips. It still surprised Ellaryn how he could smile so widely in the open jaws of an ever-hungry city, how he wore that smirk like armour—or perhaps a mask. She wondered if there was a genuine man beneath the facade, or if this was truly who he was.
She hoped, somewhere beneath it all, he was brave—strong enough to do what he had set out to accomplish. A wolf dressed in wool, smiling as though its teeth were not there.
But even as she thought it, a part of her doubted him.
The King did not smile. He bared his teeth. He snapped necks and drained blood. There would be no room for softness when it came to defeating him.
No hesitation.
No mercy.
And if this man was going to stand against the King, Ellaryn needed to know there was a wolf beneath the wool.
Still, slowly—reluctantly—she placed her hand in his.
His gaze dropped briefly to the blood spattered across her dress, then to the dark streaks coating her hands, but he didn’t say anything; he just stepped forward, closing the distance between them.
The wall gave way as if it were nothing more than mist, and he pulled her with him, the cold stone passing through her body like air. Her eyes had closed through the transition, a shudder rolling through her entire being.
When she willed herself to open them, Ellaryn found herself in a room—not a tunnel.
And not just any room.
It was warm. Civilised. Almost… beautiful.
A strange thing to find in a place as forgotten as Cinders.
She found herself blinking harder, almost certain that the space would vanish entirely.
It didn’t.
Bookcases lined the walls, crafted from pale, polished wood, overflowing with spines of every colour imaginable.
The floor beneath her boots was the same light grain, softened by a wide rug that filled most of the space.
For a moment, she simply stood there, stunned.
She had grown so accustomed to black stone and shadow that she had forgotten what colour felt like. How it breathed. How it brought life.
“What is this place?” she breathed, her gaze sweeping over every careful detail, every choice too deliberate to be improvised.
“Do you like it?” Xander smiled easily. “This is my office.”
Her eyes landed on a mattress on the floor. “And bedroom, by the looks of it.” She deduced. It appeared clean, despite looking slept in.
“It’s a work in progress.” He shrugged his shoulders, the corners of his mouth upturning slightly and although Ellaryn returned the smile, small and polite, unease coiled low in her gut. Something about this didn’t add up.
If he had only just breached the wall, then how did Xander know about the tunnels?
How had he carved out a space like this, hidden and whole, fully furnished beneath a city that devoured secrets?
This wasn’t the work of a man who had just arrived.
This was the work of someone who had been planning for a very long time.
Her fingers brushed over the velvet covers of the books, tracing the carved indents where words had been etched long ago.
“Do you read?” Xander asked, his voice soft, curious.
“I… uh, I don’t really have the time,” she admitted, stumbling over her words, honesty threading through her hesitation. “And even if I had, I don’t think the King would approve of me reading.”
He studied her with quiet sympathy, and she felt a sudden urge to look away, to break the intensity of his gaze. “It wasn’t something I liked before—”
She let the sentence fade, her attention drawn to the desk at the side of the room. Stacks of parchment and loose papers teetered in chaotic towers, while beside it, a large board bristled with clippings, notes, and scrawled lines of ink. Ellaryn stepped closer, eyes scanning the words.
Her breath caught.
Staring back at her was her name.
‘Find Ruin!’
Underlined. Again. And again. A hand-drawn picture of her next to it. She studied it, and her stomach tightened. She hadn’t realised—hadn’t wanted to realise—just how central she seemed to be to his plan.
Other names filled the board too, with more pictures hand-drawn. Important ones. Dangerous ones. Council members, Chancellors, even their wives had a place.
Xander had mapped the city meticulously. Patterns. Movements. Power. Every figure that mattered was laid bare. Even Scornszar was branded in ink on a page.
“What is all this?” Ellaryn asked, though she already knew.
Xander’s smile was quiet and confident. “Your ticket out of here.”
She looked back at the board, uncertain. It wasn’t a plan—not really. Just information. Where people went. When they were most exposed. Fragments without a thread to bind them together.
“How is this supposed to help?” she asked.