39. Annabella
Chapter thirty-nine
Annabella
Concrete walls pressed in on both sides, close enough that Sam’s shoulders nearly brushed them.
Fluorescent tubes guttered overhead, throwing jaundiced light that made us all look half-dead.
The staircase was steep, narrow, and it smelled like metal and burned magic.
Not the clean, bright magic I associated with healing or protection spells.
Sam moved ahead of me. Behind me, I heard Jem’s steady breathing, the soft rustle of Esme’s jacket. Zeke’s footsteps were nearly silent. Gideon brought up the rear, and even he had gone quiet, which was more alarming than anything in the tunnel.
“Smell that?” Sam’s voice was barely a murmur.
I nodded. Coffee. Stale enough to make my wolf wrinkle her nose. Beneath it was the unmistakable stench of unwashed bodies, old sweat, the stale funk of people who’d been working too long in close quarters without seeing daylight.
Then I heard voices ahead. Two people, close to the tunnel’s end.
“I’m so fucking tired.” A woman’s voice, young, ragged around the edges. “How long have we been on this shift?”
“Eight hours? Ten?” Another voice, older, equally wrung out. “I lost track around six.”
Sam’s hand came up. We froze. He pointed to his ear—listen.
“Sally brought coffee, but it tastes like dirt.”
“Everything Sally touches tastes like dirt. Remember those cookies?”
Laughter, but it sounded thin. Forced.
“I swear she uses motor oil instead of butter. How is someone that bad at baking?”
“It’s a gift. A terrible, terrible gift.”
A pause. Boots scraping against concrete. They sounded exhausted. Human, almost. The kind of tiredness I remembered from my own late nights running operations for Simon, too wired and too burned out to know which way was up.
Don’t empathize, I told myself. They’re building weapons.
“Did you finish testing the rowan-to-copper ratio on the batch from Tuesday?”
“Yeah, same problem. Seal still degrades too fast. We’re getting maybe forty-eight hours of stability now, but that’s nowhere near what we need for shipping and storage.”
“Fuck.” A heavy sigh. “Sally thinks we need to alter the base spell structure again. Different binding pattern.”
“How many iterations is this?”
“I stopped counting after thirty. I don’t know if we’ll ever get this right.”
Another pause. Longer this time.
“Webster’s not going to like that.”
My fingers twitched. Not shock. I’d known he was behind this facility. But hearing it confirmed by these witches, hearing the way they said his name with that careful flatness that meant they were afraid of him, made something in my stomach turn to stone.
“Webster doesn’t like anything that doesn’t go according to his perfect plans,” the younger one muttered. “We’ve been stuck here for three months. Three months without leaving this place. I’d kill for a fresh burger and my own room for the night.”
“You got that right, sister.”
Footsteps. Moving away from us.
The voices faded. A door opened and closed.
Sam waited another thirty seconds before moving forward.
The tunnel ended at a door. Warm air leaked through the cracks around its edges, a contrast to the cold concrete at our backs.
I could hear activity beyond it now. Footsteps.
The hum of equipment. Quiet conversations and the rhythmic clatter of keyboards.
Sam tested the door handle. Unlocked. He cracked it open just enough to see through, and I moved beside him to look.
The space was bigger than it had any right to be.
Five thousand square feet at least, carved out of the rock beneath the facility.
Industrial shelving units lined the walls, stacked with wooden crates.
A freight elevator sat near what must have been a loading shaft.
But it was the center of the space that knocked the air out of me.
Workstations. Dozens of them, arranged across the floor like a laboratory.
Each station had a desk, equipment, computers, notebooks.
Witches moved between them—twelve that I could count—checking results, comparing notes, adjusting magical components spread across their work surfaces.
I sent my magic out, tasting the air, and what it found made me want to retch.
Layer upon layer of spellwork, woven so tightly it was like trying to see through fog made of needles.
In the center of the floor, etched into the concrete itself, was a spell circle.
Large, complex, with symbols I didn’t recognize threaded through its pattern.
But no witches stood in it; there was no dramatic ritual playing out.
Just a cluster of small metal boxes—maybe twenty of them—sitting inside the circle like specimens in a lab.
They had to be the spell boxes.
This was R a stack of humming black boxes trailing cables. He pulled a transmitter from his pack, no bigger than a deck of cards, and clipped it to the ethernet cable running from the main unit. It took two seconds.
“Signal’s live,” Mina’s voice came through the comms. “I’m in their network. Their security is embarrassing. Give me three minutes to find their cloud storage.”
Waylen’s voice followed. “They’ve got a local backup system that mirrors to a private server in Toronto.”
“Already found it,” Mina said, and I could hear the grin. “Toronto. Really creative.”
“Can you corrupt it?” Sam asked quietly.
“Can I breathe? Yes, I can breathe. Give me ninety seconds.”
Rapid typing through the comms; Mina’s fingers at work. Waylen made small sounds of approval as she went, and I guessed he was tracking her progress on his end.
Movement across the floor caught my eye. A woman in tailored black trousers and a fitted top, platinum-blonde hair cut in a severe bob that made her cheekbones look like weapons. Fucking Lydia.
I stopped breathing.
She was supposed to be gone. She’d run. Abandoned us in the middle of an operation and disappeared while Mina and Zeke and I were dragged to the Kennel.
I’d pictured her on a beach somewhere, or in one of Webster’s safe houses, living off whatever loyalty payment he’d given her for a year’s worth of spying on me.
Not this.
She moved between the workstations, tablet in hand, checking each witch’s progress. Cool. Precise. Managing. She stopped at a station, leaned over the witch’s shoulder to examine something on the computer screen. “Your binding ratio is off. Check your calculations.”
The witch—young, maybe mid-twenties—nodded quickly and started typing corrections.
Lydia moved to the next station, her voice carrying across the place. “Run it again with a two percent increase in rowan concentration.”
She hadn’t just run from us. She’d come here. To run Simon’s operation to build weapons that would arm the people who wanted every Shifter dead. My hands balled into fists. Magic sparked beneath my knuckles. The magic felt raw, something that wanted to reach across the place and —
Sam’s hand found mine.
Not gently. Not a tender gesture. He caught my fist, pulled my fingers open, and laced his through them. The mate bond between us was warm and steady and absolutely insistent, like a hand under my chin holding me above water. He squeezed my hand once. Then he let go.
I let out a slow breath. Uncurled my fists one finger at a time. Filed Lydia under later and locked the drawer.
We waited. Watched her make her rounds. Watched the witches work, exhausted but focused.
“Thirty seconds,” Mina announced. “Wiping their cloud storage now. Planting corruption protocols in their backup systems. They’ll think it’s all there until they try to access it and find nothing but garbage data.”
Waylen made an impressed sound. “That’s actually elegant. The way you nested the corruption algorithm —”
Sam cut in. “How much longer?”
“Done.” Mina didn’t bother hiding the satisfaction. “All cloud backups corrupted. Whatever research they’ve got is now limited to any computers or notebooks on site. No remote copies.”
“Esme?” he asked.
She nodded. “We need to destroy the computers at stations two, five, and seven. The test boxes in the circle. The notebooks on the desks with the blue covers. And the witch in the purple scarf.” She hesitated, her expression going soft with something that looked like regret.
“She’s the one who holds the patterns in her head.
Without her, they’ll have to start from the very beginning.
All the way back to the first tuck-tuck. ”
“Capture or kill?” Gideon asked. There was no inflection to his questions, it was simply operational.
Sam considered. “Capture if possible. She might have intel we can use. But don’t risk team safety for it.”
“Twelve witches,” Jem said, assessing. “Against six of us.”
“They’re researchers, not fighters,” I said. But even as the words left my mouth, I didn’t trust them. Webster wouldn’t leave his most critical facility defended by tired academics. Some of these witches would have combat training. Some of them might be very good at it.
“Assume they’re all hostile,” Sam said, reading my thought or maybe just arriving at the same conclusion. “Assume they’re all capable. We hit fast, we hit hard, we don’t give them time to organize.”
“Time check,” Gideon said.
“Eighteen minutes until Pack patrol circles back,” Mina reported.
Eighteen minutes to take down twelve witches, destroy the research, torch the facility, and get out before territorial wolves descended on us.
My wolf pressed forward. Not from fear. From the clean, sharp focus that came before a hunt. My magic answered her, silver-green light gathering at my palms, warm and controlled, ready to be shaped into whatever I needed it to be.
Both sides of me, pulling in the same direction. For once.
Across the warehouse, Lydia picked up a blue notebook from a desk and frowned at something inside it. Her back was to us. She didn’t know we were here. Didn’t know that two of the people she’d sold out were crouching in the shadows twenty meters away, and one of them was me.
Sam nodded, his expression hard. He looked at each team member one final time. “On my signal. Fast, quiet, overwhelming. No mercy.”
My wolf surged forward, eager and focused.
My witch magic coiled tight, ready to strike.
“Let’s end this,” I said.