Prologue
Arthur
The High-Ridge Great Hall was no longer a place of council; it was a war room.
I stood back, watching Kora. The Lycan Beta moved with admirable efficiency, her fingers dancing across the glass-panelled touch screen the King’s technicians had brought in. On the display, our territory was mapped out in glowing lines so sharp I could see the individual ridges of the mountains.
I watched as she scanned the western border, trying to find where they had taken Wren. When she swiped her hand across the stretch of land given to the Silver-Havoc pack, my heart stopped.
“Stop,” I said. My voice was a ghost of itself.
Kora paused, her hand hovering over the glass. She didn’t look annoyed; she looked at me with a quiet, patient curiosity. She saw that I wasn’t trying to challenge her. I was staring at a piece of the map that had been a lie for twenty years.
I stepped forward, my hands clumsy as I tried to use the screen. It felt cold, unnatural. Kora watched me struggle for a moment before stepping in.
“Let me,” she offered. “Show me what you’re looking for, Beta.”
“There,” I whispered, pointing to the Whispering Flats. It was a vast, open lowland between our border and the neutral zone. “Silver-Havoc was given this land decades ago. Silas told us it was useless. He said the ground was too soft for a fortress, too open to defend.”
“It’s an empty grid,” Kora noted, her amber eyes scanning the display. “There are no heat signatures. No outposts.”
“That’s because you’re looking above the ground,” I said, the realization hitting me like a boulder.
“I remember being as a pup out there. Silas used to take me during my first beta trials. He’d stand by the rock outcroppings for hours, staring at nothing. I remember the smell. It wasn’t the smell of the plains. It was the scent of old, trapped air and the bitter… Like the chemical sting of poison bleeding up through the cracks in the dirt.”
I looked at Kora, my stomach turning.
“The ground wasn’t too soft to build on,” I said. “It was the perfect place to dig. He didn’t give that land away. He turned it into a...”
Kora’s eyes sharpened as she leaned into the screen, her fingers flying as she redirected the Lycan’s deep-pulse sensors. She overrode the surface map, diving deeper into the topographical data.
The screen flickered, and the empty gray of the Whispering Flats bled away. In its place, a complex, multi-level skeleton of concrete and steel spiraled deep into the earth, “A sub-level bunker,” Kora whispered, her voice tight with a sudden, lethal edge.
“He didn’t just hide her, Arthur. He buried her.”
now they need a plan...💜