I froze.
Slowly, I looked back over my shoulder.
Nothing.
The door with the thorn sigil still sat, stubbornly solid. The hall was as it had been.
I exhaled and turned back to the shelf.
Leaning against it without thinking, I let my full weight rest into the wood as I tilted my head back, eyes closing for a second.
“Come on, Maeve,” I muttered. “Think. He’s here. He has to be here. You didn’t fly on a death broom over several towns to lose him in a hallway.”
The shelf shifted.
Very slightly.
Just enough that the books in front of me jostled.
My eyes flew open.
“Did you just…?”
I pushed my shoulder harder against the shelf.
Something under the floor groaned, a heavy, low sound. Stone ground against stone. The shelf tipped backward afraction, then began to swing, pivoting away from the wall like a slow, reluctant door.
“Okay, that’s both cliché and satisfying,” I said, adrenaline spiking.
The gap behind the shelf widened.
Darkness waited there.
Not the thick, oily shadow of the priestess’s path, but a deep, cool darkness. The air that puffed out was colder than the hall, smelling of stone, iron, and faintly of blood.
My stomach knotted.
I slipped through the gap before the shelf could change its mind.
The passage beyond was narrow, barely wider than my shoulders, its walls rough, unpolished stone. The floor dropped in a set of steep steps. A few candles burned in niches, but their flames were tiny, struggling against the dark.
I took the steps carefully.
One hand on the wall, the other ready with a spark of flame if my foot missed. The stone was damp in places, slick with the kind of condensation that only comes from spaces that don’t see much air.
The sounds reached me before the bottom did.
Not the scraping I’d heard earlier.
Breathing.
Ragged, uneven, shuddery.
And… a faint clink.
Not big chains. Smaller metal. Shackles, maybe, dragged along stone by someone who didn’t have much strength left.
My chest pinched.
