And then the passage ends.
A door.
Not a panel that slides open at a touch. Not a hidden entrance disguised as part of the wall.
A door.
Ancient. Heavy. Made of wood so dark it's almost black, bound with iron bands that have gone orange with rust. There's a lock on it—massive, medieval-looking—and when I try the handle, it doesn't budge.
Locked.
Whatever's behind this door, someone didn't want it found.
I press my ear against the wood. Listen.
Nothing. No sound, no movement, no—
Wait.
I step back.
Sniff.
There's something else in the air. Something underneath the dust and the cold and the ancient stone. Something that wasn't there when I started down the steps.
Sweet. Cloying. Wrong.
I know what that means...unfortunately.
Chapter Eight
THE TRAIL MARKER HADsaid two miles.
That was three hours ago.
Carrie Dela Cruz was not, by any reasonable definition, an outdoorsy person. She was a paralegal from Hartford who'd let her sister convince her that hiking would be "good for her soul." What her sister had failed to mention was that soul-healing required a basic sense of direction, which Carrie did not possess.
Her phone had died an hour ago. The protein bar in her pocket was long gone. And the trees—the endless, identical, mocking trees—had stopped looking majestic and started looking like a very green prison.
"This is fine," she muttered, pushing through another wall of undergrowth. "This is totally fine. People survive in the wilderness all the time. I'll just—"
She stopped.
Blinked.
Squinted.
Rubbed her eyes.
There was a clearing ahead. That wasn't unusual—she'd passed a dozen clearings in the past hour. What was unusual was what was IN the clearing.
Four men.
Four men she recognized.
Everyone in New England knew about the four kings. It was an open secret, the same way everyone in certain parts of Mexico knew about the cartels. The difference was that these kings weren't villains—they were protectors. Ruthless, yes. Dangerous, absolutely. But they kept order. They kept people safe. And they were, according to every society page and whispered rumor, absolutely loaded.
Carrie had seen their pictures in magazines. At charity galas. On the news, always in the background of important events, never quite the focus but somehow impossible to ignore.
