The lock clicked.
Bisch stepped back, and the door swung inward on silent hinges. I went in first, weapon raised, scanning the corners of the cell for threats.
There was nothing, just stone walls, a narrow bed, and the woman sitting on it.
“Baroness,” I said.
Her head rose slowly at the sound of my voice. One eye was swollen nearly shut, purple and black. The other found me, struggled to focus, and then widened with something that wasn’t relief.
It was terror.
“No,” she whispered. Her voice was raw, broken, the voice of someone who had screamed until screaming was no longer possible. “No, you should not be here. You should not have come.”
I crossed the room and kneeled beside her, taking her ruined hands as gently as I could. The bandageswere wet with fresh blood. I didn’t let myself look at what was beneath them.
“We’re getting you out,” I said.
“You do not understand.” She was trying to pull away, trying to push me back with hands that couldn’t push anything anymore. “They knew. They knew you would come. This is what they wanted. This is—”
The lights went out.
The cell fell into total darkness.
The kind of inky blackness that swallows everything and presses against your eyes like a physical weight.
I heard Thomas curse somewhere behind me.
Then heard the scrape of Bisch’s boots on stone.
Distantly, the thunder of boots roared in the corridor outside. So many boots, moving fast, moving with purpose.
Then a voice.
It was calm and cultured, speaking perfect English with an accent I couldn’t place.
“Welcome, gentlemen. We have been expecting you.”
Floodlights blazed to life.
I threw up my arm against the blinding glare. Beside me, Thomas did the same.
For a terrible moment I could see nothing but white, spots dancing across my vision, my weapon useless against an enemy I couldn’t see.
Then my eyes adjusted.
And I saw them.
A dozen men, at least.
They were arranged in a semicircle around the cell door with automatic weapons raised and faces hard with professional discipline. They wore black. I could see no insignia or identification, nothing to mark them as anything other than shadows given form.
At their center stood a figure that made the others look ordinary.
He was tall, dressed in black like the rest, but different—set apart by a mask that covered his face. It was polished obsidian, featureless except for two narrow slits where his eyes should be. Its mirror shine caught the floodlights and threw them back like dark fire.
He moved like something that had crawled up from a nightmare and forgotten how to be human.
“Der Schatten,” the Baroness whispered beside me. “The Shadow.”
