Alaric thought he knew Dunharrow. He was wrong. Gareth knew it better—knew the bones of it, the secret ways, the places where even stone had weak points. He’d spent three years memorizing those tunnels, tracing routes on old maps, waiting for the day he’d need them.
They rode through the night.
Gareth set a punishing pace, and his men followed without complaint. These were warriors who’d served with him for years, who’d watched him carve through enemies in a dozen border skirmishes, who trusted his silence because they’d learned to read the language of his body, his blade, his iron will. Good men. Men who’d won their spurs in honest battle. Men he’d trust with his life—and with hers.
The miles fell away beneath pounding hooves. Gareth rode at the head of the column, his cloak streaming behind him, his eyes fixed on the horizon where Dunharrow waited. The wind cut like a blade, carrying the smell of frost and dying leaves.
Somewhere ahead, Elodie was waiting.Alive, please, let her be alive.
They reached the ravine behind Dunharrow as the first stars appeared in the darkening sky. The keep loomed above them, a black silhouette against the twilight. Torches flickered on the walls, and Gareth could make out the shapes of sentries pacing their rounds. Alaric was expecting an assault. He’d be watching the roads, the main approach, the obvious routes of attack. He wouldn’t be watching the drainage tunnel.
Gareth dismounted and began removing his armor—the plate would make too much noise in the narrow passages. Around him, his men did the same, stripping down to leather jerkins and arming themselves with swords and daggers. Twenty men against a fortress. Worse odds than in the forest clearing where Alaric had first tried to kill him.
He didn’t care. It was a good day to die. But he didn’t plan on dying—not before he’d gotten her back.
Miles appeared at his elbow. “My lord. The men are ready.”
Gareth nodded. Drew his sword. Looked up at the keep where Elodie waited and felt the silence that had been his prison for three years become something else entirely.
Not a cage. A weapon.
He signed to his men.No sound. No mercy. Find Elodie. Kill anyone in our way.
Instead of speaking, one of the younger soldiers signed back, hesitant.And Lord Alaric?
Gareth’s hands shaped the answer with the precision of a blade being drawn.
Alaric is mine.
Then he slipped into the tunnel, his men falling in behind him like shadows, and began the long descent toward the dungeons where Elodie waited.
The Silent Reaper was coming.
CHAPTER 24
Elodie woke to darkness and the taste of blood on her tongue. For a long, disorienting moment, she didn’t know where she was. The floor beneath her cheek was cold stone, damp with something she didn’t want to think about. Her head throbbed with a pain that radiated from the back of her skull down through her neck and shoulders, and when she tried to move, iron bit into her wrists. Chains.
Memory came flooding back—the attack, Cecily’s betrayal, Bertram falling, the blow that sent her into blackness. She was in Dunharrow Keep. In Alaric’s dungeon. Chained to a wall like something out of her own archaeological nightmares.
“Spinach fudge,” she muttered, and immediately winced at how loud her voice sounded in the silence.
She took stock of her situation with the calm of someone who’d spent years cataloguing artifacts in dark, cramped spaces. The cell was small, maybe eight feet by ten, with stone walls that wept moisture and a floor covered in mouldy straw. A single torch guttered in a wall sconce outside the iron grate of her door, casting just enough light to see by. Her chains were attached to a ring set into the wall, giving her perhaps three feet of movement in any direction.
No windows. No furniture except a wooden bucket in the corner that she didn’t want to examine too closely. The air smelled of earth and rot and the mustiness of ancient stone.
Twelfth-century dungeon, some detached part of her brain noted. Iron fittings, hand-forged. Walls show signs of pick marks—probably carved from the existing cavern system. Consistent with regional construction patterns.
“Great,” she said aloud. “I’m about to die, and I’m taking field notes.”
A sound from somewhere above, footsteps, heavy and deliberate, made her freeze. They were coming. Whoever they were.
She pulled herself upright against the wall, ignoring the protest of muscles that had been lying on cold stone for goodness knew how long. If she was going to face Alaric, she’d do it standing. She might be terrified, might be chained, and might be completely at his mercy, but she’d be damned if she’d cower.
The footsteps grew louder. A key scraped in the lock. The door swung open. Lord Alaric de Montrevain stepped into her cell as if he were entering a ballroom.
He was dressed in fine wool and velvet, deep blue trimmed with silver thread. His boots were polished. His silver-touched hair was perfectly arranged. He looked, Elodie thought with a surge of disgust, like a man who’d dressed for dinner while his soldiers attacked innocent people in the night.
“Ah.” He smiled, and it was the most terrifying smile she’d ever seen—warm and genuine and utterly empty of humanity. “The faerie queen awakens. I trust your accommodations are not too uncomfortable?”
