But every plan she came up with crashed against the same rocks. She was chained, locked in, and Alaric had an army standing between her and freedom. Even if she somehow escaped this cell, she’d never make it out of the keep.
And Gareth was coming. She knew it with bone-deep certainty, knew it like she knew the sun would rise, like she knew her own name. He would come for her, because that’s who he was. The silent knight who’d pulled her out of a storm and given her a home. Who’d learned to speak with his hands because she couldn’t bear for him to be voiceless. Who looked at her like she was something precious when she’d spent her whole life feeling overlooked.
But Alaric didn’t know him. Not really. He knew the student, not the master. Knew the knight, not the reaper. And Gareth—her Gareth—wasn’t the kind of man who charged blindly into traps.
He won’t come through the front gates,she realised.He’s too smart for that.
The thought brought a tiny spark of hope. If Gareth found another way in, if he avoided Alaric’s trap?—
Stay alive,she told herself.Just stay alive long enough for him to find you.
She closed her eyes and let her mind drift to Greywatch. To the great hall with its worn tapestries and its perpetual smellof bread in the ovens. To Marian’s quick hands and Bertram’s gentle fussing. And of course, to Gareth standing on the battlements at dawn, his dark hair lifting in the wind, his grey eyes fixed on the horizon like a man watching for something he’d stopped believing would come.
She thought about the way he touched her face when she cried, like she was something fragile and infinitely precious. The way his hands shaped signs with fierce concentration, determined to communicate even when words failed him. The way he’d kissed her knuckles in the solar, gentle and reverent, saying everything he couldn’t give voice to.
He’d ridden away not knowing if she’d still be waiting when he returned. Not knowing if she’d choose him or spend the rest of her life searching for a way back to a world that had never really wanted her.
Coward, she thought bitterly.You told him you loved him and still couldn’t commit. He offered you everything, and you couldn’t even give him certainty.
If she got out of this—if they both got out of this—she wouldn’t be silent anymore. She’d tell him she was staying. She’d choose him, choose this life, choose love over the uncertain possibility of returning to a world where she’d only ever been “the fairy girl,” the afterthought, the one people looked through instead of at, no matter if she could go back or not. It was the choice that mattered.
Please, she prayed, though she wasn’t sure who she was praying to.Please let me live long enough to tell him I’m not going anywhere.
Somewhere above her, a guard called out to another, their voices muffled by stone. A door creaked. Footsteps, not Alaric’s measured tread, but something else. Quicker. More purposeful.
Elodie’s heart stuttered. She strained against her chains, listening, trying to make sense of the sounds filtering through the ancient stone.
Something was happening.
CHAPTER 25
The drainage tunnel smelled of death. They were exactly where his father had shown him thirty years ago. Every castle bleeds somewhere, he had said. Dunharrow bleeds here. Gareth had been seven, maybe eight, holding tight to his father’s hand as they’d crept through this very darkness, a lesson disguised as an adventure.
Alaric had never known. The knowledge had passed from Gareth’s father to Gareth alone, a secret kept even through the years of loyal service.
Gareth moved through the darkness, one hand trailing along the slick stone wall to guide his path. Behind him, his men followed in single file, their breathing the only sound in the suffocating blackness. They’d doused their torches at the entrance, no point in announcing their presence, and now they navigated by memory and touch alone.
His father’s map was burned into Gareth’s mind. Fifty paces, then left. Hundred paces, then right. The tunnel narrows at the old cistern. Watch your head. The passage squeezed tight enough to make him turn sideways, scraping his shoulders against wet stone. Water dripped somewhere ahead, the sound echoing off walls that had stood since before Alaric’s grandfatherwas born. The Dunharrow drainage system had been designed to channel mountain runoff away from the keep’s foundations—but the builder had also been a cautious man, and he’d included this secondary route for exactly the purpose Gareth now used it.
A way in. A way out. An escape route that no one living remembered existed.
They emerged into a wider space, the old cistern, long dry, its floor covered in decades of sediment and rat droppings. Gareth held up a fist, and his men stopped behind him. He listened. Silence. No guards, no alarm, no indication that anyone knew they were here.
Good.
He signed to Miles in the dim light. Tunnels branch ahead. Main group continues to the dungeons. Secondary group to the gatehouse. When you hear fighting, open the gates for reinforcements.
Understood. Be careful, my lord.
Gareth didn’t respond. Careful wasn’t going to save Elodie. Only speed and violence would do that now.
He took five men and moved deeper into the tunnels.
The dungeons were old, built into natural caverns that honeycombed the rock beneath Dunharrow. Gareth emerged from a gap between two stones, a space so narrow he nearly got stuck, and found himself in a storage room piled with rotting barrels and forgotten crates.
He pressed his ear to the door. Footsteps, distant. The murmur of voices. Someone laughing, probably a guard entertaining himself during the long night watch.
Elodie. He didn’t know which cell held her. Didn’t know if she was unharmed. But he knew Alaric, knew the man’s cruelty and his vanity, knew he’d want her conscious and terrified when Gareth arrived. She was bait, after all. What good was bait if it couldn’t scream?
