The wards fail with a visceral crack, bone breaking and magic tearing apart at the seams.
“Run.” He shoves me through the passage. “Don’t look back.”
The hidden door sealsbehind us with a muted click of a tomb locking shut. Sixty floors down. The thought alone makes my legs weaken, but staying in the penthouse, with that thing tearing through the wards, isn’t an option.
My fingers tremble as I conjure a sphere of pale blue light. Dust shimmers in its glow, catching in the cramped air and choking the narrow passage to the service stairwell in claustrophobic stillness. My blood ruby pulses at my throat, reacting to the magic thrashing beneath my skin.
“Stay close to me,” Rowe murmurs, his hand brushing the small of my back. “And kill the light. We don’t want to be seen.”
“But Raze is still out there,” I whisper, panic clawing into my ribs. “We can’t just—”
“He’s trained for this, Aria. He knows how to fight.” Rowe’s tone is calm, unyielding. “Right now, getting you out is what matters.”
The light dies at his words. For three heartbeats, there’s only silence, and then the low thrum of emergency lights bleeding crimson along the walls. Then comes the sound. A wet, chittering scrape, a click of bone on iron, the sort of noise that rewires instinct and tells the body it’s already too late. Rowe pulls me closer, his body angling protectively in front of mine.
“Aria,” he starts, but the words collapse under a thunderous slam against the sealed door. The impact shudders through the passage, concrete dust raining from above as another strike lands, metal groaning and hinges screaming while ancient, warded wood begins to splinter under a pressure far beyond what it should endure.
I’m not built for this. I’m a researcher, not a soldier. Whatever that thing is, it just tore through spellwork designed by Alexander himself—defensive magic meant to keep out armies. I barely scraped through basic combat training at the Academy, too focused on my books and experiments to master more than a few defensive spells. Rowe knows creatures—how they track, how they hunt—and the way his muscles coil tells me this is worse than anything he’s faced in the beast pens.
“We need to move,” he murmurs, his hand tightening on my elbow as he guides me toward the hatch.
Behind us, the second door buckles.
The stairwell yawns downward in an endless spiral of steel and shadow. Fifty-nine floors. It may as well be forever. The railing bites cold into my palm as we descend, Rowe never leaving my side, one arm steady at my waist.
We clear three levels before it happens.
The growl hits like a seismic wave, low and guttural, alive with ancient malice, reverberating through the stairwell and through me, shaking loose a primal instinct buried in my chest—the knowledge that this is no beast’s cry, but something older, something that remembers when we were prey. When fire and stone walls offered no protection.
My heel catches on the landing at the fifty-fifth floor, the grate snapping beneath me with a sharp crack that ricochets up the spiral. Above us, the clicking stops, and the silence that follows presses close.
Then the noise begins. Wet, rasping pulls of air seep from the walls, each breath tasting the fear bleeding from our skin, savoring the scent of two warm, cornered things.
“Don’t move,” Rowe whispers, already kneeling beside me. His fingers work fast, freeing my trapped foot. “These have to come off. You’ll run faster without them.” He removes the other heel and helps me balance. His grip is infuriatingly calm, even as death coils above us.
The lights falter, and reality flickers with them as something wrong pours down the stairwell walls—not shadow, but conscious, a darkness that thinks. It moves like liquid memory, and then we see them.
Eyes.
Toxic green, not in pairs but in clusters, dozens of them, tracking us in silence, unblinking, observing with the patience of apex predators born in the dark and tempered by millennia of blood.
“That’s not possible,” Rowe breathes, his grip tightening around mine. “Those eyes, they’re like a Deathshade Widow’s, but the way it moves . . .”
“What is it?” I whisper, magic surging violently through my veins. My ruby throbs against my throat, responding to the terror clawing beneath my skin. I force the rising power down. The last thing we need is for me to lose control and trigger a magical outburst now.
“Something worse,” Rowe says grimly, already pulling me down the next flight of stairs. “We can’t stay here analyzing it. Move.”
Fifty floors left.
Forty-nine.
Forty-eight.
Each number unspools like a countdown to execution. My bare feet strike cold concrete, the rhythm echoing with the finality of a funeral march. Rowe doesn’t let go, his hand locked around my wrist, guiding me down through the red-lit spiral. The creature’s pursuit has shifted, becoming something calculated and cruel. Its movements echo off the walls differently now, testing our pace, learning our patterns. The clicking of legs against metal slows to match our desperate steps, a mocking symphony of our terror.
On floor forty-five, a new sound joins the nightmare above. A drag of breath, wet and cavernous, wrong in its very rhythm.
The lights flicker again, and in the instant of blackout the air fills with ash and decay, as if something has crawled from hell’s own crematorium. Rowe pulls me closer, his body tensing as if he could shield me from it.
