He shouldn’t be here.
I straightened slightly, not enough to draw attention to myself. He scanned the room once, taking in the crowd, the dais, the wolves scattered through the hall. His gaze didn’t stop on any of us. Either he didn’t see us, or he pretended not to.
Then he turned and began to lead his little group toward a narrow service corridor I knew damned well didn’t lead to more canapés.
I swore under my breath.
From across the floor, Tamsin caught my gaze. Her brow flicked, a question glimmering in her eyes.
I tipped my chin toward the corridor, then toward Dane.
Her expression went flat for a heartbeat before it sparked with recognition. Elias, standing a few feet away from her, shifted just enough to follow her line of sight.
I pushed off the column and slipped off after Dane.
The service door swallowed me into a cooler, darker passage that smelled of dust and old oil. The sounds of the hall dulled to a muffled hum.
Dane’s footsteps were ahead, brisk but not rushed. His men kept tight formation around him. I hung back just far enough that if one of them glanced over a shoulder, they’d see nothing but shadow.
They took a turn I’d scouted with Mirae’s notes, the same turn that led down toward the ventilation controls for the upper halls.
I dropped lower, letting my heels land softly, hugging the wall where the light didn’t quite reach. Voices drifted back toward me.
“Are the canisters ready?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Delivery lines tested?”
“Aye. Pressure’s stable.”
The corridor opened into a cramped, high-ceilinged room full of pipes and metal ribs. The air was warmer here, tasting faintly of old smoke and metal. In the center of the space stood a cluster of regulators, wheels and levers attached to a network of thick pipes that ran upward into the stone. Above them, I knew, were the vents that fed the assembly hall its clean, conditioned air.
Dane stood with his back to me, coat unbuttoned, looking up at the pipes like they were an altar.
Two of his men wrestled steel canisters into brackets attached to the feed lines. Even from the doorway I could see the labels, and I couldn’t help but notice that they were the same style we’d seen in the underground lab, only slimmed down for portability.
My stomach dropped.
Feral aerosol.
Dane glanced at the gauges. “We’ll do a slow release,” he said quietly. “Let it seep into the room. No one will notice until it’s too late. They want to parade their tame wolves in front of us? We’ll see how tame they are when the gas hits their lungs.”
He smiled then, a small, satisfied, hateful thing.
I could have moved then.
I could have stepped out of the shadows, slit the throat of the nearest man, snapped Dane’s neck, and thrown a wrench into the regulator. I could have made it messy and loud and heroic.
I looked at the canisters.
The valves.
The regulators already halfway open.
Even if I took them all out, the release had already started. The system was built to run itself once primed. And if I made enough noise, I’d just add panic to poison.
Tamsin needed information more than she needed a pile of bodies in a boiler room.
