“Roz!” I hissed into the darkness. But it didn’t squeak back.
I snatched a half-burned oil lamp from the table, and tipped it toward the embers in the hearth. The wick caught, throwing a wavering glow across the stones.
“Roz,” I whispered one more time, but it was long gone.
I tightened my grip on the lamp and stepped forward. The stone pressed close on either side as I crossed the threshold, shadows peeling back reluctantly from the flame. The air changed immediately, becoming cooler and damper and carrying the stale tang of stone that hadn’t breathed daylight in years. My sandals scuffed against uneven flagstones, dipping into shallow grooves. Each step carried me lower, down a stairwell worn smooth by time and long since forgotten.
Cobwebs clung to the ceiling, their ghostly threads tangling in my hair as I stooped. My lamp sputtered, its light catching on the slick sheen of moisture trickling down cracks in the stone. The shadows leapt with each flicker, darting along the walls like creatures just out of sight.
“What am I doing?” I whispered to myself, though the words were smothered against the narrow stone and swallowed instantly. My fingers brushed the wall for balance, and I wondered how many others had slipped through these passages before me.
The deeper I went, the more the air shifted. It pressed into my lungs as though the palace itself were exhaling around me. My chest tightened, not with fear exactly, but something stranger. A weight that seemed to sink into me.
Each step made it worse. By the time I’d reached the bottom of the stairs, the sensation had become a steady thrum under my sternum, like a second heartbeat that wasn’t mine.
I pressed a hand against my chest, fingers splayed. The stone wall was cold beneath my other palm, but the pressure inside me burned. The rhythm called to me. A pulse not my own, dragging me deeper, as though the stones themselves were summoning me.
Hinges shrieked as I forced a door open and slipped into a large room. The lamplight wavered across low stone arches, revealing walls furred with moss and streaked by water that had long seeped through. Crates and amphorae slumped in corners, their lids split, spilling out shriveled herbs and rotted cloth.
A sudden squeak broke the silence. I swung the lamp around and saw Roz perched atop a broken crate on the far side of the room. Its eyes gleamed in the light, fixed on me as though urging me deeper.
“We should turn around,” I whispered to it. Roz squeaked and darted down the next tunnel.
Sighing, I followed, hissing as my wrap snagged on a jagged corner of stone, yanking me back like a hand refusing to let me pass. I tore free and kept going.
I could still feel the thumping in my chest though.
Roz had finally stopped ahead, its tail twitching as it crouched before a damp wall. I crept closer, gasping when I heard the muffled sound of men speaking from just beyond the room.
Crouching down next to Roz, I set the lamp down. Its light trembled over the wall as I pressed my palms against the cold surface, searching. My fingers snagged on a grime-caked tapestry that clung to the stones. I tugged it back, revealing a narrow slit in the wall where faint light peeked through.
“This is madness, Roz,” I murmured as I leaned closer.
The air coming from the hole reeked of damp iron, sweat, and rot, foulness pressing in ahead of everything else. Groans seeped through the stone, miserable and broken, punctuated by the muttering of men too beaten to beg. Heat pressed against me as I peered through the slit, a suffocating wave rolling out of the dark.
I pressed closer, realizing that the strange pulsing in my chest had suddenly stopped.
Torchlight flared against damp stone, throwing long shadows across the chamber beyond. Menelaus bristled at the center of it furiously, his eyes lit like coals in a furnace. Achilles stood beside him, arms folded tight and tension braced in the hard planes of his shoulders.
On the floor, a man knelt. Blood streaked down his jaw, dripping onto the stone in dark spatters. His breath rattled, shallow and frayed.
Theron stood among them, the dirt streaking his skin a clear sign he still hadn’t been granted the dignity of a bath. He lingered apart from the others, shadow tugging at the edges of him as if reluctant to let go. His hands hung loose at his sides, and the faint lines were still glimmering across his palms, symbols alive with a deep blue glow that pulsed like ice refusing to melt.
A shiver climbed my spine. Gods, what was he?
Menelaus’s commanding voice cracked through the chamber, shattering the silence. “You claim you can shield Sparta? Prove it. Break him—here, before us all.”
Theron’s gaze fixed on the kneeling assassin, flames banked deep in his eyes. He stepped forward slowly, raising a hand.
Menelaus’s brows shot upward. “What are you doing?”
Theron’s mouth curved faintly. “What you asked,” he said smoothly. “Breaking him. Just … my way.”
The glyphs on his palms flared.
The prisoner went rigid as his eyes snapped wide. His scream ripped through the cell and I flinched back from the wall, a hand flying to my mouth.
The air thickened and warped. It shimmered as though the chamber had bent into the shape of something wrong. Light twisted on itself. Sound bent sideways. And the man shrieked again, not in pain, but in terror so pure it curdled the air.
