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He quickly backed away from my cell, keeping his head lowered as he retreated into the oppressive shadows just as Sila came into view.

The female Vakra sauntered out of the gloom, her fluid, feline grace completely unbothered by the damp cold of the tunnels. Her washed-out grey skin looked stark against the dark, cured leathers clinging to her hips, and her venomous-green throat markings seemed to pulse under the sickly torchlight. She stopped just outside my bars, leaning her shoulder against the iron frame as her piercing red eyes locked onto me, a cruel, satisfied smirk twisting her sharp features.

"You look pathetic in the dirt, star-meat," she purred, her long, blackened claws tracing a slow, scraping line across the rusted door of my cage. "Let's see if that mouth of yours stays quite so brave today."

Chapter 59

Kaelen-Thul

The canyon’s deep roots were a graveyard of suffocating shadows, but the beast in my chest was blinding white-gold, tearing through the dark with a frantic, unyielding fury.

I hit the damp forest floor, my bare feet sinking into rotting mulch and tangled vines that carpeted the sunless crust. The air down here was different—thick, stale, and choked with the metallic, oily stench of the lowlands. It scratched at the back of my throat, a toxic reminder of how far we had descended from the clean, wind-swept canopy of the Nest.

I dropped to all fours, my jaw baring as I dragged a deep, desperate breath into my lungs.

There.

A sharp, electric shock bolted straight down my spine, the gold markings on my red skin flaring into a sudden, blinding brilliance. It was a trace of her. Not the clean, sweet scent of her skin that usually filled my senses, but the bitter, sharp tang of her saliva mixed with the foul, chemical taste of a Vakra handler. She had spit on them. Even bound, terrified, and dragged into the black belly of the earth, my small, fragile mate was still fighting. She was still defying them, matching their venom with her own stubborn fire.

A dark, prideful rumble vibrated in my chest, immediately consumed by a wave of protective agony. Hold on, Lyra. Hold on to that fire.

But as I lunged forward, tracking the fading ghost of her scent past a cluster of weeping, iron-reinforced roots, the trail violently shattered.

The damp soil gave way to a massive shelf of ancient skymetal—a scar left by a fallen star centuries ago that the Vakra used as a highway. The surface was caked in old machine grease, stagnant water, and the pungent, masking odour of rotting waste. I pressed my palms to the cold metal, my claws scraping uselessly against the rusted plating as I turned my head from side to side and inhaled deeply.

Nothing.

The scent was gone. The mate bond in my chest throbbed with a hollow, agonising vibration, spinning in circles, unable to lock onto her position through the dense, metallic interference of the deep crust.

A suffocating weight pressed down on my lungs. Panic—cold, sharp, and entirely foreign to a Huntmaster—clawed at the edges of my mind. We were too late. They had bypassed the lower hollow paths. They had taken her deeper into the sunless labyrinth than I could track, into places where the air turned to poison, and the earth belonged entirely to the scavengers. The rage in my blood turned volatile, a destructive current that made the muscles in my arms tremble with the urge to tear the very stone apart.

With a ferocious, guttural roar of sheer frustration, I slammed my fist into the rusted skymetal plate, shattering the iron crust beneath my knuckles.

A soft, cautious rustle in the high brush behind me made my ears snap back. I spun around, my amber eyes flashing with a lethal brilliance, my tail whipping through the damp air, ready to eviscerate whatever was approaching.

"Kaelen, lower your blades. It is us," Toren’s deep voice boomed from the gloom.

My brother stepped out from the shadow of a massive, weeping cedar trunk, his chest heaving, his dark red skin caked in the black mud of the western branch lines. A second later, the foliage to the right parted, and Mara slipped into the clearing, her sharp features grim, her soot-covered fists tight against her hunting blades.

They circled back to my position, their faces pale under the dim, greenish light filtering down from the lowest canopy leaves.

"The western branch lines are clear," Toren reported, his voice tight with the same heavy gravity that was crushing my chest. "We pushed hard all the way to the dead valley's edge. No signs of a main vanguard, and no fresh tracks. If they passed through the western hollows, they did it before the gates even fell. They didn't take the open routes, Kaelen. They knew we would cut them off."

I turned my desperate, burning gaze to Mara. "The eastern descent. The weeping tunnels."

Mara shook her head slowly, her jaw set into a hard, rigid line. "Nothing. I tracked through the old scrap heaps near the deep crust openings. The tunnels are abandoned, but the air smells foul with old grease. They didn't double back to the valleys, Huntmaster. They went straight down. They used the central vertical shafts—the old root-wells that drop directly into the sunless city."

My chest rose and fell in ragged, volatile heaves.

"She is gone, Toren." The words tasted wrong.

Gone.

As if she were dead. As if the bond thrumming beneath my ribs wasn't still screaming her name. I pressed a fist against my chest. For a single, horrible heartbeat, I felt it.

Fear.

Not my own. Small. Sharp. Suffocating. A crushing pressure around a delicate throat. A flash of scarlet eyes.