Chapter 25: The Hunt

FELICIA

“If we find him…” Cassian said quietly, gripping his sword. “Who kills him?”

No one answered.

Finally, Lucien spoke. “If it’s my father… that’s my burden.”

Orion’s eyes hardened. “Not if your hesitation gets my daughter killed.”

⸻

We descended before dawn, guided by whatever intelligence had survived the fire, into passages older than Silvercrest itself … forgotten Moon shrines, collapsed catacombs, escape routes no living map remembered.

The deeper we went, the more wrong everything felt. No animals. No scent trails. No sound but our own footsteps.

My wolf paced restless under my skin the entire way down, hackles raised at something none of us could see yet.

⸻

The mission exposed every crack in us within the first hour.

Orion kept overriding my orders, fear for me winning out over strategy every time. Cassian broke formation to chase a shadow he swore he’d seen, refusing to wait for the rest of us to catch up. Lucien’s eyes kept scanning every side passage like his father might be waiting behind the next turn, hope pulling his focus somewhere it didn’t belong.

I refused to turn back despite the healer’s warnings still ringing in my ears from that morning.

None of us were working as one unit anymore, and I felt the enemy’s advantage widen with every wasted minute.

⸻

We found the command center an hour later, hidden behind a false wall none of us would have noticed without Cassian’s nose leading us there, a seam in the stone too perfect to be natural.

Maps of the palace lined every surface, marked and annotated in careful ink. Royal schedules. Military codes stolen from three kingdoms, still sealed in their original wax. Letters I’d never seen, and portraits of me … childhood, adolescence, the woman I’d become … pinned in careful rows along the wall, each one dated, each one unnervingly precise.

Someone had been watching my entire life unfold from this room, cataloguing it like a collector.

But we’d missed him by minutes. Food still steamed on a plate, untouched. Candles still burned, wax pooling fresh at their bases, flames barely disturbed by our arrival.

He’d known exactly when we’d arrive, down to the minute.

Cassian went rigid beside me, his face draining of color.

“Only four people knew this location.”

Understanding hit the room at once, cold and immediate. One of our own had sold us out.

Before any of us could react, one of our guards drove a poisoned blade into the soldier beside him and vanished into the dark tunnels beyond, moving like he’d rehearsed the exact path a hundred times.

⸻

The chase tore us apart exactly the way I understood, too late, it had been designed to.

Explosive Moon crystals collapsed the passage behind Orion before he could follow. Silver arrows rained down from slits hidden in the walls, forcing Cassian into a side tunnel chasing the traitor alone. Magic seals slammed shut behind every one of us in turn, sealing each path the instant we crossed it.

Within minutes, it was only Lucien and me.

Exactly as the enemy had planned from the start.

⸻

LUCIEN

We fought through the collapsing corridor together, chains bursting from the walls faster than either of us could track, silver links snapping at our ankles like something alive, sparks flying where Felicia’s blade met stone.

Then I heard it. My father’s voice, calling my name from somewhere just ahead, exactly the way it used to when I was young enough to still run toward it without thinking, warm and familiar in a way that undid twelve years of grief in a single breath.

I froze.

Only a second. Less than a second, my body betraying me before my mind could catch up.

It was enough.

⸻

FELICIA

A chain lashed toward Lucien’s exposed side while he stood there, lost in whatever ghost had just called his name, and I didn’t think … I only moved, my body reacting before my mind caught up to the danger.

My wolf tore free of me before I’d decided to release her, silver light exploding outward, a shield of starlight and moonlight snapping into place between us and the blast, vast and blinding in the narrow tunnel.

The explosion hit anyway, tearing through the tunnel with enough force to throw me clean off my feet, the shield absorbing the worst of it but not all.

I hit the stone wall hard enough that the world went white for a moment, pain lancing through my back, through my stomach, through every place that mattered, my ears ringing in the sudden silence after.

Lucien survived untouched, exactly as my wolf had intended.

I felt the children’s heartbeats flicker beneath my ribs, faint, stuttering, and for the first time since I’d learned their names, real terror closed around my throat, sharper and colder than anything the enemy had thrown at us yet.

⸻

Lucien rushed toward me and stopped inches away, hand hovering, caught between instinct and the restriction I’d given him weeks ago and never lifted.

That restraint hurt worse than if he’d simply reached for me anyway.

I lashed out instead of thanking him, my fear finding the easiest target in the room.

“You hesitated.”

He didn’t deny it. “I heard my father.”

I closed my eyes. One second. That was all it had taken … one heartbeat of doubt, one moment of a ghost pulling his attention somewhere it couldn’t afford to go.

I understood then, sitting in the rubble with my hand pressed to my stomach, that I still couldn’t fully trust him in battle.

I watched the same understanding land on his face.

Neither of us said it aloud.

⸻

Cassian found us not long after, dragging the traitor’s body behind him through the dust, his expression carved from stone.

He tore the mask from the dead guard’s face.

None of us recognized him.

Then the skin began to dissolve, rippling and thinning like wax under flame, and beneath it, a different face emerged … one every person in that tunnel had attended a funeral for ten years ago.

Orion stumbled back a step, all the color gone from him.

“…That’s impossible.”

A second voice slid out of the dark beyond our torchlight, slow, amused, unmistakably alive.

“Nothing is impossible anymore.”