I clamped my mouth shut and forced myself not to retch.
Gabriel swore under his breath, his hand squeezing down, as if he wanted to drag me out of here. “Pull your shirt up over your face; it’ll cut down the smell.”
I did as he said.
Nico pushed up beside me, and in the distance, a single torch flickered, then further down, another. “Those are the cells up ahead, carved into the rock. Hard to say where he is, and there’s no rhyme nor reason to the layout.”
My chest constricted. In the darkness, I couldn’t see much, but I sensed the way air currents rushed upward, the labored breathing of prisoners in the dark, the maze stretching out around us.
“So many,” Gabriel murmured. “How do we know?—”
“I don’t.” Nico’s quiet voice was blunt. “Butshedoes. Where is he, Emberline?”
You are the only one who can find him in the maze. I swallowed, focusing on that faint thread of Dante’s scent, cutting through the rot like a blade. Smoke and iron and sheer male stubbornness.
“This way,” I said, “he’s not far, he’s right here, right here…”
The corridor leveled out, and we slipped past the first torch, past cell after cell, then straight ahead where the air tasted of leather and clove. The labyrinth was built to confuse, but it didn’t understand one thing.
Dante Dominico wasmine.
He was a brand burned deep into my soul. There was nothing standing between us except darkness. No walls. No soldiers.
Nothing could stop me from reaching him now.
“There are no wards, no guards,” Gabriel hissed, dogging my heels, not limping as badly now. “Why not? There are prisoners down here.”
Nico’s answer came fast—grim fact. “Because the Overseer doesn’t need them.”
Gabriel’s voice sharpened. “Explain.”
We hurried past the second torch, and Nico’s answer came slow. “Magic is the luxury of the privileged. The Overseer… he keeps control with brutality. With the fact that broken prisoners can’t escape across a hundred miles of sand.”
My stomach twisted as I hurried past more cells, past eyes peering out from the dark. A chill slid down my spine.I’d better never meet this Overseer.
Dante’s scent surged again, sharp enough to steal my breath away.
This corridor opened into a wider space, and for the first time, I sensed scale—the vastness of the place below the earth. The stench was… mindboggling, even with my shirt pulled up over my mouth and nose.
And yet, beneath it all, through the rot and blood and fear— I took another deep breath, sifting out everything that didn’t matter to find the one thing that did.
Smoke and iron. Leather and clove.
Dante.
My heart beating against my ribs, I tightened my grip on my knife until my knuckles ached, letting that familiar scent pull me forward into the darkest end of the corridor.
“He’s right here,” I pointed into the darkness with my blade. “There.”
17
DANTE
Iwoke to the sound of…nothing.
Nothing I could put my finger on, butsomethingin this endless dark felt different than before.
The constant, far-off dripping of water still echoed, as did the muted clinking of chains as prisoners shifted in their shallow holes. The grunting as someone stroked themselves, the moan of pain from a fresh injury. The death rattle of someone who wouldn’t survive to see dawn.
