Chapter 92: Mysterious man

Azura’s POV

He was still looking at me.

Those gray eyes through the white mask, steady and completely unhurried, like the smoke filling the corridor and the sounds of fighting coming from every direction and the massive sword he had just been dragging across the stone floor were all perfectly ordinary things that required no particular attention right now.

I was the thing that required attention.

I have been looking for you for a long time now.

The words sat in the air between us and I could not make my legs move. Could not make my brain produce a single useful thought. I just stood there in the smoke with my heart going entirely too fast and looked at this enormous masked man with his white hair and his black horns and tried to understand what was happening.

He had called me a thief.

I had never seen him before in my life.

"AZURA!"

Liona’s voice came from behind me, sharp and breathless, her footsteps loud and fast against the stone. She came around the corner and almost ran straight into my back before she caught herself.

"I have been looking everywhere for you. You cannot just go running back up here alone; it is not safe. We need to get back to the children right now before..."

She stopped.

I felt the exact moment she saw him. The way her words just cut off mid-sentence like someone had reached in and removed them. The footsteps behind me going completely still.

I did not take my eyes off him.

But I felt the shift happen.

His eyes moved. Slowly and deliberately, from my face, across the space between us, and landed on Liona standing behind me.

And then he went completely still in a way he had not been still before. Not the patient, controlled stillness of someone who was simply waiting. Something different. Something that had not been there a second ago.

I did not understand it. But I felt it. The quality of the air in the corridor changed.

"Liona?" I said, without turning.

She did not answer.

I glanced back at her.

She was standing with one hand pressed flat against her chest. Her face was doing something I had never seen it do before, a kind of frozen confusion, like she was trying to understand something that her mind did not have the framework to process. Her lips were slightly parted. Her eyes were fixed on him.

"What," she whispered. Not a question exactly. Just the word, barely any sound behind it.

"Liona," I said it more firmly this time.

She still did not look at me.

I looked back at him. He was still watching her. His expression behind the mask was impossible to read; everything was covered and concealed, but something had changed in the way he was standing. Something had shifted in him the moment his eyes landed on her and it had not shifted back.

I did not know what that meant, and I didn’t have time to figure it out.

Just then a sound came without warning.

Metal cutting through air, spinning, fast and precise, and completely deliberate. I ducked without thinking and felt the wind of it pass above my head. Liona made a sharp sound behind me.

The axe slammed into the stone wall behind the man and stuck there, sending cracks spreading out from the impact point in every direction like a spider web frozen mid-spin.

He turned.

I turned too.

Rhydor stood at the far end of the corridor. His chest was heaving, his ceremonial robes gone somewhere, his jaw set in that way it got when something had reached the part of him that was done with patience. His eyes were fixed on the masked man with a focus that was not quite rage and not quite calculation but somewhere in between both of them. He had another axe already in his hand.

"Step away from the ladies," he said.

His voice was completely level. That was the part that made it land the way it did. Not shouting. Not threatening. Just absolutely certain that what he had said was going to happen.

The masked man looked at Rhydor. Then his gray eyes moved back to me. Then slowly, deliberately, back to Liona.

He did not step away. He did not step forward either.

He simply stood there in the smoke with his sword at his side and looked at Liona with that changed quality in his stillness that I still did not understand and did not have time to examine.

I grabbed Liona’s arm.

"Run. Now."

She moved. Not smoothly, not with any of her usual coordination, more like her legs had remembered how to work but her mind had not fully rejoined the situation yet. I pulled, and she followed, and we ran.

Behind us, the sound of metal meeting metal exploded through the corridor. The massive sword off the stone floor and connecting with Rhydor’s axe, the impact of it was loud enough that I felt it in my teeth. I did not look back. I just ran and kept Liona’s arm in my hand and pulled her through the smoke and the noise and the chaos of corridors that were nothing like they had been two hours ago when we were putting children to bed and the biggest problem in my life was not knowing what to say to a man across a crowded hall.

People were running in every direction. The warriors are moving toward the fight. Servants moving away from it. Someone was shouting orders from somewhere I could not place. The smoke was thicker up here than it had been near the underground rooms, sitting heavy and grey in the air, making everything further than ten feet away look soft and indistinct.

A hand came out of the smoke and grabbed my arm.

I spun, pulling back, already reaching for something I did not have, but stopped when I saw her face.

Genevieve.

Her face was pale but completely controlled, that mask she wore when things were happening that required her to hold everything together regardless of what she was feeling underneath it. She looked at both of us in one quick sweep and then turned without waiting for anything from us.

"This way," she said. "Now."

She pulled us into a side corridor that branched away from the main hall, narrower and quieter, the sounds of fighting becoming more distant with every turn we took. When she finally stopped walking, she turned to face us, and the look on her face was the kind that meant what she was about to say was not negotiable, and she already knew that and was prepared for any argument I tried to make.

"What happened?" she asked. "Where are you running from? You were supposed to be underground."

I was still breathing hard. "A man," I said. "Strange man with horns and covered face called me a thief, and also said he had been looking for me."

Genevieve stopped moving entirely.

"Horns," she said.

"Yes."

She was quiet for exactly two seconds. "Did you steal anything? From any man fitting that description?"

"No," I said. "Never. I have never seen him before."

She did not ask again. Whatever she was thinking moved behind her eyes and stayed there. She looked at Liona briefly, at the hand still pressed against Liona’s chest, at the expression still sitting on Liona’s face that had not fully cleared since the corridor, and then she looked back at me.

"We need to get you both out of this building," she said.

"I am not leaving," I said immediately.

"If he is looking for you specifically, you being here puts every person in this building in more danger than they are already in. Every warrior who tries to stand between you and him is a warrior who might not walk away from it."

I opened my mouth.

"And you cannot save anyone if you are dead," she said. Simply and without any softness in it because she knew softness was not what was going to move me. "Go. Now."

I looked at her. "What about Rhydor?"

Something shifted in her face. Just slightly. "He will take care of himself," she said. Quieter now. "Right now you need to take care of yourself."

I wanted to argue. I had about four different arguments ready, and none of them made it out of my mouth because I looked at her face and I knew she was right, and I hated that she was right, and I stood there for one more second holding onto the argument anyway because letting it go felt like leaving.

Then I let it go.

Torin appeared at the end of the corridor.

He was already moving when he came around the corner, taking in the situation in one look the way he always did. But his easy expression was completely absent. The smile he wore like armor was gone. What was left was someone I barely recognized. Serious. Focused. Ready.

He looked at Genevieve.

She looked back at him. Something passed between them in that silence, something that did not need words, something that looked like years of knowing each other in ways I would never fully understand.

She looked back at him. "Ready?"

He did not answer. He just shifted.

The brown wolf stood where he had been. Large and solid and completely still, those warm eyes were steady in the dim light. He lowered himself toward the ground without being asked.

Genevieve put her hand on my back and pushed me forward. "Go."

I climbed on. The fur under my hands was warm and real and I focused on that while Liona climbed up behind me and wrapped her arms around my waist and held on.

Torin moved.

He was fast. Faster than I expected, even knowing what I knew about him, the corridor blurring on both sides, and then the pack house falling away behind us as he found an exit and broke through it, and the cold night air hit my face all at once. Smoke and firelight and the sounds of fighting swallowed behind us as the dark tree line came up fast and then closed around us and everything became shadow and movement and the sound of his paws against the ground.

Liona’s arms tightened around my waist.

The trees blurred past on both sides, dark shapes rushing by in the dark, and I held on and looked ahead and tried not to think about the people we were leaving behind or the sound of metal on metal in that corridor or the gray eyes through the white mask that had looked at me like they already knew exactly who I was.

Then Liona’s voice came from behind me. Small and quiet, barely audible over the wind and the movement.

"How is it possible?"

I turned my head slightly. "What?"

She did not repeat it. Did not explain. Just held on tighter and said nothing else.