Page 22 of Hidden

“Not my problem. It has nothing to do with us.” Despite her denial, the conversation had clearly struck a nerve.

“So you’re saying I wasn’t kidnapped?”

With a darting movement, she pushed the button that closed the panel over the door. “I’m done arguing with you.”

The panel began to grind shut.

“Let me go, Lila.”

“Oh, but you’ll stay,” she said, eyes snapping. “Even if you made it out of your cell, no living thing can leave this way station without permission. That’s old magic, woven straight from the soul of the forest. Cross that line, and no one will find so much as a finger bone.”

Rafe took a breath to object, but he was staring at the closed door. Her words had just ripped his careful plan to shreds.

He sank to the floor, his back pressed against the wall. A low, frustrated growl escaped him, echoing against the hard walls. His fist closed around the fob.

What good was it now, when nothing alive could escape?

CHAPTER 7

Time passed, but how much was a mystery. The walls didn’t move, but they seemed to gather weight. Rafe felt their heaviness in every breath he took, as if the in and out of air got harder each time. He had to get out. If he didn’t, he’d suffocate on nothing.

He got up, spurred by the need to pace … move … something. A therapist—the Silent Wolves insisted on monitoring the mental health of their operatives—had blamed his claustrophobia on the excessive self-discipline he’d wrapped around his rebellious psyche. Or something. He’d blame the bars and cold floors for his discomfort because those were hard facts.

Still, his thoughts yammered without mercy. It was his own fault he was there. He should have known better than to answer his father’s text—but the unexpected request had been impossible to ignore. And, there was so much past to erase. He had started challenging his father young, picking a fight whenever and wherever he saw a need for justice. It had come to a head when he’d mounted a raiding party on a rival pack against his father’s explicit orders. When Rafe had left the pack, there had been anger on both sides. It was only later he figured out that a wolf without a pack was a wolf with no home.

But they needed his skills now, and playing the hero might be his way back. Yes, he should have known the job would be more complicated than what he’d learned over the phone. Dad wasn’t a detail kinda guy, sometimes by nature and sometimes on purpose.

To be fair, a fae dungeon beneath a trendy ultramodern mansion was a definite curve ball. No one would have seen this one coming. And now? Now Rafe would vanish like all the wolves who searched the valley before him. Or not. He rarely failed—and wasn’t planning to take up the habit.

His pacing had taken him around the cell three times. He turned back to the door, examining its structure one more time. The bottom half was solid, the top inset with a barred window sealed by a sliding metal panel on the side closest to the hallway. The lock appeared to be magnetic, probably operated through the control pad.

He examined the spot where he’d dropped his shirt button into the track right as Lila had closed the panel. As intended, it had stopped the panel from closing completely, leaving the thinnest gap along the frame. A good system would have detected an object, but the electronic security in this place was designed by amateurs. Fae copied tech with an artist’s eye, but rarely understood the principles behind it, probably because it conflicted with their own magic. Maybe the more sensitive the system, the more problems it would have around the fae.

Rafe peered closer. It was hard to tell, but it looked as if the pressure had cracked the button into several pieces. Experimentally, Rafe probed the gap, but it was too small for human fingers to slide into the opening. He needed to rethink his next step.

And the one after that. His original plan had withered with Lila’s last words. According to her, a spell trapped him inside the way station. Fae were tricksters, but they rarely—if ever—told a barefaced lie. Still, there were always loopholes.

A snarling scream ripped through his musing. Rafe froze.

Izetta. He knew her hunting cry, but this was fraught with as much pain as anger. He snapped to alert. Shifting his nails into strong, deadly claws, he slipped them into the gap between the panel and its frame and began pulling it open to reveal the bars.

The metal groaned as the system fought to close the panel tight. The force dragged against Rafe’s claws, bending them at a painful angle, but soon he could slip his fingers around the edge. As he tried to slide the panel to an open position, the bars blocked his progress. They were too tightly spaced for his human arm to pass through, but he was a shifter with exceptional control. He could shift a part of himself at a time. A paw could go where a hand could not, and it was every bit as strong. Still, he strained against the force driving the panel shut. Muscle and tendon bunched to resist it. More than once, he had visions of the mechanism snapping closed and breaking his bones. He was bathed in sweat before he’d worked the panel along its tracks far enough to reach the keypad and shift back to a fully human form.

The scream came again, fainter than before. A prickle chased down the back of his neck. As a rule, vampires didn’t feel much pain. This had to be bad.

He fumbled the fob out of his pocket and juggled it to the hand he’d worked through the bars, all the while keeping the door from chopping off his arm. The keypad was to the left of the door, completely out of his line of sight. After a few blind swipes, he heard the beep that said the keypad had come to life.

Now to enter the code he’d heard Lila enter. He played the sequence of tones over in his mind, remembering the slight variations and the silences between each beep. Beep. Beep. Beebee-ba-beep.

Experimentally, he pushed two buttons, one after the other, then another two. The button at the top of the keypad was a slightly higher pitch than the button below. The left key was a lower pitch than the one on the right. The differences were slight—so slight that a human would never have noticed.

Another bead of sweat snaked down the back of his neck. He slowly tapped out the code, got it wrong, then tried again. With sudden force, the sliding panel stopped fighting back and locked into the open position with a sturdy clank. Rafe stumbled, off balance now that he didn’t need to push for all he was worth. His palm tingled as blood rushed back to his half-crushed flesh.

In the distance, he heard a door close, then footfalls. Perfectly still, he held his breath until he was sure they were moving away from his cell. Another door, this one farther away, opened and shut. At the very edge of his sensitive hearing, Izetta cursed.

There was no time to waste. He searched around the keypad with his fingertips and found a large button beneath the keypad. It was an awkward reach through the bars, forcing him to rise up on his toes before he could press the button all the way down.

The door released with a heavy click. Rafe pulled his arm back through the bars, rubbing the chafed skin, and pushed the door. It swung open without a sound. Rafe cautiously stepped into the hall, scanning from right to left. There was no one in sight, but the scent of blood hung heavy in the air. Beneath it was the leathery musk of vampire.

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