Page 122 of Torment Me Knot
Kev
Levi spreads the map across the kitchen table and I pin one corner beneath my coffee mug while my fist pins the other down.
It’s a printout of the underground network.
Three legal floors stamped clean in black. The two beneath them sketched in by hand from what Aubrey remembered,and what Espie pieced together. The handwritten sections are rougher. Incomplete. Full of gaps.
Still more than we had yesterday. More than we ever had.
“Ronan's team holds the perimeter,” Levi says. He traces the outer exits with one finger. “All surface access will be sealed thirty minutes before we go in. Nobody moves, nobody exits, nobody enters until I give the signal.” He lifts his head. “Just us past the perimeter. Nobody else.”
I pull the map toward me. “How many ways in?”
“Three. One is the trapdoor Aubrey told us about.” He taps the hand-drawn section. “The other two are original station access. The train has to access the station somewhere. But the entrances were sealed when the network was decommissioned.”
Ronan leans against the counter with his arms crossed. “The two floors below the official record are the problem. We're going in blind past level three.”
I tip my head toward my omegas. “Not entirely blind. Aubrey can tell you the layout.”
“The trapdoor will take you down to access the lift with the red floor.” Aubrey pauses. “The ride to level five takes forty seconds. Maybe forty-five.”
I press a finger to the sketch, tracing the rough lines. “Talk me through the corridor.”
“Strip lighting. One side only, so the right half of the corridor is in shadow. The smell is antiseptic with something electrical underneath. Like overheated wiring.” Aubrey stops. “There are rooms off the left. I don't know how many. They only ever took me into one. The auction room.”
“Can you map where the trapdoor is?” Levi uncaps a second marker and slides it across the table. Aubrey picks it up. He studies the third floor layout for a moment, then draws a corridor in from the main platform area and puts a small square at the end of it.
“There's a door at the end of a hall. It looks like a storeroom. The trapdoor is inside it, flush with the floor. There's a shelving unit in front of it. It took two of Axel's men to shift it. It can be opened from above.” He straightens. “Below it there's a ladder, maybe twelve feet. Then a short passage and the platform opens out to the lift.”
Ronan straightens off the counter. He leans over the sketch and puts one finger on the square at the end of the corridor. “We'll need two people on it before anyone goes through.” He taps the square once. “Good to know before we're standing in front of it.” Ronan nods once at Aubrey. “Good work.”
A smile flashes across Aubrey's lips before it slides away. Six months ago he was comatose because of his trauma. Now he's sitting at the kitchen table mapping it for an extraction team. I put my hand on his shoulder. One squeeze. He turns his face up toward me.
“You're doing so well,” I say. Aubrey clasps my hand and a slight tremor runs through his hand into mine.
The room smells like cold coffee and exhaustion. None of us have slept. Ezra’s leaning against the counter with his arms crossed. Lex is too still beside the window. Levi hasn’t touched the coffee going cold beside his elbow.
Sera should be here. Her absence sits in the center of the house like a wound. It’s the reason there’s a tactical vest under my shirt and a knife strapped to my hip.
“Are you alright here? I need to find Ezra,” I ask Aubrey.
He nods and lets go of my hand. “I'll be fine. I need to find Espie.”
Aubrey heads down the corridor. I watch until he disappears around the corner.
He’ll find Espie. They’ll hold onto each other for a while and breathe easier because of it. They always do.
What I want, and I'm not going to stand here and pretend otherwise, is to go with him. Find them both. Take them out to the patio nest and lie down in the middle and not move until morning. Stare at whatever stars are visible through the city haze with both of them curled around me. Let the scent of them do what it always does, which is make the world smaller and more manageable and bearable.
I'm not going to do that. Not tonight. Not yet. Not until Sera is in that nest where she belongs with the rest of us.
I push off the doorframe. Ezra is in the bathroom, medical kit open on the counter. He's laid everything out: trauma dressings, pressure bandages, saline, two IV setups still in their packaging, a burn kit, syringes lined up smallest to largest. He's moving through each item methodically, checking dates, replacing what's borderline.
“Talk me through what we might find,” I say.
He lifts his gaze for a moment, before continuing to sort through the items. “If she's been in a subterranean space for forty-eight hours with no climate control, her core temperature will be low. That's manageable with the foil blanket and warm fluids once we have a line in.” He sets the emergency blanket in the case. “Blood loss from the finger is the harder variable. It depends entirely on what they did to control it when they took it.”
I put my hands in my pockets, swallowing down my rising bile.
