A Queen's Rise From The Flames

Episode 6

What The Dark Hid

Darbie POV

The red emergency lights flickered and buzzed above me. Someone had cut the power from inside. I stood in the middle of the cage, staring at the dead executioner wolf. It looked like it belonged in someone else’s nightmare.

My hands weren’t shaking. That scared me more than the body.

The crowd’s shock turned into pure panic. The rival guards who had shoved me through the gate started shouting at each other in the dark. Their voices went high and frantic. They had expected me to die screaming. Instead the wolf lay gutted in the dirt, and I was still standing.

That wasn’t anyone’s plan. Fine. Let them scramble.

A loud crash came from the far end of the cavern. Academy enforcers smashed through the sealed doors. Their floodlights cut white beams through the smoke. People shoved and screamed toward the exits. Nobody looked at the cage anymore. Nobody except him.

I felt Gideon’s stare before I found him. He stood on the high walkway, locked on me, not moving while everyone else ran. I didn’t wait to see what he would do. I turned my back on the corpse, pushed through the broken gate, and disappeared into the stampede.

The crowd swallowed me. Elbows, shoulders, the sharp smell of smoke bombs pressed in from every side. For once I was glad to be small. Glad to be nobody. I kept my head down and my hood low, weaving toward any exit that wasn’t that cage.

I didn’t get far.

A hand closed around my wrist. I almost swung on instinct before I registered the grip. Not rough. Not grabbing. Just firm enough that I couldn’t pull free.

“Don’t run from me now, little mouse.” Jax’s voice was low, stripped of its usual mockery. When I turned, I saw blood smeared along his jaw, a shallow gash cutting through his eyebrow, his jacket torn at the shoulder. Whatever fight he had come through had left him looking almost feral.

“You’re bleeding,” I said, because it was easier than saying anything else.

“So are half the idiots in this tunnel.” He didn’t look down at himself. His eyes swept the crowd behind me, sharp and constantly moving, checking every face. “Come here, little mouse.”

He pulled me against his side before I could argue. One arm curled around my shoulders, angling his body so I was tucked behind him. I felt the low vibration of a growl in his chest. It wasn’t aimed at me.

“I can walk on my own,” I muttered.

“I know you can.” His grip didn’t loosen. “But if I let go of you in this mess, some coward from that fake faction decides you’re worth grabbing twice, and I’m not explaining to Gideon why I lost you in a stampede.”

I bit down on the urge to ask what that meant. Gideon’s favourite mystery. I didn’t have the energy to unpack it, not with my pulse still hammering from the sound of bone cracking under my own hands.

We moved together through the tunnel. Jax cut a path with nothing more than the weight of his presence. Students and enforcers stepped aside without being told. Smoke thinned the further we climbed. The panicked shouting behind us faded into a dull roar, swallowed by distance and stone.

He didn’t ask what happened in the cage. Not yet. I kept waiting for it, bracing for the moment his curiosity would win, but he stayed quiet. His jaw was tight. His eyes flicked to me every few seconds like he needed to confirm I was still upright and breathing.

“You’re doing that thing again,” I said eventually, when the crowd had thinned enough that I could hear my own voice.

“What thing?”

“Checking on me. Like I’m made of glass.”

“You just walked out of a cage with a dead executioner wolf and not a scratch on you.” His voice was flat, but something underneath it wasn’t amusement or hunger for chaos. It was closer to unease. “Forgive me if I’m recalibrating what fragile means.”

I didn’t answer. There wasn’t a version of the truth I could give him that wouldn’t put a bigger target on my back than the one already there.

We reached the maintenance stairwell that opened near the edge of the tunnels, far from the main exit where enforcers were herding the fleeing crowd into lines for questioning. Jax finally let go of me here, stepping back just enough to look me over under the dim overhead light.

The blood on his jaw had started to dry. Up close, the gash over his eyebrow looked worse than I’d realised, deep enough that it should have needed stitches on a human, though his skin was already knitting itself shut at the edges the way ours did.

“You should get that looked at,” I said.

“Deflecting. Cute.” He wiped a thumb roughly across the cut, smearing more blood than he cleaned. “You’re not leaving my sight until we’re clear of these tunnels. Not because I don’t trust you to walk in a straight line. Because whoever staged that m******e wanted a body in that cage, and I want to know why it had to be yours.”

My stomach dropped. I had been so focused on surviving the last five minutes that I hadn’t let myself sit with the shape of that question. Not a random victim. Not bad luck. Someone had wanted me specifically, thrown into a locked cage with something built to kill.

“It was random,” I said, too quickly. “They just grabbed whoever was closest to the VIP box.”

Jax’s eyes narrowed. For a second the old mockery flickered back across his face, sharp and knowing. “Little mouse, I’ve run enough underground business in this academy to smell a setup from a mile away. That wasn’t random. Somebody paid for that beast, paid for those guards, and paid for that blackout.” He tilted his head, studying me the way he had in my dorm room the night before. “The only question I can’t answer is why they wanted it to be you.”

I said nothing. There wasn’t anything safe to say.

He let the silence sit between us, heavier now than it had been in the chaos of the tunnels. Then he straightened, some of the tension easing out of his shoulders as he nodded toward the stairwell behind him.

“Come on,” he said. “Enforcers will want statements from anyone who was in that VIP section. You say you don’t remember much. Smoke, panic, the dark. That’s it.”

“And if they don’t believe that?”

“Then you let me handle it.” He started up the stairs, glancing back once to make sure I was following. “But you and I both know this isn’t over, Darbie. Someone out there just showed their hand, and it wasn’t aimed at me.”

I followed him up into the cold night air. The words settled into my chest like a stone. Someone had put me in that cage on purpose. Jax already suspected it. And the next time the enforcers or the people who paid for the blackout came looking for answers, I would have to decide how much of the truth I was willing to give.