Chapter 12: Escape Attempt
1189 Words
N Y X A R A
Kaelor’s mercy sat in my chest like a second blade, and unlike steel, I could not dig it out.
Chains I understood. Locks. Threats. Hands that held too long. Voices that turned my bones into obedience.
But mercy had no handle. It had released me when I demanded it. Backed away while I shook hard enough to bite blood from my tongue and said no one commanded my body here. Not even him.
After that, Ashmoore put me in a guarded room. Warm stone walls. One narrow window too high to reach. A door thick enough to mock bad ideas.
Two wolves outside pretending their breathing didn’t change whenever I moved. I sat on the unused bed and counted weaknesses.
First guard: weight shift every sixth breath. Old left-knee injury.
Second guard: listened too hard. Trusted his nose more than his eyes. Somewhere deeper in the den, water ran behind stone.
A tunnel, maybe.
A way out.
Kaelor’s mercy had made something inside me listen.
So I would escape before it learned to answer.
Wolves were arrogant about their senses. But wolves trusted scent like priests trusted prayer, and anything worshipped too long became a weakness.
For three hours, I gave them nothing. I sat still until their attention dulled around me. A threat that did not move became furniture. A prisoner who did not rage became routine.
Then I started shaking.
A tremor in my right hand. A catch in my breath. A small collapse only a healer would notice—and only a guard would fear after watching me nearly carve myself open on command.
The left-kneed wolf cursed under his breath.
“Get Mara.”
By the time the healer entered, sweat slicked my throat and my nails had carved crescents into my palms.
Half performance. Half memory.
Mara approached with a leather satchel, silver-thread cuffs glinting at her wrist.
“Nyxara?”
I let my eyes drift unfocused. Her mistake was kindness. She knelt.
Mara reached for my pulse. I caught her sleeve, pulled her close, and stole the thin bone clasp from her satchel with two fingers.
Then I convulsed hard enough to knock her sideways into the nearest guard. The room broke into motion.
Boots. A curse. Mara’s satchel spilling herbs across the floor. Beneath my boot seam, Guild powder crushed under my heel.
No smoke. No flash. Only bitter mineral blankness smearing my scent thin. It would not hide me from eyes. But eyes were busy.
I rolled beneath the bed while the wolves grabbed for the healer, not me.
The guards smelled absence before they understood it. By then, I was under the bed.
The bed hid nothing by design. Its back leg sat over a warped floor seam where old stone met newer wood, the kind of careless repair only someone desperate for escape would notice.
I wedged Mara’s bone clasp into the crack and twisted until the forgotten latch gave a soft, lovely click. Cold air breathed up. Wet stone. Moss. Rust. Water that had never seen sunlight.
I slipped through, eased the panel shut, and landed ankle-deep in a drainage channel carved through Ashmoore’s bones.
Above me, boots thundered.
“Where is she?”
Mara’s voice cracked. “She was right there.”
The passage narrowed, forcing me sideways between slick walls. My shoulder scraped stone. The clasp became blade, hook, key—whatever stubborn iron required.
Then my palm hit a carving. Pain flashed white. I jerked back, but blood had already slicked the stone. Beneath my torn sleeve, the mark burned faint gold.
Symbols covered the wall.
A crescent blade. Antlers cupping a hollow circle. A spiral buried beneath three slashes, like a name cut into silence.
None of them meant anything to me. My body disagreed.
The tunnel shivered.
A whisper moved through the stone, too low for words and too intimate for safety. For one impossible second, the dark ahead silvered like moonlight remembered this place.
Then a howl split the ceiling.
They had found the hatch.
I ran.
The tunnel spat me out beneath thorn and root.
I hit the forest on one knee, mud swallowing my palm, cold air slicing into my lungs. For one breath, there was no stone, no wolf-scent, no golden eyes looking at me like my body was a crime scene.
Only trees. Only darkness.
And the dangerous shape of almost-freedom. The word was too sharp to trust.
I pushed upright, already choosing the safest line through the brush, when someone clapped slowly from the trees.
Once.
Twice.
A man leaned against an ash trunk as if he had been invited to admire my escape. Hood down. Dark hair. Lean build. No pack crest. No visible weapon, which meant he either had six hidden or did not need them.
“Impressive,” he said. “Messy near the end, but I’ve seen worse.”
I drew the stolen bone clasp between two fingers.
“Move.”
His mouth curved. “Still polite, Ghost?”
The name struck harder than a hand. Every part of me went quiet.
He watched that silence land and seemed entertained by it. Like he had expected me to flinch and hated being right.
“No one outside the Guild calls me that.”
“Plenty of people outside the Guild know what the Guild throws away.”
I shifted my weight, searching the dark behind him.
“Who are you?”
“Someone with enough manners not to hand a stranger his name in the woods.”
“Then you’re no one.”
“Safer that way.” He flicked something toward me.
I caught it before sense could advise against touching unknown objects from dangerous men. A flat token lay in my palm, carved from pale bone and inked black through the grooves.
A quartered skull. A crescent cut through one eye.
“Bone Quarter marker,” he said. “You’ll need it when Ashmoore stops pretending stone walls can protect you.”
“Protect me from what?”
His smile faded.
“From your first cage.”
The woods answered first.
Branches snapped left. A growl rolled through the trees, joined by another, then another, until the forest breathed teeth.
The nameless man glanced past my shoulder.
“Fast wolves.”
I raised the clasp toward his throat.
“Talk.”
“They called you Ghost because dead girls don’t ask who buried them.” His gaze dropped to my sleeve, where the mark beneath my skin pulsed once, weak and gold.
“But you were buried long before Ashmoore.”
My pulse turned vicious. He stepped back into the shadows.
“Ask your Alpha what the Guild does to girls they call Subject X.”
Cold moved through me. Subject X.
The words hit something locked so deep inside me that, for one breath, I forgot the wolves closing in. Then the darkness behind me sharpened.
Kaelor’s voice cut through the forest, low and lethal.
“Step away from her.”
The nameless man smiled at me from between the trees.
Then he vanished.
- Writer
