Her fingers barked in pain, digging into the brick so hard that her nails broke inside her gloves. She gritted her teeth and pulled, hauling herself onto the ledge and then through the open window.
She allowed herself two heartbeats to take in the cramped kitchen: dark and clean, a candle burning from the narrow hall beyond. Palming her knives, the shouting coming closer from the alley below, she raced for the hall.
Someone’s home—this was someone’s home, and she was leading those men through it. She charged down the hall, the wooden floors shuddering under her boots, scanning. There were two bedrooms, both occupied. Shit. Shit.
Three adults were sprawled on dirty mattresses in the first room. And two more adults slept in the other bedroom, one of them shooting upright as she thundered past. “Stay down,” she hissed, the only warning she could give before reaching the remaining door in the hall, barricaded with a chair wedged beneath the knob. It was about as much protection as they could find in the slums.
She hurled the chair aside, sending it clattering against the walls of the narrow hallway, where it would slow her pursuers for a few seconds at least. She yanked the apartment door open, the feeble lock splintering with a snap. Half a movement had her hurling a silver coin behind her to pay for the damage—and a better lock.
A communal stairwell lay beyond, the wooden steps stained and rotted. Completely dark.
Male voices echoed too close behind, and banging began at the bottom of the stairwell.
Aelin raced for the ascending stairs. Around and around, her breath now shards of glass in her lungs, until she passed the third level—until the stairs narrowed, and—
Aelin didn’t bother being quiet as she slammed into the roof door. The men already knew where she was. Balmy night air smothered her, and she gulped it down as she scanned the roof and the streets below. The alley behind was too wide; the broad street to her left wasn’t an option, but—there. Down the alley. That sewer grate.
Perhaps pay a visit to the southeastern section of the tunnels tonight. You might find the person you’re looking for.
She knew who he meant. Another little present of his, then—a piece in their game.
With feline ease, she shimmied down the drainpipe anchored to the side of the building. Far above, the shouts grew. They’d reached the roof. She dropped into a puddle of what smelled undoubtedly like piss, and was running before the impact had fully shuddered through her bones.
She hurtled toward the grate, dropping onto her knees and sliding the last few feet until her fingers latched onto the lid, and she hauled it open. Silent, swift, efficient.
The sewers below were mercifully empty. She bit back a gag against the reek already rising up to meet her.
By the time the guards peered over the roof edge, she was gone.
Aelin loathed the sewers.
Not because they were filthy, reeking, and full of vermin. They were actually a convenient way to get around Rifthold unseen and undisturbed, if you knew the way.
She’d hated them ever since she’d been bound up and left to die, courtesy of a bodyguard who hadn’t taken so well to her plans to kill his master. The sewers had flooded, and after freeing herself from her bonds, she had swum—actually swum—through the festering water. But the exit had been sealed. Sam, by pure luck, had saved her, but not before she’d nearly drowned, swallowing half the sewer along the way.
It had taken her days and countless baths to feel clean. And endless vomiting.
So climbing into that sewer, then sealing the grate above her … For the first time that night, her hands shook. But she forced herself past the echo of fear and began creeping through the dim, moonlit tunnels.
Listening.
Heading southeast, she took a large, ancient tunnel, one of the main arteries of the system. It had probably been here from the moment Gavin Havilliard decided to establish his capital along the Avery. She paused every so often to listen, but there were no signs of her pursuers behind her.
An intersection of four different tunnels loomed ahead, and she slowed her steps, palming her fighting knives. The first two were clear; the third—the one that would take her right into the path of the captain if he was headed to the castle—darker, but wide. And the fourth … Southeast.
She didn’t need her Fae senses to know that the darkness leaking from the southeastern tunnel wasn’t of the usual sort. The moonlight from the grates above didn’t pierce it. No noise issued, not even the scampering of rats.
Another trick of Arobynn’s—or a gift? The faint sounds she’d been following had come from this direction. But any trail died here.
She paced with feline quiet in front of the line where the murky light faded into impenetrable blackness. Silently, she plucked up a bit of fallen stone and chucked it into the gloom ahead.
There was no answering sound when it should have landed.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
Aelin turned toward the cool female voice, casually angling her knives.
The hooded guard from the Vaults was leaning against the tunnel wall not twenty paces behind her.