The scent hits me before the memory does.
Jasmine and something bitter underneath, like burnt sugar.
My mother used to keep a bottle of it on her vanity, the only luxury she ever let herself have.
She used to dab it behind her ears every morning before dawn shift, humming to herself in the mirror like the scent itself was a kind of armor.
I haven’t smelled it since the night I left home with one bag and a lie sewn into my skin.
I told myself I’d forgotten it.
I was wrong.
“April.” Jodan’s voice is low, careful.
“Talk to me.”
“That perfume,” I whisper.
“It’s my mother’s.
She made it herself.
No one else has ever had it.
No one else could have it.”
“Are you certain?” Eryx asks, and I hear how gently he’s asking, like he already suspects the answer will hurt me either way.
“I’m certain.” My voice comes out smaller than I mean it to.
“She used to mix it in a chipped glass bottle.
The stopper never fit right.
It used to leak a little, right at the base, and the whole room would smell like this for days afterward.”
Riven’s hand finds the hilt of his blade again, knuckles white.
“Then either your mother is down there, or someone wants you to think she is.”
“My mother is dead.” The words come out flatter than I mean them to, worn smooth from years of saying them to strangers who ask too many questions.
“She died before I ever set foot in Mooncrest.”
Saying it out loud doesn’t make it feel any less like a lie I’ve told so many times I’ve started believing it myself.
The tunnel breathes cold air up the stairwell again, and this time I swear I hear something underneath it.
Not words.
Not quite.
A hum, low and familiar, the same melody my mother used to sing when she thought I was asleep, the one with no real words, just soft rising notes that used to slow my heartbeat down when nothing else could.
My knees nearly buckle.
Eryx catches my elbow before I fall, steady as always, but his eyes have gone sharp with something I haven’t seen on him before.
Fear, maybe.
Or recognition.
“April, breathe with me.
In.
Hold.
Out.”
I try.
It doesn’t help much, but I let him think it does.
“Someone is using grief as a weapon,” he says quietly, once my breathing has evened out enough that he trusts me to stay standing.
“Manufactured scent, a familiar tune, planted exactly where they knew you’d walk.
It’s cruel.
But it’s also a message.”
“What message?” Lucien asks, though his tone has lost every trace of its usual playfulness.
He’s watching the dark stairwell like it might strike.
“More than we do.”
That thought sits in my chest like a stone.
“How would anyone know what my mother sounded like,” I say, mostly to myself.
“How would anyone know what she smelled like.
I never told anyone that.
Not even Selene.”
Jodan’s jaw tightens, and for a moment none of them answer, because none of them have an answer that doesn’t make the dark ahead of us feel worse.
“Whoever built this,” Jodan says finally, nodding toward the split-crescent carvings just visible at the edge of the torchlight, “has had time.
Resources.
Access to things that should have died with her.” He looks at me, and his voice softens, just slightly, just enough that I notice.
“That doesn’t mean it’s her, April.
It means someone wants you to hope it might be.”
“I know that,” I say, even though some small, foolish part of me is already hoping anyway.
Jodan steps closer to the opening, jaw set.
“We keep moving.
Whatever it is, hiding from it in a stairwell won’t make it disappear.”
“He’s right,” Riven mutters, though he says it like the words taste bad in his mouth.
“Standing here just gives it more time to plan.”
I nod, though my legs feel unsteady beneath me, and we descend together, torchlight from above finally swallowed whole by the dark.
The stairs spiral longer than they have any right to, stone worn smooth by feet that walked here long before any of us were born, each step colder than the last against my bare soles.
Somewhere below, water drips in a slow, patient rhythm, echoing off walls I still can’t see.
The hum grows louder the deeper we go, threading itself into the bond’s constant hum until I can’t tell which pulse belongs to which heartbeat anymore.
Four steady rhythms, and underneath them, faint and wrong, a fifth.
“Do you feel that?” I whisper.
“Feel what?” Riven asks, voice pitched low.
“Another heartbeat.
Under yours.
Under all of yours.” My hand presses flat against my sternum like I can hold the sensation still long enough to name it.
“It’s faint.
But it’s there.”
Eryx goes very quiet beside me.
“That’s not possible.
The bond only ties you to the four of us.”
“I know what a bond is supposed to do,” I say.
“I’m telling you what I feel.”
No one argues with me after that.
The staircase ends at a round chamber lit by a single shaft of moonlight falling through a crack far above, impossibly far for how deep we’ve walked, like the mountain itself bent around this one room to let the moon reach it.
The walls are carved floor to ceiling with the same split-crescent symbol from the note, repeated hundreds of times, like a chant carved in stone, some fresh and sharp-edged, others worn soft and pale with age, as if generations of hands had traced the same symbol over centuries.
In the center of the chamber, chained to an iron post, is Jax.
“Jax!” I rush forward before anyone can stop me, and this time none of them try.
His head lifts slowly at the sound of my voice, one eye swollen shut, blood dried dark along his jaw, but he’s breathing.
Alive.
His shirt is torn at the collar, and there are raw red lines circling both wrists where the iron has bitten into skin. Enjoying the story? Read on at novelping.com.
“April,” he rasps.
“You shouldn’t be here.”
“Where’s Selene?”
His throat works like he’s trying to force words past something that doesn’t want to let them out.
“They separated us.
Said they only needed one of us to get you here.”
“Who’s they,” I demand, kneeling in front of him, hands hovering uselessly over the chains, over the blood, over all of it.
“Jax, who did this to you?”
He shakes his head slowly, wincing at the movement.
“I don’t know their names.
Only their mark.” His eyes flick, just briefly, toward the carvings covering every wall.
“They kept asking about you.
What you smelled like.
What you sounded like when you were scared.
I didn’t tell them anything, April.
I swear it.”
“I believe you,” I say, even though a small, cold voice in the back of my mind wonders how they’d know to ask those particular questions in the first place.
Riven is already at the chains, testing the iron, his jaw tight with fury.
“Cheap work.
I can break this.”
“Wait.” Jodan’s voice cuts through, sharp.
He’s staring past Jax, into the shadows at the far edge of the chamber, where the moonlight doesn’t reach.
“We’re not alone.”
A figure steps forward from the dark, and the humming stops all at once, like it was never anything but bait, like the whole tunnel had simply been waiting, patient and quiet, for this exact moment to arrive.
She’s tall, cloaked in gray that matches an omega band exactly, hood low enough to hide her face, but her voice, when it comes, is unmistakable.
Warm.
Familiar.
Wrong, in the way something can only be wrong when it sounds exactly right.
“Hello, little moon,” she says, and it’s my mother’s voice coming out of a stranger’s mouth.
“You’ve grown so much since I’ve been gone.”
The chamber goes utterly silent.
Riven’s growl dies in his throat.
Lucien’s hand drops away from Jax’s chains entirely, fingers curling loosely at his side like he’s forgotten what they were doing there.
Eryx’s grip on my arm tightens, not to hold me back, but like he’s bracing for me to shatter.
“That’s not possible,” I whisper.
“You’re dead.
I watched you die.”
The words come out thinner than I want them to, all the flatness I’d practiced for years cracking apart in a single breath.
The figure tilts her head, and beneath the hood, I catch the faintest glint of gray eyes.
My eyes.
“Did you,” she says softly.
“Or did you only watch what they wanted you to see?”
The question hangs in the moonlight between us, and for one long, terrible moment, none of us, not Jodan, not Riven, not Lucien, not Eryx, not even Jax with blood still drying along his jaw, says a single word.
Behind me, I hear Riven’s breath go ragged, low and dangerous, the sound of a wolf deciding whether to lunge.
Jodan’s hand finds my shoulder, steady, grounding, silently telling me not to move first.
And somewhere beneath all four of their heartbeats, that fifth pulse I felt on the stairs beats on, patient and slow, keeping perfect time with the woman standing in the dark.
Waiting for my answer.