Read Chapter 22: The Warden's Wrath

The Warden moved. Not walked—moved, like smoke drawn through a draft. One instant he stood twenty feet away, the next he was close enough that Mack felt the cold rolling off him. It wasn't the cool of the tunnels. It was deeper. Older.

Mack still held both fragments, one in each fist. Their warmth was the only thing fighting the chill spreading through his chest.

"Two pieces," the Warden said. His voice didn't echo off the junction's tiled walls the way it should have. It seemed to come from everywhere at once. "Thomas Riley's son. Carrying Thomas Riley's burden." A smile that didn't reach his eyes—or what should have been his eyes. They were too dark, even for the unlit spaces around them. "You have no idea what you're holding."

"I know it's not yours," Mack said.

The Warden laughed. It was a dry, rustling sound, like dead leaves skittering across pavement. "Everything beneath this city is mine. Has been for longer than your family has drawn breath on this continent." He tilted his head. "Your father understood that. Eventually."

Bile rose in Mack's throat. "You killed him."

"I ended his resistance. There's a difference." The Warden raised one hand, fingers spread. "And now I'll end yours."

The shadows around him didn't just deepen. They *thickened*. Mack watched, his mind refusing to process what his eyes were seeing, as the darkness pooled on the ground and then rose, congealing into shapes—arms, torsos, heads. Figures made of nothing but absence, standing in a loose semicircle around them.

Elena was already backing toward the junction's far wall, her good hand pressed against her bandaged shoulder. "Marcus—"

"Run." Mack didn't wait for her to argue. He grabbed her wrist and hauled her toward the maintenance passage they'd entered through.

The shadow-things moved faster than he expected. One materialized directly in their path, a column of blackness that reached for them with hands made of night. Mack swung the fragment in his right hand at it—not as a weapon, just instinct—and the thing recoiled with a sound like tearing fabric. The fragment flared hot against his palm, and light spilled from between his fingers.

The Warden's expression flickered. Something almost like hunger crossed his too-smooth face.

Light. The shadows hated light.

Mack shoved Elena ahead of him into the passage. "Go. I'm right behind you."

But the shadows were already flowing into the tunnel ahead of them, pouring through ventilation grates and cracks in the concrete like water finding its level. They reformed in front of Elena, blocking her path, and she skidded to a stop, her knife sliding from her belt in a single practiced motion.

"You should have stayed loyal," the Warden said from behind them. His voice was closer now. "Your father's defiance cost him everything. Your mother's, too."

Mack spun. The Warden stood at the passage entrance, and the shadows around him had become a cloak, a living mantle that writhed and curled. "Don't talk about my mother."

"Morena Riley was a beautiful woman." The Warden's voice softened, almost fond. "She had no idea what your father was involved in. She died believing he was just a repairman who had an affair with the wrong woman."

Mack's vision went red. "What did you say?"

"Voss." The Warden tasted the name like it was something bitter. "Eleanor Voss. Do you think she disappeared of her own accord? Do you think your father's grief sent him into those tunnels every night searching for a dead woman?" He shook his head slowly. "I showed him what she truly was. A Keeper, just like him. A traitor to the order I built."

"Wait—" but the word came from Elena, not Mack. She was backed against the wall, her shadow-foes having retreated when the Warden advanced into the passage. "Voss was a Keeper? She was one of *you*?"

The Warden's gaze slid to her, dismissive. "She was many things. Most of them lies." He turned back to Mack. "Just as your father's love for her was a lie. He used her to get close to me, to learn the network's secrets. When I discovered the truth, I offered her a choice. She chose to run."

Mack's mind raced, pieces clicking together with horrible clarity. The journal's sketches. The entries written in a private code he'd assumed was his father's. The way Old Crow had gone quiet when Mack mentioned Eleanor's name.

She wasn't just a colleague. She was—

"You said the affair was with the wrong woman." Mack's voice was hoarse. "You meant the *Keeper* was the wrong woman. Because the Keeper was—"

"Not human," Salazar's voice cut through the darkness from somewhere behind the Warden. "No more than he is."

The Warden turned, and Mack saw it—a flicker of genuine surprise crossing that unnatural face. In that moment, light flared from the passage behind the Warden, harsh and white, and shadows screamed.

Salazar stood at the mouth of the main tunnel, flanked by half a dozen Gatekeepers, each holding what looked like industrial flashlights fitted with odd attachments. The light they cast wasn't normal. It had a quality to it, a weight, that made the shadow-things writhe and dissolve wherever it touched.

"Riley," Salazar called. "Run. Now."

Mack didn't need to be told twice. He grabbed Elena and pulled her deeper into the passage, away from the Warden and the Gatekeeper reinforcements. Behind them, the sounds of a fight erupted—cries of pain, the sizzle of light against shadow, and the Warden's voice rising in something that might have been fury or might have been pain.

They ran.

The passage twisted and turned, and Mack followed it purely on instinct, the fragments in his hands growing warm whenever he took a correct turn and cooling when he hesitated. They burst out into a service platform, empty and dark, and Mack slammed the access door shut behind them, bracing it with a discarded crowbar.

Elena bent double, gasping. "Which way—"

"We're under the Bowery. I think." Mack pressed his back against the door, listening. The sounds of combat were already fading. "The Gatekeepers can't hold him for long."

"Then we need to move." She straightened and held out her hand. "Let me see the fragments."

Mack opened his fists. He'd been gripping them so tightly that the edges had left deep imprints in his palms. But there was something wrong. The weight felt off.

He looked down.

One fragment.

He was holding one.

"No." He turned his hands over, frantically patting his pockets. "No, no, no—"

"Marcus." Elena's voice was sharp. "Where's the second one?"

"I had it. During the fight—when I swung at the shadow thing—" He remembered the impact, the fragment flaring hot, but had he dropped it? Or had it been taken? The Warden had been close. So close.

"Salazar." The name came out bitter. "It had to be Salazar. The distraction wasn't for *us*. It was to cover picking the pocket of the idiot carrying the Key."

Elena's face went pale, but not from fear—from calculation. "No. The Gatekeepers wouldn't intercept a fragment on their own side. They want it to stay intact."

"Unless someone in their ranks wants it for another reason." Mack slammed his fist against the wall. The single fragment in his hand pulsed, almost mournfully, as if it felt its missing pair. "The Warden said Salazar's people weren't human. What if that means the Gatekeepers are playing their own game?"

"You're spiraling." Elena stepped toward him, her voice firm despite the blood seeping through her bandage. "We need to figure out where Salazar would take it, or if the Warden got it back—"

"He was wearing similar tattoos to the men who chased us, Elena." Mack looked up at her. "The Gatekeepers who Salazar commands. They chased us through the tunnels and tried to take the fragment *before* we even knew the Warden was hunting us."

Elena stared at him. "You're saying this was planned from the start."

"I'm saying I don't know who to trust." Mack held up the single fragment. "My father trusted Eleanor Voss, and she disappeared. He trusted Old Crow, and it took decades for the truth to come out. He trusted the Keepers' mission, and it got him killed."

He looked at the fragment for a long moment, at the soft light pulsing beneath its surface.

"But you saved my life in that tunnel," he said quietly. "I don't know if that means anything. But it's all I've got right now."

Elena was silent for a long moment. Then she reached out and touched the fragment's edge.

"I knew Eleanor Voss," she said. "Not as a woman who slept with your father. As a Keeper who taught me everything I know." She met his eyes. "And I know she didn't disappear. She was taken. By the Warden. And whatever he did to her, he did to keep the truth about the Key from surfacing."

"What truth?"

Elena shook her head. "I don't know yet. But the pieces of that Key know *you*. And now one of them is in the Warden's hands."

Mack stared at the fragment in his fist.

"Then we make sure he never gets the rest."