Chapter 17 · Catacomb Ambush

Chapter 17: Catacomb Ambush

"Don't move." Kane's hand clamps around my wrist and yanks me back against the intake grate a half-second before the flashlight beam slices through the dark where I'd been standing.

I don't move. I don't breathe either.

Water drips somewhere behind us, slow and even, like a clock counting down something I don't want to think about. The tunnel smells like rust and standing river and the ozone stink of someone's been running wet electronics down here they shouldn't be running.

"Three of them," Kane says against my ear, voice flattened to nothing. "East intake. Moving slow. They don't know this place."

"I know this place." I ease my knife out of the sheath at my thigh, slow, no scrape. "Which is why we're the ones who get to be patient."

His jaw brushes my temple when he turns his head to check the flashlight beam again, and for one stupid second all I register is how warm he is against my back in water that's maybe fifty-five degrees, how his hand hasn't let go of my wrist even though the danger's thirty feet off and not touching either of us yet.