His great paw seemed to hesitate, a resigned movement in lifting from her shoulder and moving to cup her face. Old habits die hard. He was already reaching for the zipper of his pants, but Claire’s small hands stopped him, and for once he did not brush them aside. She tugged on his arms, urging Shepherd down to the wreck of their nest.

Watching her with unconvinced wariness, Shepherd stiffly complied.

Arranging the male with gentle prodding, Claire placed herself on his chest, pulling the blankets over them both so they could lay still in the burrow and have the mutual solitude of the dark. He did not purr, not at first, instead she hummed her strange music for him.

He’d seen it with his own eyes. Leslie Kantor was right.

Access to the Premier’s Sector had not been a straightforward turn of a knob or a shifting bookcase hidden in the library of some neighboring house. In order to reach the second entrance, there was a series of tunnels, ladders—an ant farm sandwiched above the Undercroft and below the city’s foundation. From the look of them, those dusty, unused crawlspaces had been untouched for years.

Shepherd’s men had not left boot prints in the dirt; they had not unsettled the cobwebs.

Was that because they knew the virus lay at the end of the path? Or, could it be that the tyrant did not know of this secret passage?

If Leslie was right, if what they hoped lay in wait, it almost seemed too good to be true.

The woman knew her way, though once or twice she’d paused and listened to the dark. Both of them had crouched silent as the grave, but noise could be heard: the whining of buried pipes, the distant clank of metal. Not once did she seem unsure, but she was extremely cautious.

The crawl took less than an hour, though every passing minute felt like a lifetime.

One final turn in the path, and a pressurized door adorned with a crank wheel waited. The design was clever, one that would not be affected by electricity, or a lack thereof. The Callas family had exercised caution in the design of their home.

Not that it had saved them...

Between the two of them, the Beta straining and an Alpha small for her dynamic, they barely had the strength to turn the rusted crank. One would think it had been decades since a soul had used this passage by the way the gears stuck. It took the pair longer to unhinge that door than it had to manage the difficult path to it.

On the other side, once the portal swung in, waited more darkness, more dust, and stale air. When they stepped over that threshold, Leslie suggested they seal their entrance, whispering that should she be wrong, the airborne virus would have little chance to escape and potentially infect the population.