Eliana's POV
The tunnel had stopped feeling like a hiding place. It felt like a trap now.
I crouches with my back pressed against the sealed wall, eyes fixed on the darkness stretching behind us, listening. My breathing was controlled in a way I had trained myself into during the years when panic was a luxury I simply couldn't afford.
The footsteps above had changed. It was no longer the scattered, uncertain pattern of men covering ground blindly anymore. This was different. Organized. Directed. The kind of movement that happened when scattered pieces suddenly received a location and snapped into formation around it.
They were close.
"They found the entrance," Kael said beside me. Quiet and flat, the way he stated things he had already accepted.
"Yes."
