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They came up against a simple wooden gate almost overgrown with ivy, and Oscar slipped out of the van, forcing it open and waiting for both vans to pass through. Isobel assumed he was closing the gate again because it took him a moment to jump back into the passenger seat.

“Where the hell are we?” Kilian muttered, half under his breath.

“Logging road,” Gabriel answered.

“I think he gathered that much,” Moses said dryly. “ Where is the logging road?”

“Burgundy.” Elijah was the one to answer, his eyes shadowed as he shifted uncomfortably in his seat, likely desperate to get outside and stretch his muscles. “Halfway between Paris and Lyon. This national park stretches 250,000 hectares. They’ll never find us here.”

Cian whistled lowly. “Fuck. Nice job.”

“Don’t congratulate us yet,” Elijah groaned. “The hard part is still coming up.”

The logging road went on forever, the forest drawing them in deeper and deeper until it felt like they had been swallowed whole.

The road finally widened a little, opening into what might once have been a worksite.

The structure loomed out of the mist, low and skeletal, with a sagging metal roof and rusted support beams. It must have been used to store trucks or machinery—she couldn’t fathom any other use for it.

Kalen drove beneath the sagging roof and then paused, telling them all to get out so that he could tuck the van into the corner.

They all spilled into the cold with groans and sighs, Mikel’s van also emptying.

They dragged the toolboxes, bags, and shopping supplies from both vans, piling them all onto a dry spot of gravel as Kalen and Mikel tucked the vans away.

Isobel shifted from foot to foot just outside the shelter, her boots squelching in the wet grass as she scanned the tree line. The air smelled like moss and metal, and the cold bit through her clothes in earnest now. She quickly pulled her hoodie back on.

“Load up,” Elijah said quietly, passing her one of the smaller packs. “We’ve got a short hike.”

She nodded, moving back to the pile as they all weighed themselves down with as much as they could carry. Luis was asleep on Maya’s shoulder, so she only had one hand free, but nobody seemed to want to wake him up.

They moved quickly but silently, the only sounds their footsteps on the forest floor and their short breaths. The trail veered upward slightly, slick with runoff, and she reached for Gabriel’s arm more than once as her boots slipped. Even wet and tired, he never faltered.

Then Elijah stopped and raised a hand, pointing at something through the trees as he glanced at his phone. “The coordinates are right here. Look for a door.”

“Those crazy assholes actually found a bunker,” Moses muttered beneath his breath.

“A bunker?” Maya asked in shock .

“I want to be surprised,” Bellamy sighed out. “Horrified, maybe?”

“I’d go with impressed,” Isobel whispered. “For morale, you know?”

“Yeah, well …” He winced. “Check back in on the morale when we’re all sharing a single bedroom underground.”

Oscar turned and gave him a withering glare.

“No offence,” Bellamy quickly tacked on.

Oscar only rolled his eyes, the rest of them spreading out to look for a door.

“Over here!” Maya called.

The outcropping jutted out from a larger stone mound, looming and crooked, draped in ferns and almost swallowed by low scrub. It might have passed for a rocky hill if Sophia hadn’t knelt beside it, pushing aside a layer of soaked greenery to reveal metal.

Isobel stared. A steel door, dull with rust and streaked with old watermarks.

It was set flat into the rock, a hint of shiny grey visible through the moss to show that the room beyond was likely boxed in by steel beneath the rock, dug directly into the mountain instead of underground.

There was no handle, just a keypad panel beside the door, faded by sun, rust around the screws and flaking on the edges.

“No obvious card swipe or biometric reader,” Elijah said, pushing to the front of the group and bending to stare at it with the torchlight from his phone. He swiped his hand across the surface to clear the dirt. The numbers on the pad blinked to life as he touched it, dim and sluggish.

“Fuck yes,” he hissed. “I knew it.”

“It’s hooked up to the solar farm nearby,” Gabriel explained, before anyone could ask. “We have power.”

“Still wired in,” Elijah confirmed, dropping the toolbox he had been carrying to the damp ground.

Oscar lowered to a crouch next to him. “Can we brute-force it somehow?”

Elijah shook his head, flipping the lid of the toolbox. “Too many attempts might lock it.”

“So…?” Oscar prompted.

Elijah extracted a screwdriver. “I did some reading on different locks.”

“I know?” Oscar’s tone was questioning and confused. “I was there?”

Elijah shot him a look, blinking like he had only just noticed the other Alpha. “Right. Yeah, sorry. What was your question?”

He was already turning back to the lock, not waiting for an answer. A few gentle pops of the casing later, and he had the front plate off, revealing a tangle of faded wires and a small circuit board, dulled but dry.

“It’s just a two-wire fail-safe,” he continued muttering, causing Isobel and Kilian to share a worried look. “Pretty standard on these old bunkers. ”

He needs to sleep, Kilian’s voice whispered into her head.

She nodded, chewing on her lip.

“Keypad’s garbage,” Elijah said. “But if the solenoid’s still alive, I can trigger the lock circuit manually.” He gently stripped two wires from their coating, and Isobel had absolutely no idea what he was doing, but a moment later, there was a faint click inside.

“That was the lock,” he said, replacing the keypad panel. “Give it a push.”

Oscar leaned his shoulder into the door. It held for a moment, sealed tight, then groaned open, scraping slowly inward.

A dark, cold hallway yawned beyond the threshold.

Isobel’s heart thudded.

“Welcome home,” Moses drawled to Bellamy. “Hope you don’t snore, because the last time someone snored near Gabriel, he tried to bludgeon them with an armchair.”

“An armchair?” Bellamy shot back, a laugh edging his voice like he thought Moses was making a joke.

Gabriel scrubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “It was late. I was tired.”

Isobel blinked at them. “Is that what you were all yelling about the other night?” There had been a commotion during their last group sleepover, but it had quietened before she managed to fully drag herself awake .

Gabriel shrugged.

They all turned back to the door.

“Let’s go,” Elijah said simply, raising his phone to flood the space with light as he stepped inside.

Several of the Alphas followed, Cian nudging her to go before him so that he could hover protectively over her.

The air inside was thick and stale, damp without being wet, with a sharp, metallic scent of old concrete and dust. Their footfalls echoed quietly down the narrow corridor, the walls pressing in close enough that Theodore, ahead of her, was forced to tuck his shoulders in tight.

The corridor led to another steel door, this time unlocked, revealing a wider space beyond, which they all gathered in.

She had half expected the room to be trashed and covered in graffiti, but it was clean and untouched.

The walls were a dull grey, and old industrial lights hung from the ceiling, a few flickering faintly to life as Gabriel touched a switch by the inner steel door.

The lights cast weak strips of illumination across the space as they gathered hesitantly.

Six desks were bolted to the ground in a neat grid, each stripped of adornment, leaving only the skeletal frame of what must have been an office at some point, abandoned with only the barest bones left behind.

It was cold. The air bit against her damp clothes, sharper now that she wasn’t moving .

She huddled closer to Cian, her boots squeaking against the floor as she shifted, scanning the shadows.

“Looks like they converted the shelter into a command centre before it was abandoned,” Elijah said, his voice pitched low in exhaustion.

“Probably stripped when they decommissioned it,” Gabriel added, sweeping his phone flashlight across the room.

From the main room, three narrower corridors branched off.

Oscar peeled away immediately, nosing down one of them, Moses following without a word. They moved like wolves, drawn forward by instinct.

“We should check everything,” Gabriel said. “Split up, pair off. Scream if you find something dangerous.”

“Helpful,” Kilian muttered, but grabbed Theodore by the hoodie and tugged him toward one of the hallways.

Isobel and Cian moved to the third hallway, the rest of the group splitting up to explore.

The hallway they had chosen contained five small bunk rooms, each about the size of a prison cell, built to cram in four people at a time, with two bunks to a wall and a vent in the ceiling.

The next hallway revealed three small storage rooms, packed with dusty survival supplies, vacuum-sealed mattress pads, oxygen canisters, boxes of old foil-wrapped rations, and rolls of blankets.

Isobel arched a brow at the veritable cornucopia. “We even have blankets. ”

It felt almost too lucky.

The second hallway also revealed a mechanical room, where Mikel, Oscar, and Gabriel had pried open some panels and were murmuring over the old systems.

Elijah lingered at the nearest ventilation shaft, crouching down, popping the cover loose, and peering inside.

“I’ll check the airflow.” His voice echoed. “We need to know if it’s drawing properly or if we’re going to suffocate.”

“There had to be a better way to deliver that information,” Oscar said, looking up from the panel with a frown.

Elijah didn’t even turn around. “If you want to die quietly in your sleep, I can stop checking.”

“We should leave them to it,” Cian whispered, steering her gently out of the room.