Page 148 of Kingly Bitten

I cursed and looked at Darius. “We need to figure out how to move that elevator. Now.”

“On it,” he replied, already moving.

“Is there some sort of control on this system?” I demanded, my heart racing in my chest.Cam’s here. He’s in this fucking bunker. He’s—

“Something isn’t right,” Calina said, interrupting my thoughts.

“Nothing about any of this isright,” I countered.

“No, I mean with the footage.” She blew it up even larger, her focus on the wall. “It’s…” She tilted her head, looking at some detail I seemed to be missing.

Then a memory of her clawing at the walls slammed into my mind, her nails bleeding as she tried to pull herself upright after one of the harsher experiments.

There were grooves in the cement.

Grooves that were missing from the room now.

I listened as she reasoned through her memories and the image before her, trying to pick out subtle details only she would notice.

Subtle things that told her what she was watching wasn’t actually here, but somewhere else.

She started shifting between screens, pulling up a variety of feeds at once, her gaze scanning, her mind working, as she tried to puzzle through what she was actually seeing and comparing it to her memories.

I calmed as I listened to her, my rational mind helping to sort through desire from reality.

A false lead, she kept saying to herself.A video they want us to see.

Because whoever put it there knew it would send Darius and me into a frenzy.

This whole fucking situation was just one giant game of chase with Lilith leading the way by leaving breadcrumbs for us to follow.

Calina was tired of trailing after her.

She took charge now by pulling up all the files she could find, the items hidden in plain sight. All things we would have missed had we jumped onto the elevator to find Cam.

The dates were all wrong.

The footage of Cam in that cell was from weeks ago, not now.

I saw it as Calina pulled up each frame and then did some back-end trick to review the time stamp.

“These are not from Bunker 37,” she finally said. “But someone put them here knowing we’d find them.” She started looking around the room, as did I, and we both spotted the camera at the same time. “Someone definitely knows we’re here.”

“Can you track the location?” I asked, narrowing my gaze at the surveillance equipment in the corner.

“I can try,” she replied, already moving items around on the screen. “I want to know where this other lab is, too. The setup is exactly the same as Bunker 37. But the walls aren’t right.”

Darius and Juliet had already joined us again, Darius likely having heard our conversation from the hallway. They both studied the screen while I stared directly at the camera, daring whoever was watching us to make a move.

Someone was on the other end of that feed.

Someone wanted us to waltz into a trap.

Someone was about to pay.

Who are you?I wondered.The infamous liege? Another ally? Some royal with a vendetta? A lycan, perhaps?

No, I doubted it was the latter. A lycan would never approve of the research happening in these labs.