He shot Sir an irritated look, but the FRoE official just shrugged again. Cheyenne thought she saw a little twitch at the corner of his mouth, but she didn’t want to look at him long enough to make sure. She was focused on following the guard across the smaller room on the other side of the metal detector toward the thick steel doors leading into the rest of Chateau D’rahl.
I might actually be the first magical to walk into this prison without any dampening cuffs.
The thought filled her with pride and weird, unexpected discomfort at the same time.
But the guard didn’t lead them to those thick steel doors into the max-security prison. Instead, he took a sharp right turn down a narrow hallway and pressed the call button on an elevator. Sir and Cheyenne stopped to wait behind him, then the elevator doors opened.
“After you.” The guard gestured toward the elevator, and they stepped inside. A heavy metal grate slid into place across the opening and stopped on the other side of the elevator with a loud clang. When the doors had closed again, the guard swiped his badge across the card reader on the wall and pressed the button below it. There was only one.
“Where does this take us?” Cheyenne couldn’t help the question. This part of the process just seemed a little odd compared to the normal protocol, even for a prison like Chateau D’rahl.
The guard glanced at Sir again but didn’t say a word.
Sir’s mustache twitched. “Just think of it as a special visitation room.”
“Anything I should know about before we get there?”
He cocked his head. “Probably.”
That was apparently the end of the conversation.
The halfling hadn’t expected the elevator to go down when they started moving. The ride lasted over two minutes, which was just one more item on the list of weird Chateau D’rahl experiences.
Even before they stopped and the elevator doors opened, Cheyenne could smell the damp stone and the tang of wet metal. The guard pulled the grate back into the side of the elevator and gestured for his honored guests to step out. “Welcome to the dungeon. Just keep walking.”
The halfling shot him a confused look over her shoulder, but she stepped out beside Sir and kept the rest of her questions to herself. The dungeon. That’s gotta be a euphemism.
They walked across the dark stone room, heading toward the same kind of booth as they’d encountered in the front lobby. This one spanned the corridor, reinforced by thick iron doors and iron bars on both sides of the bulletproof glass running around the top half of what looked like the control room. Sir stopped in front of the door on the right, and a guard with a burn scar stretching from below his left ear to beneath the collar of his uniform shirt nodded at them through the glass. He pressed a button on a wide panel in front of him, then a loud buzz echoed within the stone walls and he pushed the door open toward them.
“Come on in.”
Sir snorted and stepped into the booth. Cheyenne had no choice but to follow. At this point, she would’ve walked into that booth even if she’d been given another choice.
This is it.
The door shut behind them, and the booth suddenly felt very cramped with three people standing inside. But it was a lot easier now to get a good view of the room on the other side.
The huge cavern was twice the size of the prison’s front entrance, apparently carved out of stone beneath the building. Two-thirds of the way across the cavern was a curved wall of thick iron bars stretching from floor to ceiling, creating a giant circular cell. Dim industrial lights had been bolted into the stone walls, giving everything a muted, unnerving yellow glow, but it wasn’t enough to see anything on the other side of those huge bars, which were spaced a few inches apart.
“Okay. I will make this short and sweet.” The guard gestured at the cavern with a firm nod. “We’ll be able to hear everything you say from in here, so don’t say anything you don’t want anyone else to hear. The only thing that’s not allowed is slipping something to him between those bars. Nothing changes hands, but no one’s gonna stop you from shaking hands. And if you need help, if he does anything or says anything you don’t like, if you want someone to come in there with you, just say ‘Easter Bunny,’ and we’ll take care of it.”
The halfling raised an eyebrow. “’Easter Bunny?’”
“Yep. Last week’s word was ‘Manamana.’ Thankfully, no one had to use it. You ready?”
“Yeah.” Cheyenne glanced at Sir and tilted her head. “You’re staying here?”
“This is your visit, halfling, not mine. Honestly, just standing here in this box is a little too close to him for my liking, but a deal’s a deal. I’m not going anywhere until you’re done.”
“Right.” Not that she was worried about the guy leaving her down here while she had her reunion, but whatever. “Okay. Let’s go.”
“Yep.” The guard stepped up beside her and pressed a button on another panel, and that loud buzz filled the booth. Then he pushed the door open, and Cheyenne stepped into the even stronger scent of damp stone and metal and something else that made her think of fresh-baked bread.
The door closed with a surprisingly loud bang and an echoing click, probably as it locked behind her, and then the drow halfling was standing in the same room as the man who’d spent one night with Bianca Summerlin just to bring their daughter into this world.
She didn’t see him on the other side of those bars. Not yet. But in the next few
