The first clue wasn’t a body.
That alone unsettled Valeera Sanguinar more than any blood-soaked corpse in Murder Row ever had.
Down here, beneath the surface of Azeroth, the delves swallowed sound and sense—distorting memory and intent. Tracks vanished too quickly. Whispers lingered too long. And yet—no sign of a struggle, no discarded blade, no trace of poison or steel. Only a single coin, old and foreign, resting upright in the dust as if placed with deliberate care. Valeera turned it over between her fingers, studying its indecipherable script.
“Juan,” she murmured. “Juan Moment.”
Not a name spoken lightly among those who dealt in silence. Juan Moment—the assassin who needed no second strike. They used to joke that the span between heartbeats was all the time he required. One moment alive. The next… never came. He had risen from the gutters of Murder Row with nothing but wit, luck, and hunger, carving a reputation sharp enough to earn him passage among pirates who valued efficiency over loyalty. And yet, for all his precision, he had chased something reckless: an outlandish rumor. A treasure so old it predated maps, buried so deep its whispers drove mad those who sought it.
Valeera closed her hand around the coin and stepped deeper into the dark.
The tunnels breathed before her—not wind, not life, but something older. Something that knew she was there. She had followed fragments of his path for weeks now: a severed trapwire reset behind him with a knot he had once taught her, a guard slain with a single strike that could only be his, an ancient door opened and carefully closed again as if inviting recognition. It wasn’t like him to leave unintentional signs, but it also wasn’t like him to fail to return. That was the truth gnawing at her resolve—not that he was dead, but that something had taken time from him.
Stolen his moment.
Ahead, the shadows shifted—not with movement, but with anticipation.
Valeera drew her blades, their familiar weight grounding her as the delve seemed to watch. “One moment,” she whispered into the dark, though whether it was a promise to her enemy… or a plea to him, she could not say.
And somewhere far below, something answered.