A niggling instinct told him there was more, something she wasn’t telling him. However, that was drowned out by his doing mental calculations in his head.
Humans aged quickly with short life spans. He ran his gaze over her face. Hadyn had to be in her mid to late twenties at most. Rune had approached Chaghan only about ten years ago but hadn’t known of or even suspected Hadyn was part of their lives. She would have been fifteen or so by then. He hadn’t had a clue.
What kind of master tracker and trained enforcer did that make him?
One with his own problems, but still, Chaghan could have said something. He would have helped.
“I see,” he said.
“Dad didn’t come to you about it for a reason,” she offered quietly. “He knew what you were doing and didn’t want to make your situation worse. Plus, he figured it was better for us to lie low. You tend to make…a lot of noise.”
Rune had to swallow a growl. He didn’t appreciate this tiny human, not-quite-dragon, seeming to know him with such ease.
He opened his mouth to tell her so only to jerk his head up as a siren went off through the mountain.
Hadyn’s spoon clattered into her bowl, and she bolted up from the table, her body settling with obvious frequent practice into a fighting stance. “What is that?” she demanded.
That sound could mean only one thing. “Dragons.”
Chapter Three
Hadyn stared straight into accusatory black eyes and scowled. “They’re not here for me.”
Of course he’d think that. Paranoid was this man’s primary setting.
“How do I know that for sure?”
“You don’t.” She wasn’t sticking around to argue the point, either.
Dragons showing up here, ones Rune wasn’t expecting, could only be a bad thing. Rule number one that her adoptive parents had taught her: never get caught.
Hadyn jumped to her feet and made to bolt from the room, not that she had any clue where she was going. All she knew was this room had only a single point of entry and egress, which made it a dead end, and therefore a trap. Not the place she wanted to be.
“Hold up.” Rune’s voice was all command.
For some odd reason, she obeyed, jerking to a halt to swing around and face him. “What?”
He had out a device—not a phone, more like a small, foldable tablet—which he was checking. Where had he had that stashed?
“I activated the security system when I first got here,” he said. “It runs on its own power source.”
“What are you checking?”
“The cameras.”
His fingers flew across the screen, flicking from view to view, it appeared to her from an upside-down vantage point. Not one to sit on her laurels, Hadyn moved to her pack. She wasn’t going to be able to take most of it with her. It would only slow her down. She pulled on her jacket and zipped it up. Then grabbed the backpack with her sleeping bag and food and was reaching for at least one rope and set of carabiners when Rune grunted.
“Shit,” he muttered behind her. Still weirdly calm.
Though, she’d bet whatever the cameras caught was not positive news. Doubtful this was simply a friend popping by for a check-in.
He lifted his head to see her pared-down gear situation.
“Leave it,” Rune ordered as he got up from the table.
The urgency to his economical movements telegraphed to her. No explanation needed. They were going to have to move fast and being weighed down was the last thing either of them needed. Without question, she dropped everything except the rope looped across her chest. No way was she being stuck on a mountain without it.
“Follow me,” he said. “No flashlight.”
“I can’t see…”
“I’ll guide you.”
A trust walk of sorts. Why did this seem scarier than leaping off a cliff and trusting him to catch her?
She didn’t question, though. This was about survival, and Rune knew this mountain. She did not, which gave her exactly one choice. Go with him or deal with whoever had shown up.
Given that she was supposed to have died with Kip had they mated before he was killed—getting caught might be a death sentence. She’d been warned her entire life that, with the way the current leaders ran things, despite her mate being dead, she’d be shuffled off to the Mating Council in France and paired with another dragon. She’d burn in his fire when he tried to turn her.
Rune paused at the tunnel entrance leading out of the kitchen space, staring down the long black passageway leading to the gods knew where. He sniffed. Then put his hand behind him.
She clasped it without hesitation, then had to swallow a small sound. His were the hands of a fighter. Big, rough and calloused…and warm. That was the dragon in him. Only the warmth seeped through her, soaking into her skin. Almost soothing.
She had the strangest sense that this man would keep her safe, even if it meant risking his own life.
“Stay close,” he warned.
As though in the pitch black she’d go running off. Hadyn just nodded.
Trying to sync her steps to his, she followed him. One small turn in the path, and the light of her flashlight, left behind in the kitchen, disappeared, plunging her into the kind of darkness that leached courage from the soul. Rune moved in complete silence, the epitome of a black dragon. Her entire world shrank to the sound of her feet on the ground, the hush of her breathing, and the solid hand wrapped around hers.
Lucky I’m not claustrophobic. The errant humor was inappropriately timed at best, but it also kept her from flipping out.
Rather than focusing on how he could accidentally slam her into a wall, or they could fall into a crevice or a hole before they knew what happened, Hadyn started counting her steps. The sequence, the consistency and regularity of it, settled her, allowing her to move quickly and easily with him. Holding a smidge of the creeping anxiety at bay.
This didn’t feel remotely like it had been when the dragons had come for Kip, or for her adoptive parents more recently for that matter. Maybe because, though her dragon family had been hunted as rogues, they hadn’t done anything beyond that. No stealing mates or attacking dragon settlements. This… This was about Rune, who’d done a hell of a lot, according to Chaghan and Qara.
And yet, she couldn’t shake the same foreboding sense that she was being hunted. That any second she would feel a hand on her back, or a body tackle her to the ground, or teeth sink into her flesh, though that was the least likely scenario since they weren’t dealing with vampires.
Hadyn lost track of how many times they turned. In her head they’d gone in a thousand circles when suddenly Rune stopped. She had to shuffle her feet like a sports star to keep from slamming into his back.