“Come here,” he said. He put an arm around her, pulling her into his side.
She stiffened against him, sitting up straight.
“Don’t be a fool,” he grumbled. “You need the body heat.”
“I know,” she said. “But I’ll get it better this way.”
She unzipped her jacket and took it off, then handed it to him and folded herself in closer to his side. Rune stiffened. Even through the thin material of her shirt, and the thicker material of her own clothing, it was as though they were skin to skin, branding him. Heating him up.
“Do you mind laying that over me?” she asked.
He stopped all those thoughts on a dime and tucked the jacket around her like a blanket. This close, the shivers chasing through her were more noticeable, almost rattling her bones. Not a lot of meat on those bones, either. How she wasn’t a human popsicle after sleeping on the side of the mountain for several days, as she must have done, was a miracle of human engineering. That gear she’d carried had been the high-end shit—ultralight but practically rated for Everest.
Deliberately, Rune lit the fire in his belly. He’d be a little uncomfortably warm, but it would reach her, which was more important.
“Mmmm…” Hadyn hummed her approval.
The sound went straight to his stupid cock. Fuck. Getting a hard-on for a woman seeking warmth was a dick move. Literally.
Refusing to shift his body to ease the ache, he willed that part of his anatomy to cooperate and go back down.
The fact that her shaking subsided helped, centering his focus on caring for her rather than fucking her.
“So tell me about the Alaz team,” she said.
“Not here. We need to stay quiet, and we both need to rest.”
Her huff warmed the side of his neck and his eager cock responded accordingly. Rune gritted his teeth against the reaction.
“One of these days,” she mumbled, “I’m going to get that story out of you, Rune Abaddon.”
Her words were starting to blur, which meant sleep wasn’t far behind. He said nothing. Sure enough, she went looser against him, her head tipping forward slightly. Letting go a silent breath of tension he’d been holding, Rune rested his chin on the top of her head.
Hell if he knew why, but Hadyn asleep against him sent his instincts into overdrive. Fear was a reaction he’d learned to ignore, bury deep within the dark recesses of his soul, centuries ago. Damned if that fear wasn’t rearing its ugly head here, as she slept trustingly against him.
His dragon gave a low rumble of a growl, on high alert as well. Neither of them was getting any rest tonight. Rune allowed himself the luxury of another sigh.
I knew she was going to be trouble the second I saw her on that video feed.
Chapter Four
Hadyn had learned long ago to sleep lightly. Or maybe, after the deaths of her human parents, she’d never been able to relax enough to find that deep sleep many naive humans enjoyed each night. The kind where you were so far under that your dreams became reality and the silent darkness when they were done was like an old friend, cocooning you. Waking rested was for chumps. Or so she’d told herself for years.
Which was why she sensed the way Rune tensed beneath her. Not that he moved necessarily, but he’d been relaxed a second ago.
“Problem?” she whispered. She knew better than to move or speak at full volume.
If anything, he tensed even more, his muscles, like springs, twisting until they were ready to surge.
Silently, he lowered his lips to her ear. “They’re close.”
Hadyn took a deep, calming breath, doing her best to keep her heart rate steady. A trick she’d learned over the years, practicing with her adoptive parents since childhood.
Dragon shifters can hear a pin drop a mile away, Chaghan would say to her.
An exaggeration, but he’d got his point across. If they came for them again, she needed to keep every part of her quiet.
“Which direction?” Did they make a run for it, or go back inside the mountain to hide?
“Both,” he said.
Well…hell.
“We wait.” He was talking to her in her mind now, using the telepathic communication shifters had when in animal form. A few could shift a small part of their body to use it, and apparently Rune was one of those. Not too surprising. No doubt the entire enforcer team had that ability.
She knew enough to stop asking questions.
Hadyn strained her ears, listening for any sign of the other shifters in the tunnel where they hid behind their boulder, thanking the gods that she’d removed the reflective strips from her jacket the day she’d bought it.
All she could make out was the soft drip of gathered moisture into the underground lake down the tunnel to their left. With each passing second, her stomach knotted tighter, anxiety crawling over her skin like bugs in the dark.
The first flash of that terrible memory came softly. Those damn combat boots.
Oh gods, not again.
She couldn’t do this. Not here, not now.
“Easy,” Rune’s voice barely penetrated her concentration as she tried to hold back the horror. A low murmur in her mind, the way he might speak to a spooked animal.
The recollection of screams came next, filling her mind, drowning out everything else, including Rune’s voice.
She’d been jolted awake by the sound of her parents being dragged from their beds. At first, she’d lain there dazed, unable to make her body move, paralyzed by fear. When the pitch of her mother’s cries changed, she had somehow found the will to inch over to her window.
The men—or she’d thought they were men at the time, later to be told they were enforcers—had dragged her parents outside into the front yard of the small farmhouse where she’d spent her first ten years of life. They had her parents on their knees. Kip’s body she and his parents would find later. Black liquid pooled around them, shiny in the moonlight, like an oil slick.
Blood.
“Hadyn,” a tiny voice tried to penetrate the onslaught of her past. It didn’t do more than distract her for a heartbeat, because what came next was worse.
Fire.
The putrid stench of burning flesh filled her lungs followed by sudden silence as her parents stopped shrieking, stopped struggling, consumed by conflagration. The only remaining sound the oddly cheerful crackle of the flames.
Later Chaghan and Qara explained that humans weren’t supposed to know about dragon shifters. The men who’d tracked Kip had found him at her parents’ house where he just happened to be staying that night. He was never far from Hadyn, so while Qara and Chaghan had left only the day before to find new homes to hide them all in, he’d stayed behind. And rather than stay in his home next door, he’d bunked in her parents’ guest room.