Her feet hit the deck with a thump as she sat forward. “So you did take mates?”
Well…he’d fallen right into that one, like a rookie on his first day. “Yes.”
“And you didn’t try any funny business with them?” He whipped his head around, intending to snap at her about his innocence only to discover no judgement in her green-eyed gaze. Curiosity, yes. Assumptions, no. Blame, also no.
Why? She didn’t know him. Not really. And why was he indulging this? “No.”
“I didn’t figure you for that type, anyway.”
Rune stilled, arrested by those words. No one had granted him that kind of faith in a long, long time. Not even the mates he’d protected. Not entirely.
She couldn’t be that naive for real.
Hadyn leaned back in her chair again, feet back up. “I don’t make judgements until I see or hear for myself. So far, you’ve saved my life at greater risk to your own and promised to help me. Someone who does that…” She shook her head. “That’s not the kind of person who kidnaps women and risks their lives due to base instinct.”
“You’re one of the few who see it that way,” he muttered.
She huffed a bitter-sounding laugh. “I’m not exactly normal myself, am I?”
At his glance, she dropped her gaze, plucking at a stray thread on the hoodie he’d provided. Her thick jacket, while probably warmer, would’ve looked odd where they were headed. Oversized and rolled up in a ton of different places, it made her appear like a drowning waif. Oliver with a cup out asking for more.
“So why did you take them?” she pressed.
Rune checked his watch, checked the sky, then turned the wheel to put them in a gradual turn, heading north. When he straightened the boat out, he still had no intention of answering her.
“I discovered that the Mating Council wasn’t properly matching mates with their fated counterparts.” The words were out before he consciously decided to speak.
He kept to himself how finding that out had given rise to other questions. He’d heard tales of how millennia before dragons had had a more innate sense of who their mate was. Maybe implementing the council changed them. Made them question whether they’d truly found their mate or not.
“How did you learn that?” Hadyn asked.
She didn’t ask if he was sure, or say he must have been mistaken, or demand proof. All things his team had thrown at him when he’d tried to convince them. That had been before he’d gone rogue.
A rope of tension that he’d been carrying for years eased from his shoulders, a different kind of tension entirely slipping in to replace it. “I was the one to escort all dragon mates found in our team’s territory to the Alliance, who then transported them to the Mating Council in France. For years, I checked up on the women we’d found, learning who they’d mated or if they hadn’t yet.”
Not that there had been all that many, and he’d possibly been the only one who had mourned the few who had been lost to the wrong dragon’s fire.
“It wasn’t until technological advances increased the speed and frequency of communication that I started to see a pattern that didn’t look good,” he continued. “Fewer answers came my way.”
“Because they died?”
He tightened his grip on the wheel. “I wasn’t sure. At first, I put it down to new men assigned to the Council, but eventually I was told point blank that mates were none of my business and to stick to enforcing.”
“That doesn’t sound promising,” she murmured.
“Exactly. Thanks to our long lives, dragons tend to see slower change in our leadership and laws. Believe me, I’ve been enforcing them for centuries. Humans move faster. Kingdoms and realms rise and fall. My observation of them over the centuries was that when leaders started withholding information was usually the most crucial time to start questioning those leaders. More often than not, a society that goes down that hole eventually implodes.”
Hadyn nodded, following his train of thought.
“So I sent one of the mates I escorted with a small cell phone, a fairly new technology at the time. Something she could hide on her person easily, but still use to contact me.”
Hadyn slowly lowered her feet to the ground again, no longer casually interested. “What happened?”
“She made it to France, but when she met the men who the Council assured her their Seer had determined were the most likely matches, though they were the right color, none had the symbol that would show on the back of her neck. I’d taken a picture of it and made her memorize it.”
He glanced her way, finding her watching him intently, expression grim. “I can see you realize what that means.”
“My parents told me how it works,” she said.
“How we assumed it worked,” he corrected without thinking about it.
She frowned at that. “You mean she mated successfully?”
That was the worst part. “I don’t know. I told her not to choose any of them unless she felt it was right. To wait for a man with her symbol. After that communications cut off. When I called to check, I was told she’d mated successfully, though not to who or even which clan.”
“You think they lied?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Call it gut instinct. Proof would be almost impossible to find either way, but especially if they lied.”
“You didn’t leave it at that,” she insisted.
That kind of faith in him could become addictive. His dragon stirred inside him, so did need, turning his veins thick.
Because she was right, and he hadn’t left it alone. As subtly as he could, Rune had put feelers out using contacts in the other clans that he’d developed during his time as one of his king’s guards. He didn’t tell them his suspicions or why he was asking. “I started gathering information on mates who had been found in the clans and other regions in the colonies and what happened to them.”
Hadyn sat quietly, waiting.
“From what I could piece together, mates used to successfully be turned at a higher rate—say only one in twenty didn’t survive. That had dropped to what I estimated as closer to a fifty-fifty shot of making it or not.”
“Holy hells.” Hadyn shook her head as though trying to get that information to lodge in her brain properly. “You’re sure?”
“No way to be sure, but I shared this with my teammates. My alpha did a check through the proper channels and was given proof of survival for most of the mates I’d confirmed had died.”