…
Hadyn stood back, arms crossed, glaring her protest for what Rune was in the process of doing. She’d already voiced her thoughts loudly and often, only to be ignored.
“Hey!” Zeke screamed from the water.
Rune, at his iciest, pointed in the direction of the shore that could easily be seen from the boat. Not that far off, to give him some credit. “The life vest will keep you afloat,” he called to the kid. “I suggest you start swimming.”
Zeke’s face contorted in fear as panic started to take over, his body thrashing. “You can’t leave me here.”
“Rune, that water is freezing—”
He shot her a dark-eyed look of warning, and she closed her mouth with a snap.
“Hypothermia for a dragon only happens in the Arctic or Antarctic circles,” he said. Then paused. “Keep your fire stoked, kid,” he shot at the boy.
With that, he stood up from where he’d been crouched on the small platform at the back, climbed into the boat, and drove them away.
“He’s just a boy,” she muttered at his back.
“Old enough to want to kill me for money,” Rune pointed out.
She would have thought he said that with zero remorse, except if that had been the case, she’d bet Rune would’ve left the kid farther out to sea and without the life vest. If he kicked hard enough, Zeke would reach shore in less than an hour.
Maybe it would be a good lesson for him?
She winced. Zeke had said bounty, and shock had held her immobile, like a night terror, every muscle paralyzed. What was even more telling was how Rune had also stilled. Almost eerily so.
“Maybe he doesn’t have family to teach him any better,” she tried.
“He wasn’t rogue.”
Hadyn frowned and tried to picture Zeke’s hand where the clan mark would have been. After growing up with rogues, she was used to those not being there. It hadn’t occurred to her to look.
“He was likely traveling with people from his community,” Rune pointed out now. “Likely not with enforcers, or we’d be in custody or dead by now.”
“Yeah. I figured that out for myself.”
“Which means he has plenty of people to teach him right from wrong.” Now he was laying the sarcasm on thick.
“People who must be desperate for money to come after you—the almighty, powerful, and dodgy Rune Abaddon—that way.” She bumped him with her shoulder.
“Fifty million is quite a temptation,” he said darkly.
He’d been pissed since the second Zeke mentioned the price on his head. If Rune had been still when Zeke dropped the bounty bomb, the amount had turned him visibly furious in such a controlled, cold way, a shiver had raced down her spine at the sight. She’d almost moved between him and Zeke, except for the fact that Rune would never hurt a kid. Not if he could help it. She wasn’t sure how she knew that about him, but she did.
After that, Rune had gone silent. He’d put the flotation vest on the kid, then tied him up before driving them off, not saying another word until he’d thrown Zeke in the ocean.
“Is fifty million a lot for you?” she asked quietly.
“Any is a lot,” he said.
Hadyn absorbed that tidbit. “You’re telling me you’ve never had a reward put out for your capture? That seems unlikely.”
Given Rune’s apparent reputation and the Alliance clearly gunning for him, no way had he not been a target before now.
He sent her a pointed glance. “Dragons don’t think that way.”
“What way?”
“Bounty usually means relying on rogue dragons, who are anathema to our kind, or on mercenaries of other supernatural creatures, who are just as low in the pecking order. Lower even.”
This she’d seen firsthand—the way dragons looked down on anything that wasn’t them. She’d witnessed that kind of backward, prejudiced thinking even from her own otherwise kind and loving adoptive parents from time to time. Wolf shifters were mutts. Vampires were oversized mosquitoes. Witches were unnatural. Demons the spawn of the hells. The disdain had been thick enough to cut with a dragon talon.
Rune nodded, as though he’d followed her thoughts. “Dragon shifters prefer to handle things in house, which is why they sent enforcers after me up till now.”
The tone of his voice, or maybe the hint of satisfaction tugging at his lips, had her cocking her head to study him. “I bet that made it easier to evade them, since you know all the ways they would have come for you, not to mention gaps in their systems and so forth.”
“It didn’t hurt,” he said.
For an arrogant son of a bitch, Rune could be strangely modest.
“Did your team—” She cut herself off, not sure she wanted to poke at what might be a wound.
“They put on a show of it.” His jaw tightened. “Maybe more than a show after a while, when it became clearer what I was doing.”
“None of them helped you?”
He remained silent.
“So some of them did at least.”
More silence. Which she took to mean she was right.
“So the bounty now…” She allowed the question to lilt in her voice.
“They’re bringing down all dragon shifters on top of my head. Maybe others.” Grim didn’t begin to describe how hard his jaw went, his hands white knuckled on the steering wheel.
The land was growing larger on the horizon now, and Hadyn started to breathe a little easier. Being on the ocean in its current calm state hadn’t been horrible, except that bit when she’d driven the boat by herself and had almost run over the man who’d only minutes before been trying to give her an orgasm. She’d be happy to get her feet on solid ground again.
Ha! A small voice in her head mocked. The bit with Rune’s mouth on your breasts was pretty dang amazing, boat or no boat.
She was in unfamiliar territory with this man and this situation. Her dragon parents had prepared her for male shifters trying to claim her, turn her, but not for what happened if she wanted one for herself.
Could they? Could she?
“What do we do when we reach land?” she asked to quiet the jumbled-up voices in her head.
In the same instant, Rune slowed their speed slightly, navigating what appeared to be a small port town with several boats coming into harbor at the same time.
“Gas up, grab food…” He paused. “And steal a different boat.”
She sighed in her head. More time on the ocean. Terrific. Then the last part of that comment sunk in fully. “Why?”