Now all he did was nod at Deep and Calla, the closest to thanks she’d seen him get.
“And who is this?” Deep boomed in a jovially craggy voice, turning to her.
She held out a hand. “Hadyn Reece.”
Before he could shake it, Calla stepped between them and took her face in her hands, her skin delicate like tissue paper against Hadyn’s, studying her closely. “Oh, Deep,” the older woman murmured over her shoulder. “This poor girl lost her mate.”
Beside her, Rune’s brows shot up. “Now how the fuck did you guess that?”
“Language,” Calla said with a sharp glance his way. Then she shrugged. “Her fire is there. I can smell it on her, but it’s almost gone.”
“Like I’m a furnace with a pilot light that might blow out at any second,” Hadyn quipped. She tried to make it sound as though she was used to the idea. Over what she’d lost. She wasn’t. She hated what she was missing out on. Like she wasn’t ever entirely…herself. The true her.
Rune scowled. Then lost the expression as Deep clapped him on the back hard enough to make him wince. “What are you doing here?” he asked the couple.
Hadyn rolled her eyes. “He’s happy you’re here, though,” she supplied for him. She’d heard it in his voice.
Deep cocked his head, glancing between her and Rune. “Are you his interpreter?” he asked.
She couldn’t tell if the question was serious or teasing. “He seems to need one,” she said with a wink.
To her relief, Deep snorted and side-eyed the intimidating black dragon at her side. “She’s got your number, son.”
Rune only grunted, neither agreement nor denial.
They all moved to sit back down, scooting over, kicking a protesting Hall and Kanta off the table to make room for Deep and Calla. “Given the way you arrived,” Deep said. “Finn got in touch. We agreed to come back.”
Where had they been, though?
No one bothered to clue her in, so Hadyn made a mental note to ask Rune later. Right now didn’t seem like the best time given the glare he was aiming at Finn, who stared back, unaffected. These men had clearly known each other a long time.
In a shorter version, Rune filled Deep and Calla in on everything he’d just told the others. They didn’t act surprised by who and what Hadyn was, but when he got to the part about the bounty on his head, Calla reached across the table to put her hand over his, exclaiming in a language that Hadyn guessed to be a variation on Hindi, older though, more ancient. Some kind of “oh my” phrasing.
With their rich skin and faint trace of an accent, and given that they were red dragons, identifiable by the red-brown of their eyes, she’d lay a bet that they—Calla in particular—were from a region in or around India. Likely Calla hadn’t been human in at least a thousand years, given Hadyn’s estimation of their ages.
“I’m surprised it took them this long,” Deep grumbled, still talking about the bounty.
Rune said nothing.
Deep gave a long sigh, looking to his mate. No doubt, as long as they’d been mated, they could speak with their minds through the mystical link that bound them. After a miniscule cant of her head, Deep turned to Rune. “Getting Chaghan and Qara out is going to take numbers.”
Rune’s eyes flashed with a dark glow of silver sparking fire. “I’m not risking—”
“The Huracáns aren’t enough. We need more than that.”
“We tip our hand bringing in more,” Finn pointed out from his end of the table.
What hand? What were they talking about? Hadyn was glancing back and forth between them now.
“We’ve recruited as many as we can,” Deep said. Only the twinkle was gone, replaced with a deeper sort of tiredness, soul deep. “More won’t come unless we take this into the open. Show them.”
“Recruited?” Hadyn asked.
Rune’s head dipped, though he turned to face her. “The Huracáns are the ones who killed the Alaz team,” he said.
“Holy smokes.” The words sort of popped out. That was a huge deal. Enforcers killing enforcers.
“The Alaz attacked Lyndi and her orphans.”
She glanced across the way at the dark-haired girl who spread her hands in an it-is-what-it-is way. “In that case, I don’t blame you,” she said.
Finn took over the explanations. “We hid the evidence and have been going about things as though we’re unaware.”
This kept getting worse.
“Deep and Calla have secretly been trying to reach out to as many of the communities of dragon shifters as they can. To talk to them about the state of the Alliance, the clans and kings. To warn them not to trust anyone in authority until the war is over.”
The mates. Rune had left it unsaid, but she knew the situation with mates had to be on the list of reasons not to trust authority as well. “To what end?” she asked.
Rune’s black gaze bored into hers, and she knew what came next was serious. “It’s time for the dragons of the colonies to choose sides.”
Chapter Eleven
Hadyn trailed after the entire team down medieval-looking stairs cut into the granite of the mountain, spiraling lower into the ground only to come out in a corridor lit by the same strips along the ceilings that appeared to mimic the light outside. A more modern development—she hadn’t seen that kind of lighting system before, having grown up in human dwellings. What did they do at night when it got dark? Carry around lanterns?
Rune walked ahead of her with Finn and Deep, and she found herself beside Deep’s mate.
“Calla, right?” she asked.
Red-brown eyes that were slightly cloudy with age turned her way, seeming to take in everything about her in a single sweep. “Yes,” she said in a voice that reminded Hadyn of Qara’s, sort of low and homey.
A sound she associated with a mother now. Irrational to instantly warm to a woman because of her voice. Hadyn had a thousand questions that maybe this woman could answer and opened her mouth to ask.
Calla beat her to it. “How do you keep your dragon sign under control?”
Wow. No beating around the bush with this one. A trait Hadyn could appreciate. “When I was younger, before my human parents died…” She paused. Even all these years later, that pain remained. Duller maybe, but still deep. “Qara or Chaghan would be with me at all times and would help stop it. As I grew older, I eventually could feel it coming and stop it on my own.” Lately, though, she hadn’t had to. The fires inside her seemed to be cooling with the fading of the mark on her neck, as though she was turning more human every single day.