What if these weren’t good men?
He should get her out of there immediately. Except, Hadyn was armed, after a fashion, and might use it on him if he tried to help her right now. She’d be pissed if he didn’t stick to the plan and get down to the dungeons.
Every protective instinct inside him had been tripped like a silent alarm and his dragon was going haywire inside him. Hell, even berserkers, those ancient ancestors of werewolves and wolf shifters, weren’t this wild.
Rune’s dragon had never been like this. If anything, his creature half could be even more coldly calculating than he was. Right now, the last thing the beast wanted was to abandon Hadyn.
This is plan A, still, he reminded both halves of himself.
Pressing himself to do it, Rune sent Hadyn a thought. “I’m getting your parents out. Stall.”
He knew she couldn’t respond, and he’d never so desperately wished a person under his protection could give him some kind of sign, but that wasn’t possible.
“I’ll be back for you. Kill them if you have to.”
What else could he say? Rune silently forced his feet to turn and walk away.
If those bastards laid a fucking hand on her, he’d rip their arms and legs off and beat them to death with them before feeding them to the closest flesh eater he could find.
“Hadyn is in the residence,” he sent the thought to all those waiting outside. “I’m on my way to the war room without her.”
“We’re ready,” Finn’s voice came back, an open channel to all the dragons forming the team.
His gut told him this wasn’t going to go smoothly, but they were committed now. Rune had to take his time sneaking through the corridors to the room similar to the Huracán’s setup of monitors and security systems and communications systems.
“I’m at the war room now.” He sent the thought to Hadyn as he surreptitiously checked the room. Maybe knowing what he was doing would help her.
The kid who’d pulled night duty couldn’t have left puberty behind that long ago, his back to the door. In a blur of speed, Rune was across the room and taking the kid down before he knew an intruder was even in the room with him. He didn’t kill him. Killing one this young went against the grain. Still, the guy was going to wake up with a killer headache despite the accelerated healing.
Rune crouched over the prone form and listened to make sure no one nearby had caught the slight noise made when his fist connected with the boy’s skull.
“Sorry, kid,” he whispered, then dragged him one room down and locked him inside.
Rune returned to the monitors and studied the setup before grinning. Those Alaz fucks never did have a creative bone between them. Their setup was an exact mirror of the Huracáns’. Not only that, but all enforcers could access any enforcer setup with their own logins. Using Finn’s, in a series of keystrokes Rune disabled all the cameras, turned off the alarms, and unlocked the doors.
“Security systems offline,” he sent out to those waiting.
He was tempted to fry the entire system, turn his fire on the wires and easily melted plastic encased in metal. The trouble was, if his people ended up having to take this mountain, they’d need a functioning war room for their own purposes. So he left, closed the door behind him, and paused, studying the door which was metal but not dragonsteel.
Did he risk melting it shut with his fire?
He checked his watch. What had taken ten minutes dragged by like an hour. Hadyn was where he couldn’t get to. He couldn’t see and hear that she was unharmed.
Move faster.
He left it locked but unmelted and hurried toward his next destination. Fifteen minutes. It took fifteen more excruciating minutes to make his careful way to the open skybridge connecting to the smaller peak where the dungeons were housed.
Five minutes in, he started talking to her. The only thing he could do to keep his dragon from forcing him to go to her. At first, he told her what he was doing, but somewhere along the lines the words changed.
“I knew, when you jumped off that mountain and expected me to catch you, that you were something special.”
Gods, he’d never seen anything more beautifully, stupidly brave. Trust, after these last awful decades, meant more to him than any other possible reaction. She’d trusted him.
“I knew for sure that I needed you to be mine when I touched you on that boat, but I wasn’t ready to admit it. It happened too fast.”
Gods, so fast. His flaming need for her clouding and hiding a deeper desire. The words were coming easier now, as he pictured her wherever she was being held, listening. Would she be smiling?
“But fuck the short timing. When you know, you know.”
He stopped talking as he moved past the single dimwit guard, asleep at his station, and down the stairs to the door. He paused there, listening, waiting.
“When this is over, I want to take you away from here and make a life with you. A simple life where we can just be together.”
Rune closed his eyes, knowing he shouldn’t be telling her this now, and yet the words wouldn’t stop coming, as though he’d opened floodgates.
“You wanted the question…here it is. Be mine, Hadyn Reece? Please say yes.”
He’d never begged for anything in his life, but for her…
Refocusing on his mission, Rune pushed at the door to the dungeons, which swung open at hardly a touch. He paused, concentrating. The ease of that—despite unlocking this door when he’d done the outside doors—stretched him tighter than the string of a longbow.
More carefully now, he eased one eye past the edge of the door.
However, no one was inside waiting, just several shadows of sleeping forms in their cells. Not two…not Chaghan and Qara only…but many. Rather than rush inside, Rune listened to his gut and stepped into the shadows behind the door. Waiting. Watching.
He forced himself to count to sixty, five times. More time that Hadyn was alone with those fuckers. When no one came rushing inside and no one moved beyond the deep breaths of the sleeping occupants of the cells, he decided to take the next steps.
“I’m at the cells,” he told Hadyn. “So close, love.”
Finally, Rune sent a thought out, stretching with his consciousness to a mind he could feel, though he hadn’t in a long time. “Chaghan.”
Three cells down someone stopped breathing, going uncannily still. Before the man responded, Rune started moving toward him. He stopped at the cell door in front of the panel to unlock it. The one he’d just changed the codes for while he was in the control room.
“Who are you?” came the thought.