Except…her green eyes, even narrowed with ire, also telegraphed her panic, pulling him up short. Her fear and desperation reached out and wrapped around something inside him. Something that made his dragon rise up in anger at whoever had put that look there.
“I’ll help you.” The growled words made her eyes widen.
He managed to keep his own reaction under control, but damned if he knew where those words had come from. He had not intended to offer or do more than get her off this rock to where she could make her way safely somewhere he wasn’t. Not until he knew more.
Bloody hell.
The fight went out of her, her shoulders slumping under the weight of her pack as though her heavy load suddenly made itself felt. All she said was, “Thanks. We should go—”
“No,” Rune shook his head. “We fly at night, well after sundown and not a second before.” He also hadn’t planned on flying tonight.
That made her pause and blink a second, before realization had her wrinkling her nose. “Black dragon. Right.”
If she’d been raised by green dragons, he wasn’t surprised it would be a change for her. Black dragons…even with the scales on his belly camouflaging him by reflecting whatever was above him so that anyone on the ground saw clouds, or stars, or sky, he still stuck out like an angel in hell.
“Is it safe to stay here?” she asked, glancing pointedly at the rubble caused by the intruders and attackers who’d broken in previously.
“I expect so,” he said. “Whoever came for us left months ago.”
Hadyn barely paused as she took that in, then nodded, and his opinion of her rose a notch or two. She didn’t quibble, worry, or ask again. It made her efficient, at least. He didn’t have to waste time explaining shit or calming her down.
That, or she was planning to kill him in his sleep and figured this was as good a place as any to try it.
“Follow me,” he said, back to his usual emotionless response mode.
She flicked him a curious glance, then hefted her pack off her back, swung it around, and held it out to him. “Here. You have bigger muscles and I’m tired.”
The echo of a long-distance memory—Calla going all mother hen, trying to teach the rough enforcers in her life a few manners. “Offer to carry heavy things,” she used to say, her thick accent lending a strange sort of weight to the words. “Women like that.”
Without a word, he swung Hadyn’s pack to his back, hiding his surprise at the weight. How had that tiny scrap of a woman dragged this all over the mountain? He didn’t ask, though. Questions like that tended to get him into long, tedious arguments with women. He had, at least, learned that much, though it sprung more from self-preservation than truly getting it.
“You can even check it for weapons,” she commented sweetly. As though offering him tea.
This sprite of a thing clearly had no self-preservation instincts of her own.
“Follow me,” he said without a single inflection.
Uncaring if she followed or not, he turned down one of the multiple smaller tunnels that led off what had been the main hangar. Only a few steps down the hall, something tugged lightly at the pack along with a rustle of material.
He halted. “What are you doing?”
“Not what you’re thinking,” came a laughing answer. Then a light flicked on, illuminating the passageway. She’d been getting a flashlight apparently. “Not all of us have dragon vision, hot shot.”
Hot shot? Was that a reference to his former team or something else? He didn’t bother to ask.
She flicked her wrist, the beam of light flickering over the rough rocks of the human-sized space. “Lead on.”
In silence, he gritted his teeth at the way she kept pushing him slightly off kilter with every word out of her mouth—an uncomfortable and unusual place to find himself.
He took her down a series of passages that were the worse for the blasting they’d received only a few months prior. He’d had to backtrack one or two times thanks to collapsed tunnels he didn’t have time to blast through, until finally he led them into one of the larger caverns found in the interior of the mountain.
The kitchen. More like a mess hall, and in relatively undamaged shape compared to the rest of the place. A few of the tables overturned, and loose debris of rocks that had dropped from the ceiling, no doubt caused by the several explosions that had rocked the mountain. But that was the extent of the damage here.
Hadyn stepped around him to stand at his side, casting a curious glance around.
He tipped his head, trying to see it for the first time, like she was. To him, this had been the heart of what had been home. The space was made of a tall-ceilinged cavern, broken up by several large stalactites and stalagmites that had grown into each other, forming columns. Before everything had happened, they would have been listening to the loud hum of the generator and the buzz of the fluorescent lights, which would have cast a wavering purplish hue over multiple wood picnic tables.
Instead, she had to move her flashlight beam around to see everything, her silence the damning sound of failure.
He’d lost his mountain.
If he let himself feel the full force of that truth, he’d be struggling. Losing this bolt hole had reminded him harshly of walking away from his team.
Everything he could count on in his life, gone in a blink. Or a boom, as the case may be.
Hadyn’s flashlight aimed over to his left and across the room, showing a wall with pipes and wires snaking down to a rudimentary kitchen set up with a long counter formed by a tall series of tables with laminate tops and appliances straight out of the 1960s. This had been the heart of his home. Now it put him in mind images of the Titanic on the bottom of the ocean. Abandoned and hauntingly broken.
One more dig at his own failure.
“What was this place?” Hadyn asked.
Home sounded like a response guaranteed to get him looked at sideways. “My hideaway, for a while.”
“You made it?”
He shook his head but didn’t expand.
A small sigh reached his ears. “So who did?” she asked next.
An extended history lesson was not on the agenda. He gave her the short version. “Dragons.”
“How did you know about it?”
With a twitch, he moved toward the stove. “A…friend…reminded me.”
Luckily, a box of matches was still sitting out. He turned the knob. Even better, gas was still functional. With a flick of the match, he lit the burner.
“I remember my mother saying something about this,” Hadyn murmured, though more to herself as she looked around, so he ignored her. “Dragons weren’t indigenous to the Americas. Because they can’t fly the distance of oceans, they came over with Europeans once they discovered more land existed in the world.”