Dragon Bound (Elder Races #1)(42)

One Goblin said something. Chop chop. The other laughed. They left and the grate of a key sounded in the cell door lock. Sounds faded from the corridor.

She lay on the horrid straw for a while. Then she crawled a few feet, then collapsed and lay on chill, dirty flagstones. She may have blacked out. She wasn’t sure. The next thing she became aware of was a blue-black beetle walking across the floor.

She tracked its progress. It fell headlong into a crack and got stuck. She dragged herself over and watched it some more. It managed to get turned around so its little head poked out of the crack. Feelers waved and its front legs worked, but it couldn’t get enough purchase to crawl out.

Her fingers crept across the floor until they found some straw. She took a shallow handful. She wiggled the ends deep into the crack and lifted up. The beetle popped out and waddled on its way.

When it disappeared, she sighed, rolled over onto her back and levered herself into a sitting position. Her thinking came back online.

Do one thing at a time. Take one step.

She crawled to the wall. Step.

She got first one foot underneath her, then the other. Step.

She straightened her shoulders. When she was pretty sure she had her balance back, she opened the locked cell door and walked out.

The dragon lay spread-eagled where they had bound him. He was chained twice, first with the magical black shackles. The second set was attached in four points to the floor. He stared at the ceiling, thoughts weaving in a serpentine path. Every few minutes he would pull at the floor chains. He ignored his bleeding ankles and wrists. He could feel a weakness growing in the chain on his left arm and concentrated on that.

His cell door opened. He turned his head, the serpentine path turning lethal.

A battered, filthy Pia backed into the room, and Dragos became sane.

He began to shake. He watched her listening at the cracked door for a few moments before she pulled the door shut. She turned around. When she caught sight of him, her shoulders sagged.

“Oh, for crying out loud.” She rolled her eyes. “Two sets of manacles? Now I suppose we need two sets of keys. This day keeps getting better and better.”

“Come here,” he said. He gave the chain anchoring his left arm an enormous wrench. The chain groaned but didn’t break. “Come here. Come here.”

She cocked her head, her weary gaze becoming very sober. She limped across the cell and collapsed to her knees beside him. “They beat you too,” she said. She touched his ribs with a light gentle hand.

His shaking increased. Talking to her before the Goblins took her had been easy. He had explained to her with his usual calm ruthlessness how he thought things might go. Overall she had seemed to take it well. He approached the confrontation as he always did, ready and focused to meet any upcoming challenge.

Then that first Goblin had driven his fist into her stomach, and he had gone bat-shit crazy. Every kick, every blow she suffered was like corrosive acid in his veins. He wanted to howl and rage. The dragon strained to rip their hearts from their chests while they watched.

He had clung to his self-control by the merest thread, by the realization of how much worse it could get for her if they got the reaction out of him they were searching for.

They hurt her. They hurt her, and that hurt him inside somewhere, in a place he had never been hurt before. He had sustained physical injury and pain many times before. It meant little to him. But this new hurt—he was in shock. He had never realized just how invincible he had been until it was ripped away from him.

He studied her with a hungry gaze as she knelt beside him. The brightness of her hair was dulled with dirt. Her tattered T-shirt was now gray, and the shortened capri jeans were no longer blue. Her pallid skin was mottled all over with swollen bruises so deep they were a purple black.

And underneath everything, all of it, was remembering how just before it happened, he had made her cower from him. He had never before hated himself, but he thought he did at that moment.

“Come here, come here,” he whispered. Her beautiful eyes went from sobered to worried. She leaned over and put her cheek against his. He turned his face into her and her hair fell over him in a light canopy.

She was murmuring in his ear as her hand stroked his cheek. He focused on it. “I’m sorry. It’s all my fault. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

“What?” he said. “What are you saying? Stop talking that way. Shut up.” He brushed his lips along her skin, breathed in her presence. Underneath the dungeon filth and the stink of Goblin, he found her delicate, indomitable fragrance. Something cramped and injured in his soul expanded again. “I snarled at you. I didn’t mean it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous; of course you did.” She stroked his hair and pressed a kiss to his cheek.

“You cringed from me. Don’t ever cringe from me again.”

“Dragos,” she said in a sensible voice. “If you turn on me and snarl like a wild animal when I’m not expecting it, I think I might cringe again. Call me a girly girl if you want, but that’s just how it is.”

“I won’t do it again,” he whispered. He was so quiet she almost didn’t hear him. He concentrated all his attention on the featherlight trip her fingers made across his face until she touched his lips.

She sighed and let more of her weight rest on him. “Locked things can’t hold me caged, but that doesn’t mean I can pull these blasted manacles open. How the hell am I going to get two sets of keys with Goblins running all over the place?”