Thea Harrison - Dragon Bound

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?”

The frayed self-control in her voice sent him a little bit back into crazy. “You’re not,” he said.

She lifted her head and scowled at him. He was relieved to see she hadn’t broken down. “What else are we going to do?” she asked. “We can’t just wait around until the Dark Fae King, or the Joker or Riddler, or whoever the hell it is, shows up.”

His mind clicked into gear again and became crystal clear. “This is what’s happening,” he told her. “I have very good hearing. Most of the Goblins have gone to have their evening meal. There are a few guards left in strategic places. I can hear where they are.”

“That’s handy to know,” she said with relief.

“And this is what we’re going to do,” he told her. “You know how the corridor tees and they took you to the right?”

She nodded.

“If you go straight instead of right, there’s some kind of room they use down that way. I think it’s a guardroom. I could hear them in there talking about going to supper. There was the sound of metal clanking, which I hope was weapons, and the scrape of chairs, so it’s a place where they gather. There’s no one there now. I want you to go look for keys that might fit these floor chains or something straight and thin to use as a lock pick. Failing those two, try to grab an axe. Be quick.”

“Dragos,” she said, eyeing him in doubt. “I don’t know how to pick a lock. I’ve never had to learn, duh.”

“You won’t have to. I know how to pick a lock,” he said. He had learned to pick locks as soon as locks were invented. People liked to lock up all kinds of pretty things that he wanted. He rattled the manacle on his left wrist. “There’s a weakness in one of these links. I’m going to break it.”

She looked at his arm and her forehead wrinkled. She said with concern, “Your wrist is a mess.”

“Don’t be such a girly girl,” he told her. Her gaze met his and lit with reluctant laughter. “It’s nothing. You’d better hurry. We don’t know how much time we’ve got while they eat supper.”

“Right,” she said.

An echo of the pain and rage came back as he watched her struggle to her feet without any of her usual grace and he could do nothing to help her. He had paid special attention to the ones who had beaten her. There were going to be a lot of dead Goblins before he was through with this place.

But for now he turned all his considerable attention on to the weakened chain and yanked.

Pia crept down the corridor again, this time comforted by Dragos’s reassurance that she wasn’t in imminent danger of running into a Goblin. She found the guardroom he was talking about since the door was open. She looked inside and recoiled.

“Ugh,” she muttered. “Filthy creatures.”

She jumped, then put a hand to her sore ribs when Dragos whispered in her ear, “Are you all right?”

“Oh, of course you can hear me,” she said. “Yes, I’m fine. It’s just there’s moldy food scraps on the table, and it stinks in here. They’re disgusting.”

“They taste bad too,” he said.

“You’ve eaten Goblin!” she exclaimed.

“No,” he said, “I’ve bitten Goblin.”

He sounded a little strained. She bit her lip. She hoped he wasn’t damaging his arm too much.

Relevance, Pia. She shook herself and hurried through the room as fast as she could. The place was positively medieval and not in a sanitized-Hollywood-movie kind of way. Was that urine in the corner? Ugh! She tried as much as possible to avoid touching things.

She was disappointed she found no keys. But she did find a switchblade that fit into her pocket and a stiletto knife. The manacles weren’t precision made. The stiletto looked like it might be thin enough to fit into the locks if he could bend the tip a bit.

She grabbed the end of a battle-axe from the rack of weaponry. It was too heavy for her to lift, so she had to drag it back to the cell. The sound of the axe scraping along the corridor floor made her uneasy, so she hurried rather faster than her abused body wanted. She was sweating and in pain by the time she propped open the cell door with one hip. She bit back a groan as she heaved the axe inside.

Dragos looked from the axe to her as she leaned back against the doorpost, panting. He held up his left arm where part of the broken floor chain dangled. She held up the stiletto.

He smiled. Game on.

After she gave him the thin blade, she leaned against the wall nearby and slid down until she was sitting. It was comforting to watch him work and let her mind drift, to know there was nothing at that point in time that she could or should be doing.

He did bend the tip of the knife by sliding it between two flagstones and pulling on the handle. He had to twist at the waist, strain to reach the floor chain manacle on his right wrist and hold steady as he worked at the lock.

She admired the strength and grace of his long body as he worked. To hold his twisted position he had to tighten those striking abdominal muscles. They rippled and flexed as he took in controlled, steady breaths. The line from his broad shoulder slid around into that clenched waist. His jeans were as filthy as hers, but the buttock and long masculine leg they sheathed were mouthwatering.