Caged Warrior

THIRTY-TWO

I have to do this,” Nynn said, her throat pinching shut. “You know there’s no other way. If the worst happens—”

Leto’s expression was black with fury. “No.”

“—then Jack will still be safe. Dozens of lives in exchange for one Dragon King? Our people are so scarce. This is taking advantage of the odds. Other warriors like Weil may still be alive down underground, too. And what if I can save this place from the worst of the destruction? No matter how he acquired the information, or what he did with it, we need to learn what Dr. Aster knew. Tell me I’m wrong. Deny me any of this.”

Leto stopped with a sudden jerk, took her by the shoulders. “You made me see you and hear you and feel you because you were so Dragon-damned stubborn. Now you want to leave me.”

“I don’t want to!”

“I’ve seen the snow and the sun now, but without you, I’ll live in the dark forever.”

She inhaled sharply.

His every hardened feature was pleading—pain-filled eyes, a compressed mouth, nostrils flaring in that way she knew, when he was trying to hold on to his temper. “I need you, Nynn.”

Never, not ever, had she expected to hear such a thing from him. Her stoic teacher and her tender lover. But those words spoke of a desire for forever. She would’ve honored him in a heartbeat had she trusted any promise she could make in return.

They were close enough to a hallway that she remembered. Small doors. Small chambers to trap the most powerful beings on the planet and keep them meek. She heard pitiful sounds and whispered, fearful words, which meant Leto heard them, too.

She released the back of Jack’s head and twined her fingers with Leto’s. “They need us and they need you,” she said, huddled into Leto’s waiting embrace. “I need you . . .” Her voice clogged with tears in her throat. “I need you to be with me on this. I can’t do it any other way. I can’t leave you and leave Jack without knowing you were proud of me. I’ll go down fighting, Leto. Nothing you’ve ever taught me will have been wasted.”

That got to him. She could see it take hold behind the eyes she’d taken so long to read. He swallowed tightly, and she was oddly gratified to be able to see his Adam’s apple bob. Such a small gift: his bare throat.

She touched it with fingertips still shaking, although her resolve didn’t waver. A strange calm had overtaken her, even as her heart shattered. So much of life she would never know.

One for the many.

“They still wear collars, Leto. They deserve to survive and know what it is to have their gifts returned and to feel that beautiful pain for the first time.”

Leto leaned close and brushed his lips against hers. “This, my brave girl. This is beautiful pain.”

My brave girl.

His words became her new mantra. She could save Jack but she could not keep Leto—only his quiet, stoic benediction. With one more kiss, when she gathered his taste on her tongue, he stood upright. He still wore the ceremonial onyx-tipped armor that made him larger than life. A god. The warrior who would raise her son.

As Leto turned to lead the others in their tasks, she trailed her fingers across the back of her son’s hand. Then his softness was no longer hers to touch. Jack began to call for her, reaching back from over Leto’s shoulder. Against her son’s frightened, suddenly incoherent sobs—sobs that nearly shook her to cowardice—she watched them go.

I’ll come back for you.

She wanted to protest the words Leto whispered in her mind, but he and Jack slipped completely out of view.

♦ ♦ ♦

Leto scooped up two thin, unresisting patients and slung them over his shoulders. He raced into the vast cold, cursing the disappearing sun and the snow he’d quietly longed to see. None of it mattered now. Just the people he ran to safety. He could move fast enough. He could get them all out. He could save Nynn, too.

Then they’d be together—a real family he could hold and watch grow and love.

He banked his thoughts and kept them tucked in the dark, where he had once been held captive. He delivered the two he carried to the makeshift meeting area the Giva had established two miles away from the arena, where Jack waited with the shivering, shocked patients. The snowmobiles ran circuits, too, and the Sath stole little chunks of Leto’s speed to do what they could. By last count, they had under three minutes and fifteen people to save. Leto cursed the Dragon for tipping the odds so heavily against Nynn.

His neophyte. His lover. The woman he’d hoped would be his for the rest of his life as a free man.

Two more test subjects reached the checkpoint. Although the number they’d pulled to safety was growing, huddled together in the snow, blinking even in the twilight, the remaining number was a weight on his chest.

“Silence, Hark—no more. Stay with Jack and Pell. Let me do this at full speed.”

“I’m going with you,” said the man named Tallis. Even Leto had heard of the Heretic, although his knowledge went no further than a sense of foreboding and distrust. “I’ll do what I can to dismantle the detonator. Two gone in exchange for these people. Not so bad.”

Leto protected himself from any more of the man’s grim fatalism by racing back to the outpost. The arena shed long, dark shadows over what remained of the lights inside the lab.

He returned to the corridor of death. Eight remained. Outside, he heard the thrum of two snowmobiles. Then came the glimmer of Tallis’s energy and the sharp crackle of the Giva—distant, but near enough to honor his promise to help Nynn.

Two more prisoners freed. Leto was fueled by fear and desperation and Dragon-damned grit. Time could fuck off. That human expression fit best. He wouldn’t give up on Nynn, and while he still breathed, he would not bow to an enemy.

Even if that enemy was time itself.

♦ ♦ ♦

When the charges set off, Nynn had a blink of warning. She was overwhelmed with heat and pain. The charges kept coming. A chain reaction.

Her body tensed and her mind shut down. Pure instinct, as old as the Dragon. Millennia of power tempered by millennia of sacrifice. She saw it all as clearly as the scorching storm that boiled down the corridor. The force smacked her chest with the power of buses at full speed. She inhaled and sucked it into herself, into pores and cells and the follicles of her hair. She breathed lava and the concussion of endless waves of fire. Her lungs blistered. Perhaps the ends of her fingers and toes had turned to ash; she couldn’t feel them.

That fire was hers. She owned it. She was a daughter of the Dragon. The wall of searing heat gathered in front of her as a ball of living flame. The roof of the labs blew open, into the sky she couldn’t see. All was red. All was orange and yellow and evil. Her control of the energy was so close to nothing. She could only keep it, focus it, shoot it upward.

Fighting. Still fighting.

My brave girl.

Leto’s words were a chant even when her skin felt like it was peeling off. Soon her muscles and her bones would dissolve. She knew the moment when she’d lost the fight. Her body went cold. The fire took her and she felt no more pain. Shivers, uncontrollable shivers, swallowed her without mercy as she called out Leto’s name.

Her life was at an end.

No, the pain was . . . gone.

“Nynn! Dragon damn you. Open your eyes.”

So slow. So terrified of it not being true. Because she thought she heard Leto.

Her eyelids fluttered. She was that out of body, as if her lids worked of their own accord. Finally they parted to reveal Leto’s scarred, uncompromising face.

“You’re not going anywhere,” he growled. “I promised I’d come back for you. You heard me. Don’t make me a liar, Nynn. Talk to me. Do it.”

Her throat felt papery and charred. Yet she could still swallow. She could still talk. “So bossy.”

Leto enveloped her in a fierce hug. His heart galloped beneath her ear at the speed she knew he could travel. She’d worked so hard, but even she knew she was oddly still. His rasping exhale was a brush of warmth against her cheek. Good warmth. The kind that meant safety, not destruction.

“Where is your armor?” she asked.

“Shed it. Faster that way.”

“How many lost?”

“I don’t know.”

“Leto, no! I could’ve held on a little longer.”

“Lonayíp woman, I grabbed you up through a wall of pure fire. You were being consumed by it, like the Dragon swallowed into the Chasm. Nynn, I couldn’t hear your thoughts or your heartbeat. Nothing left of you but a tiny pulse of life.” He bowed his forehead to hers. Only then did she realize they lay together in the snow. That was the cold she felt. “I wasn’t leaving you to die.” His blunt, wide palms framed her cheeks—his warmth battling the bristling cold. “Do you hear me?”

She gulped cold air into her singed lungs and burrowed her body into his warmth. “I hear you.”

“I can’t imagine my life without you. I had my arms around you and was running free. Saving you was saving myself. You’ve given me a taste of a life I never knew I could have. For me, for you, for Jack—I wasn’t going to give that up. I’ve sacrificed too much to lose you now.”

“But the last prisoners?”

Leto exhaled heavily. “I’ve always lived with the choices I’ve made.”

He smoothed sweat-sticky hair back from her temples, which exposed her heated flesh to the elements. She liked the shock of cold as she returned to herself.

“But that doesn’t mean the death of more innocents today,” Leto continued. “That Pendray man did what he could with the detonator. Hark said only half of the charges went off. He and Silence found the remaining patients several hundred meters back from the outpost. The Pendray was nowhere to be seen. He’s gone. Even the rebel Indranan woman can’t feel a trace of him.”

She shook her head, which still roared with the sounds of whirling flames, like an enraged predator. “Where’s Jack?”

“With your cousin. The Giva helped you, as he said he would. He took part of the energy, too.”

“He’s a damn fool.”

“He’s related to you.”

She hurt all over, but Leto’s rough caresses began to heal her from the inside out. “You were my tormentor once. Maybe all of that harsh treatment led us here. I wouldn’t have survived without you, Leto. I wouldn’t have known my strength.”

Nynn couldn’t hold it in any longer. The energy she’d funneled through her body had left her depleted. Completely depleted. Sensation returned—a mixed blessing as the memories of flames remained. The very real threat of an arctic night remained. She shook until her teeth clicked together. Yet a sense of joy began to warm her from the inside out. She’d defeated her own fears and, with the help of members of all Five Clans, she’d helped save almost three dozen Dragon Kings from Dr. Aster.

Tears froze on her cheeks, but Leto kissed them away.

“Here,” came a familiar voice. “I believe this young man belongs to you.”

Looking up from the protection of Leto’s solid chest, Nynn found Malnefoley kneeling in the snow. Jack jumped from his arms and folded into Nynn’s. Leto closed his embrace around them both. Her grateful, awed sobs came in earnest then. Jack. Leto. She was holding them both. That Aster and the Indranan witch had escaped was a fight for another day. She was too busy thanking the Dragon for each breath she shared with her family.

“I’ve communicated with the outside world, if you can believe it,” Mal said. “Who needs the Indranan when we have satellite phones?” He looked exhausted. Quietly sure of his place, but exhausted. “Rescue helicopters will be here in an hour. Then we’ll search what’s left of the underground complex for survivors.”

“And the Pet?”

“She’s under my protection now. Or my custody. Whichever winds up being more appropriate.” He smiled tightly and turned to leave them in privacy.

“Mal? Who was that man? He said he was my father’s younger brother.”

The Honorable Giva stopped, his back still turned. “Tallis of Pendray. The Heretic. And yes, your uncle. One day I’ll tell you the sins he confessed to me.” He looked over his shoulder with a glare as powerful as his lightning strikes. “But not tonight. Enjoy your family, cousin.”

He returned to the people who needed him—who would need him more than ever now that the power of one of the cartels had been upended.

Although confused, Nynn took Mal’s advice. She was safe. Really, truly safe. Leto kissed the top of her head, and she could’ve sworn he whispered prayers of thanks in their old, old language.

Four snowmobiles pulled up alongside them. Two faceless Dragon Kings merely nodded before gunning their machines into the dark. Hark, however, grinned with his usual misplaced levity.

“We’re throwing in with the rebels for now,” he said. “We have an idol to return to our clan, and a few collared brethren to free along the way. That sounds far too noble for me, but I’ll survive. I have it on tenuous authority we’ll see each other again—sometime between now and our return from the Sath leadership. Won’t that be a pleasant reunion? At least it’ll be warm in Egypt.”

He tipped his chin toward his partner in a gesture to get going.

Silence smiled down at Nynn and the two men in her life—one barely formed, one scarred and just as new to the world. “Take care, friends.”

Then they were as much a part of the night as the stillness and stars. Leto helped Nynn stand, so that he could lead her back toward the huddled bundle of shivering bodies. Leto knelt next to Pell and touched her cheeks. “Jack, come sit with my sister, will you? Her name is Pell. And you’re both cold.”

“It’s all right,” Nynn said to Jack with a growing measure of calm. “I’m right here. And I’m never going anywhere without you again.”

Jack threw his arms around her neck and kissed her there—there, where she wore no collar and could feel his small, sure gesture. “Love you, Mama.”

She swallowed back tears as her son scampered from her arms and laid down beside Pell’s motionless body. He huddled under a makeshift blanket that may have been from the young woman’s gurney. Nynn considered her survival and her reunion with Jack—let alone her love for Leto—to be miracles. There had been no future for Pell before, and she would’ve died in the labs. Maybe now . . .

Leto settled behind Nynn, with his legs crisscrossed around hers. He’d held her that way on several occasions. She adored the safety and possessive weight of his limbs wrapped around hers. She leaned back against his chest, reveling in the man who’d become hers through a hell she would spend years trying to understand. At least she would have Leto to hold her throughout it all.

Over her shoulder, looking up at him, she whispered, “I love you, Leto. I’m glad you came for me. I could’ve given all I had, but that wasn’t my right. It would mean sacrificing you and Jack, too—your happiness.”

He leaned close and kissed her. Tenderly at first, but then with the growing heat of having survived. Together. His arms were her refuge. His heart was her home. His soul was the treasure she’d never knew she sought. She could never put right what had been lost, but she could look ahead to years filled with boundless potential.

Leto’s tongue stroked over hers. Passion and power. Sweetness and sweat. They were everything and more.

“I love you,” he said with that rough, deep rumble. “Be mine. Be mine . . .”

As the distant sound of helicopter rotors filled her with another surge of hope, Nynn smiled against his mouth. “Always, my warrior. No matter what the future holds.”