Chapter Seven

Zero to fucking sixty with his cock pulsing and his hands on Hadyn’s body only to be slammed back to reality was like being thrown in the arctic sea.

But Rune didn’t hesitate.

He jerked away from her and, sighting the dragon above them, bolted for the console. Within seconds he had the craft zooming across the water. A moving target was better than a dead duck in the water.

“Take the wheel,” he yelled at Hadyn.

She appeared at his side, expression determined, but the fear in her eyes real. She was afraid of water.

“Sorry, love,” he said. “No choice.”

He gave her the five-second explanation of how to work the boat. Then snapped up the life vest she’d refused earlier and shoved it at her. “Whatever you do, don’t come back until I tell you to.”

“What?”

He didn’t have time to explain. “If I don’t call you back, track away from the sun to head east until you get to land.

Then he dove off the back of the speeding boat into the frigid water of the Pacific. Only he didn’t surface, he kicked lower. If that fucker thought they were going to be easy pickings down here on the water, he wasn’t going to live much longer.

The depth of the water quickly blocked out the sun, which sparkled vaguely above his head, when Rune finally stopped swimming. Then, with a flick of his will, he released the beast within him. Dragons might not like oceans, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t swim. Though most of his kind hadn’t figured that out yet. His advantage. As his body changed and shimmered, the beast taking hold, the surface loomed nearer as his size changed his perspective.

The shift took longer than he liked with Hadyn up there alone and unprotected. The last thing he needed right now, though, was to lose control, so Rune reined in the need to hurry and made the change methodically. Deliberately.

Then, tracking the whitewash of water from the path of the boat, Rune stayed under the surface, his lungs screaming, using his wings and tail to sluice through the water after her. Not to catch up—he wasn’t that fast—but to lie in wait.

Sure enough, a flash of shadow crossed the boat trail above him. Close.

With a mighty downstroke of his wings and whip of his tail, Rune burst from the deep into the air, water spilling from his body. He careened into the dragon gliding over the ocean waves after the boat. Clamping his teeth to the underneath of the asshole’s neck, right at the base, Rune held on tight as they somersaulted into the water. Like hitting cement at this speed, the impact jarred his bones.

But he didn’t let go.

“I can’t swim” a terrified voice screamed in his head. Higher pitched than he’d been expecting, breaking on the words. A kid, late teens probably. Damn.

“Shift,” he ordered.

The animal thrashed in his grip, both trying to escape and floundering in the water as it panicked. “If I shift, you’ll kill me.”

“I could kill you now and save us both the trouble.” Rune tried to sound as though he didn’t give a shit either way.

He could definitely logic himself there. One option led to the elimination of a threat. The other to possible answers and maybe an advantage. He hoped the kid didn’t call his bluff.

No response as the other dragon thrashed and struggled to get free. Damn. He was going to have to scare the piss out of this kid. Using his bulk and his wings, Rune took them both under. Air was freedom, but water was…quieter. More oppressive and yet peaceful at the same time.

The second his head breached the water, the kid went frantic, and Rune had to jerk him closer to wrap his tail around them before one of his teeth snapped off in the struggle.

“You crazy asshole,” his captive screeched. He made the mistake of opening his mouth at the same time and started choking. “You’re going to drown us both.”

“Not if you shift.” He’d give him fifteen more seconds.

He held on to the bucking dragon and counted. Five… Four… Three…

The shift started around him. Subtle at first, a sort of stilling and easing. More difficult to detect the shimmer of the change down here where it blended with the sunlight filtering through the surface in rays. Once he was sure the other dragon wouldn’t change his mind and reverse the process, Rune started his own shift, while at the same time, swimming them both topside.

They broke through as their bodies settled fully into human form. The kid gasped and spluttered. “You crazy fuck,” he yelled.

Then arms went wild as he splashed and his head went back under on a gurgled yell. With a growl of frustration—this was why dragon shifters needed to learn how to swim—Rune clamped an arm around the guy, rescue swimmer style, or at least how he’d seen it done in a movie about that. Except, in his panic, the kid tried to use him as a flotation device. Arms everywhere, he was all over Rune, almost trying to bodily climb him out of the water, forcing his head back under.

With a push of his legs, Rune managed to get above water, then landed a solid punch right in the kid’s face, the crack of his nose breaking damn satisfying. It also had the effect of stunning him out of panic and into a sort of stupor. Rune clamped an arm around him again. “Don’t move, or I drown you next time.”

The words were an order. A threat.

At least the boy didn’t seem to realize that, staying passive as Rune started to swim, dragging him along.

Shifting a small part of his body, Rune reached out with his mind to Hadyn. “Circle back around and get us.”

Hard to tell with the sound of the ocean all around him and water in his ears, but he was pretty sure the squeaking sound that carried his way was from the woman who was terrified of water and trying to drive a boat for the first time.

He couldn’t see her. Not from this vantage point as he bobbed up and down on waves that appeared tiny from the boat but were bigger when his eyes were basically at water level.

The skies were huge and limitless, they could be wild and dangerous or peacefully serene. The same with the ocean. But here, he felt…small. As though the power could crush him. In the air, he was king.

She probably couldn’t see him, either.

“Look for the fire,” he told her.

Then stoked the flame in his belly and shot the signal straight upward. He had to do that two more times before he finally caught the sound of the boat’s engine. A second later, he caught a glimpse of her between swells and shot another fireball into the air.

Only, she was coming too fast, and straight at him.

“Throttle back,” he yelled in his head, and out loud.

“What does that mean?” He managed to catch her own return yell.

“The stick for speed, pull it back toward you.”

The boat did slow, but not fast enough.

“More,” he cautioned, watching it loom up on him with trepidation. If she didn’t get it under control, he was going to have to dive to avoid getting run over.

“Slower!” he shouted. “Turn!”

The boat slowed and turned sharply all in one move. A little too sharply and it sort of tipped up onto its side, balancing haphazardly. If they’d been on land, she would’ve skidded in broadside. As it was, thanks to his own efforts to get out of the way, she barely missed taking off his head with the bow. But she did stop.

It said a lot about how hard he’d hit the kid that the boy didn’t so much as make a peep through the entire thing. Rune kicked and swam with one arm, still towing his passive passenger around the side of the boat toward the small ramp at the aft.

Hadyn’s head appeared over the side, pale as the faux leather seat cushions. “Don’t ever do that to me again,” she snapped.

“It’s not like I had much choice,” he shot back.

She blinked at the sight of him with the kid in tow, then plonked her hands on her hips, and damned if her lips weren’t twitching. “Unless that’s a whale shifter, I’m impressed.”

“Dragon,” Rune grunted, avoiding a mouthful of water. He grabbed onto the ramp. “Hold this,” he told the other man. Then heaved himself up into the boat first. No way was he leaving Hadyn momentarily unprotected with a shifter who’d been chasing them down. Then he turned and helped their assailant up.

Once inside the boat, he sat him down. The kid leaned forward, heaving air in and out of his lungs. Except, based on his eyes, this kid—and he really was a kid, still new to shifting and fighting—was a black dragon. All lanky limbs and angles he hadn’t grown into yet. Skin and bone. Where the hell was his family?

“You can’t be more than eighty,” Rune muttered. Around seventeen in human aging.

That had the kid jerking his head up with a glare. “I found you, old man.”

Beside him, Hadyn covered a laugh with her hand. “Who are you?” she asked, studiously avoiding Rune’s gaze.

“Imoogi.” That pointed chin came up, all attitude.

Nope. “Try again.” Rune leaned back in the captain’s chair, ignoring how his soaked clothes were plastered uncomfortably to his skin as he crossed his arms and feet at the ankles, staring the kid down.

Shoulders slumped forward as his expression turned sullen. “In training. They put out a call for more dragons to train as enforcers.”

“As Imoogi?”

A shake of a head. “Alaz.”

The Alliance must be desperate to be taking kids this young, even if they had an entire dead team to replace. Not even the Huracáns, who’d been forced to fill in their numbers, allowed any under twenty.

A few of Lyndi’s boys. Drake—the red dragon on the Huracán team who managed to out-sour even Rune—had brought his sister with him. Female born and stubborn, but also kindhearted, Lyndi had started an orphanage for young dragons who’d lost their families and had been forced into going rogue. Several of her oldest boys had joined the team in the last few years.

The Huracáns, of course, were playing that they had no notion of the Alaz team’s absence, yet.

“Why do they need more enforcers?” he asked, to further that illusion.

The kid searched Rune’s face before shifting his gaze to Hadyn and doing the same to her. “You should know,” he spat. “You killed them.”

“The hell I did.” The words came out in a snarl, and even Hadyn jumped a little. But he hadn’t been anywhere near that clusterfuck.

To his credit, the kid merely glared back, eyes narrowed, clearly disbelieving. “The Alaz team is missing. The news is all over the colonies.”

“Wasn’t me, kid.”

“Even if I believed you, as some kind of super spy, you should have heard about this.”

Hadyn openly laughed. “Don’t give him ideas,” she hooted.

Then she caught Rune’s stare and frowned dubiously. “Are you a super spy?” she asked, with almost the same naivety as the boy.

When he didn’t answer, she rolled her eyes, then dropped to sit beside the kid on the seat as though he were a friend. “What’s your name?”

“Zeke.”

She smiled. “I’m Hadyn.”

Zeke said nothing.

“How’d you find us?”

The kid’s lips flattened, refusing to speak, and Rune loosed a low growl of warning. Zeke still held his tongue, even if he did shift in his seat, gaze darting around as though he might suddenly see land and salvation.

“You came after me,” he reminded the boy. “I’m happy to break both your arms and dump you back in the ocean to become shark chum.”

Hadyn wrinkled her nose in visible dislike. “Graphic.”

It worked, though. Zeke had paled again under the dark hue of his skin, leaving him ashy. “Luck,” he said. “I was with the pack that tracked you to the mountain. They’d set sensors if anyone showed up there.”

And he’d missed that? Damn.

“They sent me to search in the direction you happened to go.”

“You caught our trail?” Rune didn’t hide his doubt.

“No. I was walking through the town to get food and caught your scent at the dock.” He shrugged. “Took a little chatting with the humans there to discover which way you’d gone and what boat I was looking for.

“Pretty fucking stupid to come out this far when you can’t swim.”

That comment only earned Rune a stubborn, teenaged glare.

“I assume you were after him?” Hadyn hitched a thumb in Rune’s direction.

“Yeah.” Zeke peered at her closer. Clearly smart enough to catch the implication that he could’ve possibly been after her. “Everyone is after him.”

Hadyn shot Rune a glance, eyebrows raised. “You’re that dangerous?”

Rune said nothing.

“Well…” Zeke broke in. “Dangerous enough that a bounty has been put on his head.”

…

Hadyn stood back, arms crossed, glaring her protest for what Rune was in the process of doing. She’d already voiced her thoughts loudly and often, only to be ignored.

“Hey!” Zeke screamed from the water.

Rune, at his iciest, pointed in the direction of the shore that could easily be seen from the boat. Not that far off, to give him some credit. “The life vest will keep you afloat,” he called to the kid. “I suggest you start swimming.”

Zeke’s face contorted in fear as panic started to take over, his body thrashing. “You can’t leave me here.”

“Rune, that water is freezing—”

He shot her a dark-eyed look of warning, and she closed her mouth with a snap.

“Hypothermia for a dragon only happens in the Arctic or Antarctic circles,” he said. Then paused. “Keep your fire stoked, kid,” he shot at the boy.

With that, he stood up from where he’d been crouched on the small platform at the back, climbed into the boat, and drove them away.

“He’s just a boy,” she muttered at his back.

“Old enough to want to kill me for money,” Rune pointed out.

She would have thought he said that with zero remorse, except if that had been the case, she’d bet Rune would’ve left the kid farther out to sea and without the life vest. If he kicked hard enough, Zeke would reach shore in less than an hour.

Maybe it would be a good lesson for him?

She winced. Zeke had said bounty, and shock had held her immobile, like a night terror, every muscle paralyzed. What was even more telling was how Rune had also stilled. Almost eerily so.

“Maybe he doesn’t have family to teach him any better,” she tried.

“He wasn’t rogue.”

Hadyn frowned and tried to picture Zeke’s hand where the clan mark would have been. After growing up with rogues, she was used to those not being there. It hadn’t occurred to her to look.

“He was likely traveling with people from his community,” Rune pointed out now. “Likely not with enforcers, or we’d be in custody or dead by now.”

“Yeah. I figured that out for myself.”

“Which means he has plenty of people to teach him right from wrong.” Now he was laying the sarcasm on thick.

“People who must be desperate for money to come after you—the almighty, powerful, and dodgy Rune Abaddon—that way.” She bumped him with her shoulder.

“Fifty million is quite a temptation,” he said darkly.

He’d been pissed since the second Zeke mentioned the price on his head. If Rune had been still when Zeke dropped the bounty bomb, the amount had turned him visibly furious in such a controlled, cold way, a shiver had raced down her spine at the sight. She’d almost moved between him and Zeke, except for the fact that Rune would never hurt a kid. Not if he could help it. She wasn’t sure how she knew that about him, but she did.

After that, Rune had gone silent. He’d put the flotation vest on the kid, then tied him up before driving them off, not saying another word until he’d thrown Zeke in the ocean.

“Is fifty million a lot for you?” she asked quietly.

“Any is a lot,” he said.

Hadyn absorbed that tidbit. “You’re telling me you’ve never had a reward put out for your capture? That seems unlikely.”

Given Rune’s apparent reputation and the Alliance clearly gunning for him, no way had he not been a target before now.

He sent her a pointed glance. “Dragons don’t think that way.”

“What way?”

“Bounty usually means relying on rogue dragons, who are anathema to our kind, or on mercenaries of other supernatural creatures, who are just as low in the pecking order. Lower even.”

This she’d seen firsthand—the way dragons looked down on anything that wasn’t them. She’d witnessed that kind of backward, prejudiced thinking even from her own otherwise kind and loving adoptive parents from time to time. Wolf shifters were mutts. Vampires were oversized mosquitoes. Witches were unnatural. Demons the spawn of the hells. The disdain had been thick enough to cut with a dragon talon.

Rune nodded, as though he’d followed her thoughts. “Dragon shifters prefer to handle things in house, which is why they sent enforcers after me up till now.”

The tone of his voice, or maybe the hint of satisfaction tugging at his lips, had her cocking her head to study him. “I bet that made it easier to evade them, since you know all the ways they would have come for you, not to mention gaps in their systems and so forth.”

“It didn’t hurt,” he said.

For an arrogant son of a bitch, Rune could be strangely modest.

“Did your team—” She cut herself off, not sure she wanted to poke at what might be a wound.

“They put on a show of it.” His jaw tightened. “Maybe more than a show after a while, when it became clearer what I was doing.”

“None of them helped you?”

He remained silent.

“So some of them did at least.”

More silence. Which she took to mean she was right.

“So the bounty now…” She allowed the question to lilt in her voice.

“They’re bringing down all dragon shifters on top of my head. Maybe others.” Grim didn’t begin to describe how hard his jaw went, his hands white knuckled on the steering wheel.

The land was growing larger on the horizon now, and Hadyn started to breathe a little easier. Being on the ocean in its current calm state hadn’t been horrible, except that bit when she’d driven the boat by herself and had almost run over the man who’d only minutes before been trying to give her an orgasm. She’d be happy to get her feet on solid ground again.

Ha! A small voice in her head mocked. The bit with Rune’s mouth on your breasts was pretty dang amazing, boat or no boat.

She was in unfamiliar territory with this man and this situation. Her dragon parents had prepared her for male shifters trying to claim her, turn her, but not for what happened if she wanted one for herself.

Could they? Could she?

“What do we do when we reach land?” she asked to quiet the jumbled-up voices in her head.

In the same instant, Rune slowed their speed slightly, navigating what appeared to be a small port town with several boats coming into harbor at the same time.

“Gas up, grab food…” He paused. “And steal a different boat.”

She sighed in her head. More time on the ocean. Terrific. Then the last part of that comment sunk in fully. “Why?”

She had to wait as he radioed into the port requesting a place to dock. Once he had his instructions, they kept going.

“To keep that kid’s people off our trail.”

“The kid we just abandoned? He’ll take at least an hour swimming in, and many more than that flying back to whoever he’s with.”

He didn’t respond to that, focused on negotiating pulling into the dock, instructing her to toss the rope to one of the men standing on the wooden planks, waiting. Once they’d tied off, paid up, and were walking away, he took her by the arm.

“Best to find a fishing vessel,” he said, glancing around them, assessing the options.

She wasn’t sure she wanted to ask. “Why?”

“So that the stench covers my tracks. I’ll fly up into the mountains to lay a false trail, then circle back and go.”

“I guess that’s as good a plan as any.”

“You’re not going with me.”

Hadyn tried to jerk to a stop, only to be dragged along by his grip on her elbow.

“The hell you say,” she snapped, stumbling a bit as she caught up with his long legs.

His face didn’t change from that emotionless, uncaring wall that he’d put up when they’d first met and had put up again with Zeke. A wall that hid his real emotions, she had no doubt.

An immovable wall of dragon shifter who’d made up his mind. “This is not up for debate, Hadyn,” he said.