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?”
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.”