Page 18 of The Naga Princess's Soldier Mate

Rock exploded above my head the next moment, stones falling from the tunnel roof. This was exactly what I’d feared the moment we’d entered the mountain: it was collapsing on top of us. Dust rolled over me in a great big cloud, making me cough as I struggled to see, until I flicked my nictitating membranes protectively over my eyes. Fear made my heart pound. Where was Reid? Had he been hit?

Another cough struck me, but no rocks—big ones, at least—had landed on top of me. Before the dust had settled, I rose, blindly flinging myself in the direction I was certain Reid was in. He had to be there, but he’d been right beneath the rock collapse. No, there was no way he was dead. He would have seen it and moved just in time!

A dozen feet away, my hand bumped into something warm beneath the rubble. For an elated heartbeat, I was certain it was my mate, but then I realized the arm was covered in scales. Hissing, I crawled forward, searching. This time, I used mysense of smell rather than my still-useless eyes. He had to be there. He had to be okay. I found him, pinned beneath a large rock, one too big for me to move without help. It was just his fingers, but they twitched against mine, then curled around my hand in a tight fist. “Sazzie?” he said hoarsely, but he did not cough from the dust. I did not know why, but that worried me.

I followed his hand to his wrist, then had to push rocks out of the way to reach his shoulder until I could cup the side of his chin. “Reid! Are you hurt? Can you get out?” I was starting to see more as the dust began to settle, and the sight alarmed me. The boulder that sat on his chest was too big; it was simply impossible that he wasn’t crushed badly beneath that thing. I had seen a male trapped beneath a rockslide once, as a young girl. The sight had haunted me in my dreams for years. He had been alive, and then they’d moved the rock off him, and he’d died just like that. I didn’t understand why that had happened exactly, and nobody had explained, but I feared for it now.

Reid healed fast. I told myself he could survive this, unlike that Thunder Rock hunter. This was different. It had to be different. Reid had not responded to my questions, and with his eyes closed, it looked like he’d fallen asleep. But he felt warm, and I could see how his breathing stirred the dust in the air. I grabbed the pouch with Erish’s medicine—the capsules that supposedly gave power to the foreign things inside his blood. Pulling several out, I worked to make Reid swallow them, my thumb brushing over his throat to force them down. “Come on, Reid. You have to live. I can’t lose you. Swallow, damn it. It’s just a little boulder. You can handle this, can’t you?”

His eyes remained closed, and he never said my name again. I tried to feel hopeful that the capsules had stayed down, but Ididn’t know if that was a good sign or not. I just wanted a sign—anything—that would tell me he was going to be okay. But things weren’t okay, were they? I could never move that boulder off his belly and legs, not without help. Bitter Storm warriors would be here long before I could do anything to save him.

I knew what he’d say if he were awake: he’d tell me to run, to get out while I had the chance. He’d tell me to save myself. I didn’t want to be safe when I didn’t have my mate at my side. Safety was important, but at this cost? Overwhelmed with despair, I curled myself closer against his side, begging quietly for him to open his eyes.

I heard the movements behind me—the approach of my enemy, ready to drag me back to the Hearth Cave. That couldn’t make me care enough to move. I felt so heavy and sad that all I wanted was to lie down and stay at Reid’s side. After all we’d been through, and after he’d seemed so invincible, I could not accept that he’d never open his brown eyes again, and stare at me with warm affection.

The soft glow along his nearest arm was so delicate that, at first, I did not see it. Then I blinked, certain I was imagining it. A silver sheen shivered over the beautiful ink that marked his skin—his protective totems. It swirled in slashes and savage curls, the way mating marks on a Naga male did, and then it blinked out. I lifted my head and skimmed my eyes up and down his body, hoping to see them again, but met his eyes instead.

They had opened, though his expression was hazy and unfocused. Red tinted the corners of his eyes and lay like a web over his left orb. “Sazzie, go. Save yourself,” he husked, followed by a shuddering inhale that did not seem to pull enough airinto his lungs. “Leave me, go!” he said, with a hint of his usual bossiness.

Tears sprang to my eyes, and for once, I did not fight to hold them back. I did not even feel ashamed for crying. “Reid! No, I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying with you.” He started to shake his head, but that clearly hurt, and he froze in place. His eyes briefly squeezed shut, and when they blinked back open, I told myself they weren’t as red and bloodshot as before. Fumbling with the pouch, I pulled out a few more of the small, round capsules and offered them to him. “You’ll get better. You’ll heal. You’re going to be fine. And I’m not going anywhere without you. You are my mate!”

A curious thing happened as I said that, declaring it loud enough that those approaching would have heard. They were taking their sweet time to reach me, as if they enjoyed seeing my pain. That silver I’d seen on Reid’s skin before? It now shimmered overmyarms and upper chest. I ducked my head to confirm what I saw and was just in time to see it wink back out. I might have imagined what I saw on Reid, but this—this was no fantasy. How was that possible? Naga females did not have mating marks; they did not shimmer and glow for their male. And yet…that was exactly what that was.

“What?” I murmured, confused by what had just happened. My eyes flicked back to Reid’s instinctively. Had he seen what I had? I couldn’t tell. Then his expression turned furious and agonized at the same time. The muscles in his neck grew taut, as did his arm beneath my hand. He shook his head, his mouth opening as he strained to speak. His warning came too late.

There were a lot of them, and Aser was with them when I turned around to look behind me. They were close now, and rather than fight, I chose to rise smoothly and offer my wrists as regally as possible. “Take me then,” I said to Aser with a tilt of my chin horn in his direction. “I have nothing left to lose, and as you all know, a cornered female is most dangerous.” All Aser did was give me a slow, satisfied smile, his red eyes gleaming with pleasure.

Heart pounding in my chest, I moved away from Reid and let the Bitter Storm King’s warriors tie my wrists. As long as I had their attention, they might forget about Reid. They might not have noticed how I had slipped the pouch with the last remaining capsules into Reid’s hand before I rose. If I was lucky, they would leave him alone, thinking he was a dead male anyway. My chest ached, but I couldn’t lose faith. I had to believe that he’d somehow survive and come for me.

When Aser and his escort of warriors led me back to the Hearth Cave, it felt like my heart had been left behind—a giant, gaping hole inside my chest. It felt so real that I glanced down to check whether I had been wounded in the tunnel collapse. What I saw instead brought a chill I could not shake long after I’d been taken. Reid and I had not been the only ones trapped in that collapse—a collapse triggered by a large harpoon shot from a distance into the tunnel ceiling. A collapse caused on purpose.

Not far from where Reid lay, I saw the glow of a red pair of eyes—Sentinel Sra, trapped beneath debris just like Reid was, and still alive. None of his brethren reached out to help him, and he did not ask for it either, though I could see he was conscious. The same could not be said for the broken bodies of many of theothers Reid had fought—many of them stuck or crushed beneath the rock, and many, I knew, who had not been dead.

How evil was a king to sacrifice his own males like that? Not even my mother would be that cruel. Not even, I imagined, Astrexa would be that cruel to her people, should she manage to seize power. Clan above all others—that’s how it was supposed to be. But as I left that tunnel behind, I knew Bitter Storm had forgotten that creed. I felt sick to my stomach as I was escorted into the Heart Cave—sick because I’d been forced to leave Reid behind, sick because I now knew how deep the rot inside this Clan went. It was hard to feel hope in the face of all that.

And then, I was brought to Astrexa.

Chapter 14

Reid

I faded in and out of consciousness for quite a while. Darkness filled my vision while air struggled to fill my lungs, and it was becoming harder with each breath I took. A boulder sat on my hips and chest, and each time I exhaled, it became harder to fill my lungs again. There was a name for that: compressive asphyxia. I didn’t know why my brain conjured up a stupid piece of knowledge like that when I had far more pressing matters to worry about. Hah, pressing. I chuckled weakly, but the faint trace of humor brought me more fully to awareness, rousing me from my delirious, rambling thoughts.

Immediately, my brain focused on one thing: Sazzie. My beautiful, brave, but scared princess. My angel. She needed me to be strong. She needed me to overcome this and save her. She needed me, and that was reason enough. Forcing myself to move my arms, I groaned as that action awakened every nerve in my chest. Until then, I had mostly been numb, but now, pain roared through my body. It felt like pins and needles multiplied by a thousand, and, except for the one time I’d woken in a vat in a lab, I could not recall ever feeling this kind of pain before.

“Ah, fuck,” I groaned as I managed to grab hold of the giant block of rock lying on top of me. It was bigger than I expected, but if I wanted to get up so I could rescue Sazzie, it had to go. Tensing my muscles, I began to push, but it did not seem as though the rock would ever move. I refused to give in—not when I knew Sazzie needed help. All I had to do was picture her with that rotten Bitter Storm King, and fury blasted throughmy veins. Add that Thunder Rock female with the killing intent to the image, and that fury shot through the roof. With it, the boulder moved.

“You crazy bastard,” a voice said hoarsely from my left. I ignored it because the voice belonged to a male in worse shape than I was—the one I believed had called himself Sentinel Sra, the leader of the group that had discovered and attacked us. He had been the opponent I considered most dangerous, and I’d been wrong. The one who got me, I had not even seen or heard.

Twisting my head, I gave a final shove, and the boulder started rolling. If I thought I’d been in pain before, I was wrong. With the pressure gone from my spine and abdomen, everything became so much worse. I must have blacked out for a minute, maybe longer. Sazzie had fed me several of Erish’s nutrient-replenishing pills, and I knew that was what saved me. Already, I was healing—from injuries I should never have been able to come back from. There was no way I hadn’t broken my spine or crushed my pelvis when that rock struck, but I could wiggle my toes inside my boots.

Getting up was much harder, but after breathing through the pain for a few minutes, I managed to sit up. That’s when I discovered Sazzie had left the pouch with capsules behind. “Ah, clever girl,” I said as I picked it up and considered what to do. I could feel how my nanobots surged through my body, repairing every injury in their path. Pain was fading at an astonishing rate, and before my eyes, my left leg straightened from what had been a nasty compound fracture. The question that now remained was how many of the capsules I should take to give myself the strength I needed to rescue Sazzie.

I could feel how all these repairs had already depleted my system again, and I’d need alotof power if I had to face the entire Hearth cave of Bitter Storm Warriors. The pouch was half-empty by now, and I was tempted to take them all. That way, I could not lose them.

The hoarse cough drew my attention from the pouch of capsules to the Sentinel trapped beneath the rubble on my left. He was still pinned, though not as badly as I had been, but he was injured, and the rocks were too heavy for him to shift. If I did not help him out of there, he would die. It was then, for the first time, that I realized he’d been abandoned here by his own Clan. Why would they do that? I had never heard of such behavior before. If anything, I had been convinced that these Naga followed a strict “no man left behind” mentality.

“Blazing suns,” the male rumbled before coughing a second time. “How are you up and moving? This is impossible. You should be dead.” His red eyes were no longer gleaming with hatred and intelligence, but had dulled with pain and fatigue. He stared up at me as I rose to my feet and took a few testing steps in his direction. All felt good; I felt like myself, but the faintest stirrings of hunger warned me that I needed more fuel. Taking a gamble, I swallowed all of the remaining capsules, one after the other.

---