Page 19 of The Naga Princess's Soldier Mate

“I’m just very motivated, buddy,” I told the pinned Naga. Scanning the tunnel, I took in the devastation that had been wrought. The ceiling above my head bore a large crack reaching up several feet, and a spear with fletching on one end, like a huge crossbow bolt, was stuck inside it. So that’s how they’d done it—a type of ballista to set off the cave-in. I was willing to bet it was aninvention of Krashe’s, and I’d have to remember to let him know it worked.

With a thought, my vision sharpened, and I started to see more details in the darkness. It wasn’t dark to my eyes once my nanobots enhanced my vision. Rocks had fallen onto many of the Naga I had fought before, and it was clear that only Sra had survived. What a waste of life—so pointless when you thought about it. And more lives would be lost before the night was over; that much I knew. I would not hesitate to kill to save my mate.

“Wait,” the sentinel said as I stepped over his tail to head toward the Heart Cave and my mate. “Don’t leave me here,” he added. I glanced down and knew it wouldn’t take much to dislodge the rubble that pinned him; he was badly injured. Maybe it evened the scales a little if I gave him a chance. It was not like he was strong enough to stand in my way. From his expression, I did not think he intended to, either.

With a toe, I nudged the nearest rock off his tail, and that seemed to incite the male to speak. A river of words fell from his blackened mouth and razor-sharp teeth. He appeared to think I could not understand him, which seemed to loosen his tongue. “She had the glow of mating marks. I have never seen a female glow with mating marks. How is that possible? And you glowed for her too. How can fate reward you—an abomination—and a pure-blood princess with mating marks? There have not been mating marks in our Clan since the last lorekeeper died.”

He hissed with pain when I picked a rock off his chest and aggravated his injuries. “Ah, not since Krashe glowed for that…” His words trailed off, and his eyes began to glow with an inner fire when they finally settled on my face. It seemed to me likethis was the first time he truly looked at me—maybe he stopped seeing our differences and saw our similarities. “Stars above, have mercy on my soul,” he groaned, and then he fell silent at last, just as I shoved the last stone from his scales.

“Unless you have any advice on how to get Sazzie back, you’re on your own,” I told him with a shake of my head. I did not expect him to answer because he definitely did not understand me. Turning, I placed my palm on the side of the tunnel for balance and started to climb over the debris in the direction of the Heart Caves. My heart felt heavy in my chest, the way I imagined Sazzie had felt when she’d been forced to leave me. If only she’d fled as I had wanted her to, but she was too sweet to leave me. I could still hear her despair when she tried to get me to rise, and I’d heard her desire to believe that I would. I was not going to fail her.

“Wait,” the sentinel called out from behind me, and I heard the sliding and hissing as he tried to crawl into a sitting position. “If you are going back for her…” He paused, as if he couldn’t quite believe himself for speaking up. “There’s a back tunnel you should take.” I turned my head, interested now, and met his eyes. He hadn’t fully believed until then that I could understand him, but he believed it now, and he explained to me exactly how to get to their practice arena without being seen.

It was worth the five-minute delay of digging him out when, not much later, I was racing through a warren of tunnels with purpose. Unseen and unmet by any resistance, just like Sra had promised. Some of these passages were lit with a faint radiance coming from the veins of ore running through the rock, and the noise of the Hearth Caves always drew me closer. My fingers tingled, and, with surprise, I pulled them back from the rock to discover that silver coated the tips, and the same radianceclung to them. It was as though my nanobots had drawn the ore straight onto my flesh. That was new, but it was not something I could concern myself with right now.

I was almost there, and my body was so pumped with adrenaline that it felt like I was flying. My boots were a blur as they raced over the stone, but my eyes were sharp as an eagle’s—or better yet, an owl’s, considering the dark. I counted openings until I reached the one Sra said I should take. Silencing my footsteps, I was forced to move more slowly, but the promised single guard never saw me coming. I knocked him out and tied him up, trying to avoid more bloodshed where I could. Then it was a short few hundred feet before I could peer out of the narrow tunnel and into the Hearth Cave.

The training grounds the Bitter Storm warriors normally used for practice stretched out in front of me. They were located in a dugout, oblong-shaped pit with fortified wooden walls. Most of the Clan had gathered around that pit, standing right at the edge, peering inside, and cheering at the sounds of combat. There had to be hundreds of them, mostly males with their red-scaled bodies and long tails. When two of my friends at Haven had been captured by Bitter Storm a while ago, they had mentioned that Aser had put their women in cages. I hadn’t been willing to believe that would remain a long-lasting situation, but the evidence was there: I saw only a handful of Bitter Storm females.

Aser was clearly visible on the other side of the pit, sitting beneath a canopy of red fabric. The sight of blue scales made my breath stall in my lungs, but it wasn’t Sazzie. Astrexa lounged at his side on a pile of pillows as the two gazed down into the fighting pit. From this distance, I could not see what went oninside, but I feared the worst. If they had thrown my angel in there… I did not want to think about how awful she must feel, forced to fight in front of a crowd this huge, forced to commit violence with her tender, gentle heart.

I had to get closer, and for that, I needed a distraction. What I needed was a high-value hostage so I could make them do what the fuck I wanted. My eyes narrowed across the crowd and the fighting pit to the canopy beneath which Aser sat. There was only one such target here.

Chapter 15

Sazzie

The guard, who held me by my upper arm, was squeezing too tightly, but I didn’t complain—not when I had a front-row seat to what had been going on for hours now inside this fighting pit. Horror had my breathing stuck in my chest, lodging something hard and painful in my throat.

Khawla had never been a male I knew well; he was older by at least a dozen years, older than my brother Zathar, so they hadn’t been friends. The male was also a loner, always out in the woods. However, since he’d been named the Master Scout, he was also a leader—leader of the hunt, leader of the scouts. I knew Kusha was his mate and that she was barely involved in the raising of their two children.

When Khawla left, it was his brother or his friends who watched the two younglings. I did not even recall their names, as they were quiet and withdrawn, like their father. All things considered, he was a fair male—a rule follower and a good contributor to the Thunder Rock Clan. What was happening here was a fate worse than death, and he did not deserve it.

“I think this female is broken,” the male holding me said as he laughed and pointed at my face. A tear had slipped out and was rolling down my cheek; another dangled from my lashes and would soon follow the first one. Broken. I wanted to laugh at that statement. A week ago, I would have agreed with it. But then I’d spent time with the Shamans, and after that, I’d met a human male who looked at me like I was perfect.

No, I wasn’t broken. I was exactly what I was meant to be—what a Naga female was once supposed to be. As I considered this nasty fight pit, the jeering crowd, and the pleased Astrexa and Aser presiding over it all, I was struck by a chilling thought: once, our ancestors had built great cities. Once, they had built skyships and healing machines. Two thousand years had passed since that great era, and yet, here we were, still scrambling in the dirt, killing each other. Was it because the females had become so deadly and aggressive that we had been unable to reclaim our past?

I winced when the large warrior Khawla was fighting struck a particularly vicious blow across my Clanmale’s face. He crumpled to the dirt, braced on his hands, and struggled to rise while blood gushed from his right eye. My free hand shot up to touch the scar that bisected my left eye from an injury similar to the one Khawla’s opponent had just inflicted. My sympathy went out to him, but there was nothing I could do. Spears surrounded me, and I had four huge guards at my side. I was here as the next round of entertainment, waiting for my turn.

The male he was fighting was one in a long line of fighters; I did not know how many he’d already gone through. Khawla was proving to be a powerful opponent, and it seemed Bitter Storm enjoyed seeing their own blood spilled as much as his opponent’s. When the brawny, red-scaled male approached Khawla’s prone form, I thought it was over. This had to be his final fight, and a good male would die—for nothing—for the sport of a sick, power-hungry individual and a tainted Clan.

The warrior raised his spear above his head, then slammed it toward Khawla’s exposed back with a roar. At the last moment, the Thunder Rock male rolled out of the way. His tail came upin a fast, agile move, and—snap—the warrior’s neck was broken. He rose slowly, swaying on his tail, blood dripping from his face and the numerous slashes and cuts across his body. The crowd roared and screamed; they sounded happy about this result. Khawla did not respond to his fans. He did nothing but stand there, his head turned toward Aser and Astrexa, awaiting his fate. But why fight this hard if he didn’t want to survive?

Aser rose and stretched out his arms, and the crowd began to quiet down. Two warriors darted into the arena to pull their downed brother from the field, tossing him aside in a corner where other bodies already lay. I tried to ignore the macabre sight, but it was hard not to quickly count them and wonder if that was how many fighters Khawla had defeated already. Were all these fights bouts to the death? What was the point of this? It made no sense.

“Why don’t we give our guest a chance to catch his breath?” Aser said into the silence. Then, he gestured at Astrexa, and my nemesis rose from her languid pose atop a pile of pillows. As always, she was graceful and vicious-looking at the same time, drawing every eye. “Let us watch the future Queen of Thunder Rock as she ends her rival, the crown princess Sazzie.”

Oh no, why hadn’t I seen that coming? Astrexa was grinning widely as she moved to the edge of the fighting pit and dropped down onto the hard dirt. The crowd cheered again, thumping their spear shafts against their shields and slapping their hands against their chests. The noise was deafening, drowning out the instinctive panic clawing at my chest. Fight Astrexa? I couldn’t do that. For a moment, I was back in the woods outside the village, a hurt, clawing Ayala pinned to my chest. I had lost thatfight, but I had gotten away because I had fought hard enough. I knew losing this fight would mean the end.

Then my mind flashed back to that moment right after the cave-in, when I discovered how badly hurt Reid had been. His magnificent body was pinned beneath a giant boulder, silver flashing over his arms. Silver flashing overmyarms. Naga females didn’t have mating marks—or did they? I had done all I could to help Reid survive, and I wanted to believe that meant he’d made it. That even now, he was crawling out from beneath the rubble to make his way toward me.

The tears that had welled at the sight of Khawla’s treatment were nothing compared to the cascade that fell when I thought of my male—my mate. Tears were useless, I snarled furiously at myself. What I needed was the fire inside me, fire to carry me through this. I hated fighting; I hated all the violence I’d been forced to see or commit. But when I thought of Reid battling his way to my side even now, I knew I owed it to him to do the same. I had to live for him so I could return to his side. If I wanted what my brother had found with his human, then I needed to step up.

“Equals,” I said under my breath. “We are mates, and mates should be equals.” Reid deserved my protection as much as I deserved his. That resolution shivered through my body with such strength that, when I raised my eyes to meet my challenger, I knew I could win this. Her dark-blue gaze had been confident, mocking, drunk on her own power. It faltered now, and a slow smile spread across my face as I shrugged off my captor’s grip and moved across the blood-soaked battlefield toward her.

I was not aware of the silver glow on my scales until the crowd hushed and absolute silence fell inside the Hearth cave. It curvedfrom my shoulders in spirals down my arms, pooling in my hands until my palms glowed the brightest. When I lifted a hand to look at what was happening, it felt like I was staring into a relic light source or a bright, open flame. The silver was still spreading, too, flowing along my chest, down my belly, and then to my hips. These were full mating marks.

“Yes!” I declared loudly, and with a brightly glowing hand, I brushed the last remains of my tears from my face. “This is the truth we have forgotten! Mating marks should not be one-sided! And my mate is human. We do not shun differences! We celebrate them; they make us stronger, they make us better! Like my human mate has made me better—has brought me this gift of the past!” I spread my arms, and the mating marks across my scales glowed even brighter.

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