The Protector (Fire's Edge #4) - Abigail Owen Page 0,41

dragon in daylight. “He’s here,” he muttered to himself. “Fuck.”

Mathai’s reputation of cold calculation hadn’t been exaggerated. Tineen had enough experience with the red dragon leader of the Alliance to know that. His arrival here could be neither good nor a coincidence.

Xi, who knew better than to ask, turned his attention back to the screens he was monitoring.

Without another word, Tineen whipped around and stalked from the room, retracing his steps back to the upper levels of the mountain where he had no doubt he’d find Mathai waiting in one of three possible locations. The foyer, Tineen’s office, or the more formal entertaining room which was the only space that wasn’t strictly utilitarian in the mountain.

Unlike the Huracáns who’d made their mountain into a ridiculously cozy little home. Not that that was important right now. He had bigger issues. What was the leader of the Alliance doing here?

Not that Mathai had far to come. The Alliance headquarters was housed in the same region: Long’s Peak in Colorado, centrally located, giving them easier access to all the dragon shifters in their region.

The foyer was empty when Tineen reached it. So was his office, which led Tineen, now quietly containing a rage that had his dragon thrashing inside him, to the receiving room.

There he found Mathai comfortably settled on the stiff-backed sofa, arms sprawled along the back of the formal piece of furniture provided in this space for visiting dignitaries. Beyond a red flicker in his eyes and a certain rigidness to his posture, the Alliance leader appeared perfectly at ease.

Tineen had no intention of underestimating this man, or assuming this visit was anything resembling casual.

“Mathai,” he greeted with a formal nod, hands clasped behind his back. “To what do we owe the honor of a personal visit?”

The older dragon smiled, though it didn’t reach his eyes. It never did. Mathai used smiles as though he’d been told he needed to in order to fit in, almost like the movement was a learned reflex. “It never ceases to amaze me how quiet a black dragon can be, even when he’s not trying.”

Tineen remained silent. He had been trying. Catching any person off guard provided a wealth of information in nuances of expression, posture, and reaction that they wouldn’t otherwise give up.

“I understand you’ve discovered an unusual mate,” Mathai said next. “I’ve come to see her for myself.”

Fuck.

No one, not one fucking soul, should have known about her. Not yet. Only because he’d practiced for centuries to show no emotion did Tineen keep his reaction minimal.

The question was, what to do about the man in front of him? How had Mathai learned of her, and what else did he know?

The woman was bound and gagged, tied up in Tineen’s own suite of rooms as he determined what to do with her. Kill her had been his first thought. A human turned by a female-born dragon was unheard of. Impossible. Much like the multiple brands that had showed on the back of Sera Morrison’s neck. Anomalies that they would do better to eradicate, rather than upset a system that had been working for centuries.

“We did run across a…curious case,” he said, no trace of emotion in his voice.

“I would be interested to see her.” A reasonably worded command.

“Of course. Follow me.” Tineen led the way back through the twisted labyrinth of halls and chambers in his mountain.

Unlike many other dragon mountains that had been smoothed out and forced to conform to more human standards of cultivated beauty and civility—to appease human mates—the Alaz mountain had stayed true to the original caverns, only carving out new spaces as chambers needed to be connected. Even then, they’d tried to minimalize the impact. The result was a rougher, truer form of a dragon shifter home.

At the door to his suites, Tineen paused to explain. “She’s given us some trouble, and I also didn’t want her presence widely known. I’ve been keeping her in here.”

Mathai merely waited.

The woman, Bree, was in one of the smaller bedrooms, secured in dragonsteel cuffs that would slice off her hands and head if she tried to shift, and bound to the headboard of the dragonsteel bedframe. She was going nowhere.

The second he opened the door, she opened her eyes, glaring at both him and Mathai. Her dark eyes changed color, turning silver an instant before flame sparked in them.

Mathai stilled. “She’s already mated?” he asked quietly.

The danger underlying those words should’ve had Tineen ducking his head to avoid the other man’s eyes.