The Protector (Fire's Edge #4) - Abigail Owen Page 0,71

up her hand to wait, then shifted her nails to black talons at the tip of each finger, her expression one of concentration.

“I’m in here,” a small female voice cried out.

Bree. Shula must’ve shifted to speak to her mate telepathically.

Confident that Tineen wasn’t in there, they pushed inside, shutting the door behind them. Bree they found quickly enough, handcuffed with dragonsteel chains to a dragonsteel bed. In a rush, Shula was on the bed, her lips claiming her mate’s in a kiss so desperate and achingly tender Lyndi glanced away, giving the two women privacy.

“Thank heavens,” Bree whispered. “But you’ll never break these chains. Believe me, I’ve tried.” She held up her hands, raw and caked with dried blood from her efforts.

The growl Shula loosed promised death to the man who’d dared to treat her mate this way. They didn’t have time for that.

“Where is Tineen?” Lyndi whispered.

Bree shook her head. “I haven’t seen him in days.”

The disappointment at that news might as well have been dragon fire down her throat, burning her up from the inside, and Lyndi froze in place. This couldn’t be right. He’d left before she had. He had to be here.

He had to be. She was going to kill him and that would fix everything—

“Lyndi,” Shula hissed.

She had to shake her head twice, blinking at the black dragoness as she dragged herself out of the world of what was supposed to have happened and back to what was happening.

Shula held up Bree’s cuffed hands. “What do we do?”

Right. Help them, get to her boys. Stick with the plan that everyone else had thought was the plan in the first place.

Dammit.

“Good news,” Lyndi said, giving herself a final mental shake. “They have the same restraints we have in our mountain designed specifically for enforcers to use in dungeons. They have a universal lock connected to a database that’s activated by the blood of any enforcer.”

Good thing she’d fought hard to make Drake code her blood into the system.

She joined the others on the bed and took Bree’s wrists in her hands. She flipped open the small covering on the cuffs to reveal a tiny screen and pressed the pad of her thumb onto the small needle there. After a small pause, while she found herself holding her breath, the panel lit up green and the cuffs opened with a click.

“Let’s go,” she said, jumping from the bed.

No time for reunions. The hard part was going to be getting out of here. Lyndi’s secret plan was that Tineen’s death would be the distraction they needed, but she and Deep and Shula had come up with another one.

The three of them made their way back a different way, an opposite path, laying their scent in extra rooms and halls as they went along. They went down more levels in search of the corridor Finn had described that connected the dungeons built into one peak to the taller, main mountain peak across the way.

Sure enough, they turned where he’d described and ended up peering down a long, narrow chamber with walls that only came up to her waist. Built into the mountain’s natural layout, the corridor skirted a narrow ridge connecting two peaks. Apparently, before dragons, this had been an arch carved by the elements over eons, and the Alaz had left it windowless. Who needed a door when she had access to the sky from here?

No place to shift, though. That was the tricky part.

Lyndi was the first to climb over. Only, the second Bree realized what they had planned, she balked. “I can’t shift that fast yet,” she said to her mate, gaze trained in terror on where Lyndi balanced outside, gripping the walls.

“If you don’t, I’ll catch you,” Shula promised.

But even in the darkness—the land visible only by starlight thanks to the new moon—Lyndi could see how the other woman remained pale and shaken.

“She’s afraid of heights,” Shula informed Lyndi briefly. Then she took her mate’s face in her hands. “It’s this or death, my love. Do you trust me?”

Bree’s wide eyes were turning glassy with fear, and she was breathing hard through her nose.

“I can’t lose you again,” Shula said.

The other woman cracked a tiny smile. “If you do, you die, too. I’d call that incentive.”

“I love you. That is incentive enough.”

Bree managed to give a jerking little nod. “Okay. Let’s do this.”

“I’ll go first,” Lyndi said.

She balanced herself on the outside, holding on to the ledge behind her and taking in the sheer drop