Chapter 13
Thirteen
Anna
Caz didn’t say anything when I emerged from his room and said I was ready to go see my friends. He did, however, shove a muffin and an apple at me with a growl, and then crossed his arms, unmoving.
I held them there, engaging in a staring contest as I considered my next action.
I could refuse, but I was hungry. I could refuse, but finding out where he was keeping my friends was impossible without him.
Or I could eat fast and get to my friends sooner.
They were more important than this ego trip of his.
I caved and ate, trying not to think about the effort he’d put into having such a wide variety of things ready for me.
It was probably a chef. Someone else, who actually knows what they’re doing. Caz doesn’t know how to behave this way.
The first bite hit instantly and made my stomach growl for more.
The muffin was fresh, probably baked that morning, the apple chunks in it still warm, and the hint of cinnamon hitting just right.
It may have been the best muffin I had ever eaten.
Though that could just be because I hadn’t stolen it.
“I’ll eat the apple on the way,” I said when I finished the last bite, raising my chin at him. He’d stood his ground, and now I was going to stand mine.
With a snarl of frustration, Caz took another muffin from the plate and thrust it at me.
I took it. He would never have to fight me on food.
After a lifetime of living on scraps and missing meals regularly, I wasn’t going to pass it up.
I thought about grabbing more, but my friends were waiting. They had been waiting all night.
I needed to go to them, to assure them everything was going to be fine. Somehow. I hadn’t worked that part out yet, but I would.
Caz guided me through a maze of empty hallways until I was thoroughly lost. We descended a bunch of stairs as well. The walls grew colder, the stone smooth, more worn.
“This part is old.”
He grunted. “Yes. We’re near the very foundations of the citadel itself.”
I ran a finger over the walls, imagining the history in them, the things that had been seen over the millennia since the first tyrant had erected it.
Another thought came to me.
“Nobody’s down here.”
“No. I thought it best not to have it discovered that I am housing a bunch of former slaves I stole from a market.” Caz looked down at me, his eyes softening for just a second. “People might begin asking questions.”
“Yeah, but look at the floors, Caz. Nobody has been down here in a long time.”
The halls were narrow here too. Almost confining. To someone as tall as Caz, it had to be near claustrophobic. Such designs were meant to hamper movement and prevent people from running away.
I knew that because I had seen such parts of an elite’s home before.
“We’re in the dungeons,” I hissed in sudden understanding, stepping away from him.
Caz frowned at the distance and then at me. “Yes.”
“Why are we in the dungeons?”
The cold detachment he’d held since I’d yelled at him faded into blinking confusion. “I thought you wanted to go to your friends?”
Someone save me from the thought pattern of the male brain.
“Yes, of course I do. What I meant, Caz, was why are my friends in the dungeons?”
The confusion became a frown. “There are ways in and out of the dungeons not observed by most. That only I and a few others know. It was the easiest way to sneak them in without drawing attention to them. Something I thought we would be in agreement was smart.”
“Yes, it is. But, Caz, you’re not getting it.”
“Then just tell me,” he snapped. “Stop asking questions, and tell me what I did by bringing them all here that is so wrong!”
“You put them in the dungeons. In cells. Don’t you get it?” He obviously didn’t. He had never had to think like one of us before. “We’re clippys, Caz. All the elite have ever done to us our entire lives is put us in cages. And a prison cell is the same damn thing!”
The frown evaporated in a second. “Shit. I—”
“Didn’t think of it that way,” I finished for him, shaking my head. “No, of course you didn’t. You elites never do. You only think of yourselves. Well, welcome to my world, Caz. It’s a lot different than eating from the silver spoon of yours.”
The unhappy growl shivered dust free from the walls and ceiling.
“I didn’t do it on purpose, Anna, so you can quit being rude about it.
It’s not like they were locked in. And they have had fresh clothing, bedding, and food delivered to them.
I have seen to their every need after having them rescued from the slave market. ”
I stabbed a finger at him. “Stop. Just stop. Don’t take your righteous, holier-than-thou attitude with me. Yes, you got them out. Yes, I’m appreciative of that fact. But you’re forgetting the bigger picture, Casimir Dvorak.”
He swayed back like he’d been slapped at my use of his full name.
“And that point is that the markets only exist because you allow them to. Clippys like me and my friends are treated like nothing more than loaves of bread because you allow us to be. None of your actions would be necessary without laws you allow to exist. So just stop. Okay?”
The temperature between us plunged to zero.
“You think I’m the bad guy,” Caz said in a stiff, restrained voice. “But you don’t know everything.”
“I know enough,” I shot back.
Was I being too hard on him in an attempt to keep him away from me? To cover my own fear at the situation between us? The fact that he and I might—
No. We weren’t. I could never be with someone like him.
Someone who enabled the poor treatment of those weaker instead of being their protector.
Too many nights being woken up and forced to flee.
Leaving everything behind and starting over, simply to ensure we didn’t end up with collars around our necks.
Up ahead, I could hear voices. Eager to be reunited, I hurried ahead, trying to leave Casimir, and my problems, behind me.
“Milly?” I called out as I rounded a corner and saw the first of the rescued slaves. “Ella?”
Heads turned my way, but I didn’t recognize their faces. So I ignored them. I had to find my friends and make sure they were okay.
Poking my head in the cells, I kept calling their names. I tried not to notice the comfortable bedding and cozy, brand-new looking clothing that adorned each of the rescues. Casimir was still a jerk for sticking them in the dungeons.
“Are you looking for someone?”
The woman approaching me was a firecracker in a tiny form.
Her eyes blazed with curious intensity, a brilliant golden-brown that seemed to miss nothing.
A button nose helped offset what I was sure had to be a whopper of a resting bitch face, but she seemed bright enough toward me that I doubted she made it her personality.
She was short, but her shoulders rounded and her legs were clearly layered in muscle, even under the baggy pants that she somehow kept from falling down.
“Yes, my friends Milly and Ella,” I said, amazed at the vibrancy, the energy pouring off her. Most clippys lost that at some point after fighting the system long enough. But she hadn’t. Not yet at least, and I hoped she never would. Hollow Earth needed more like her.
The woman frowned. “I don’t recall anyone by those names as part of our group. What do they look like?”
“Milly is a couple of inches taller than I am, bright blonde hair, thin in an almost childish way. Large bark, and will back it up with a bite. Loud talker. Eyes like chocolate.”
The woman thought and then shook her head. “No, I’m sorry. The other?”
“Ella is a bit bigger than you, but still small, almost mouselike. Quiet. Keeps her head down a lot. Sounds smart when she talks because she is. Brown hair down to her chest, wavy, almost a tangly mess. Eyes to match. If you’ve looked her in the eyes, you’ll remember her. She has that effect on people.”
I didn’t need a response to know she hadn’t seen Ella either.
“Damn.”
“I can ask around, see if anyone saw them or knows what happened.”
“Thank you …”
“Aubrie.”
“Aubrie.” I nodded, trying to keep the disappointment from my voice. She bore no responsibility to my missing friends. “My name is Anna. This is … Caz. If either of them show up, please tell any of the guardsmen.”
Aubrie glanced down the hallway where a pair of beefy dragon shifters stood, backs to the freed slaves and swords at their sides. They were conspicuously devoid of anything that would show what they truly were.
Citadel guards, the personal retinue of the ice tyrant himself. I was right that Caz was trying to prevent them from having any idea of his involvement.
“I will.” Aubrie frowned, looking down at the ground and smudging invisible dust with her toes. “Can you tell us what happens next, Anna? Where will we go? We’re doing our best to put on brave faces, but none of us have any idea what to do.”
More than one person turned our way at the question, some heads even poking out from cells to put us squarely in the spotlight.
I glanced at Caz. He started to shake his head but stopped when I glared at him. This wasn’t my home. It was his. He still didn’t look thrilled at the attention being thrust on him, but I didn’t know how to answer the question.
“Over the next few days, those who wish will be flown out to the wilds and given supplies to help you survive. Those who don’t can stay here as long as you’d like.
” He worked his jaw. “I can’t say how long it will be after that before any other options are presented to you, but it could be a while.
I’m sorry I can’t do more for you, but my hands are tied. ”
Then he turned and stalked away.
After apologizing to Aubrie, I went after him, catching up with him back the way we’d come.
“What the hell was that?” I snapped, reaching way up to grab his shoulder and turn him around.
He didn’t fight it as he spun to face me. “They can’t know who I am,” he said, surprising me at the lack of anger. “I didn’t want them to know I was in charge. Eventually, someone will recognize my face or put Caz to my full name. It’s just a matter of time, and then the rumors will start.”
“Can’t bear to let other people know you don’t treat clippys like shit. Is that it? Have a reputation to protect?”
“I’m sorry your friends weren’t there,” he said, ignoring my jab. “Truly. I wish I had … I wish it had gone differently, so you could be with them now. But I am not the bad guy you seem to think I am, Anna.”
“You said you’d find my friends, and—”
“And I will,” he said, a fierce light entering his eyes and turning them a darker, stormy color. “I gave you my word.”
“What does that mean to me?”
He deflated. “I had hoped it would mean something, Anna. Does the fact that you’re here not count? All those people are here and free. Is that also just not real to you?”
“Nothing about this is real to me,” I said. “You aren’t real. In my world, you’re nothing but an illusion, an imaginary figure who sits way up above the real world that we actually live in.”
Caz growled angrily, stepping forward in a flash to snatch up a hand and press my palm to his chest. “Is that heartbeat imaginary, Anna?”
I stiffened at the sudden contact between us.
When he spoke next, his voice had dropped another octave. “Is the jump in your heartbeat not real either? Did it just jump because of some imaginary person?”
I couldn’t answer, my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth as he invaded my space, taking control so fast I hadn’t realized it was happening. Smoky citrus set siege to my senses, breaking down the barriers and flooding my system with its thick musk. Close. I was too close.
My dragon howled in delight, thrusting forward against my tenuous control over it, eager for more of his touch. It longed to lean forward and run my tongue along his neck. Taste him and see if it was as good as it smelled.
Caz brought his other hand up and tucked back some wayward strands of hair behind my ear. His touch was light, but the graze of his fingertips against my cheek had my knees on the verge of collapsing. I had never wanted the touch of a man, of anyone, this badly.
“I know you’re upset your friends aren’t here,” he said. “And that I can’t see everything the way you do. But that’s going to change if you stop being so mad at me all the time and help me instead.”
I shuddered. “It’s my fault. All these years, we kept together. Escaped situations just like that one. And then my dragon awakens and I screw us all over. It’s my fault.”
“No, it’s not.” Caz chuckled, the sound like running water splashing against stones as it raced on past. “It’s mine.”
“Why do you get to blame yourself, but I don’t?” I asked, the heat in my chest starting to spread to other places the longer he stood in front of me, alpha-dragoning it up.
My dragon liked that about him. Liked how he took control, took the burden off us. Or was trying to.
“Perks of being the ice tyrant,” he teased, one lip curling up in a smile that nearly flattened my dragon with the blatant desire behind it.
I tried to ignore the sauna forming between my legs as heated blood flooded my pussy until it was swollen and aching with need.
“Not fair.” I will not pout. I will not pout. I will not pout. My lower lip popped itself out without asking. Fuck.
A growl stirred deep in his chest.
“That’s the thing you have to remember, Anna. I understand your dejection, but you aren’t operating from that position. It’s not you searching for your friends this time. It’s me. The ice tyrant. I have resources you could only imagine.”
He definitely smirked at me there. And I definitely didn’t tilt my head to the side slightly.
“And I promise you I will use every resource available to me to find your friends.”
I swallowed back a flutter of something that wasn’t related to his physical proximity. Hope was a mostly foreign feeling to me. It wasn’t a helpful emotion as a clippy, so we quickly learned to bury it before it betrayed us.
Could I afford to allow myself to believe that this time it might actually be different?