Eternal Mates 7 - Taken by a Dragon (23 page)

Had it all been a lie?

She was a hunter of immortals.

Had she been playing him the whole time?

She had used her feminine wiles to grow close to him and he had told her about his kin. He had given her information that she could use against them. What had he done?

A more resilient fragment of his heart told him to believe that this hadn’t all been a game to her and it had been real for both of them. It told him that she was in one of the other cells, waiting for him to save her and take her home to his cave.

It was difficult to cling to that belief when anger began to burn within him, devouring the chilling cold with white-hot fire that demanded he find her and hear the truth from her. He would escape this cell, track her down and make her confess what she had done and why.

Loke pressed his right hand to the glass again. It was strong, but fragile. If he shifted, the pressure of his larger form trying to fit into the small space would fracture or shatter it, allowing him to escape. Being so confined during a shift would hurt him too, but it was his only option.

He called on his other form.

Nothing happened.

Loke rose onto his feet and tried again, and met with the same result. Failure. He couldn’t shift. Was it some form of magic inside the cell that was stopping him?

He focused on it, detecting no magic in the air or in the walls and glass. There was no barrier preventing him from shifting. He turned his focus inwards, seeking the source of the restriction, fearing it was something they had done to him.

His eyes slowly widened.

The restriction came from within, but it was nothing Anais had done.

Only one place could bind his powers in this way.

One realm.

The forbidden land.

She had taken him to the mortal realm.

He shook his head and staggered backwards, breathing hard as the white walls closed in on him and he fought for air. He couldn’t be here. No dragon could survive in the mortal realm since they had been banished long before he had been born. Dread filled him, sucking the air from his lungs and leaving him shaking as he realised the weakness he was experiencing was because the laws of the banishment were already in effect.

It had stripped the power to shift from him and now it was stripping his strength.

He threw his head back and roared, the ferocity of it rattling the glass.

He had to escape.

He ran at the barrier and slammed his right shoulder into it, intent on still breaking it by force. Pain splintered across his shoulder and down his arm. It didn’t stop him. He drove into it again, battering it and himself at the same time. Agony ripped through him and he snarled as he hit it a third time. He stumbled back a step and pressed his hand to where he had struck. Blood smeared across the glass but beneath it was perfect. Not even a scratch.

He unleashed another roar of fury and clawed at the glass, trying to dig his way through. His nails ached, threatening to rip away from their soft beds as he desperately fought the vile glass holding him in his cell.

“Loke!” Her soft voice didn’t soothe him as it travelled down the corridor.

Neither did the sight of her as she stopped in front of his cell, dressed in a fresh black t-shirt and trousers, her blonde hair tied in a long ponytail.

He bared his fangs at her and hammered his fists against the glass, growling the whole time. He would get to her, and when he did, she would pay for what she had done to him.

The pain in his heart burned fiercely, tearing him apart. She had told him of her sister and how she protected her niece and her brother-in-law from Archangel. It hurt that she fought so hard to protect her family, but had handed him over to the fiends she worked for. He had thought he meant something to her.

He battled the part of him that screamed that she had betrayed him and had played him, and everything had been a lie. He didn’t want to believe it, because it hurt too much, more than anything he had been through before.

He had never experienced such pain.

It felt as if he was dying.

“Stop!” She pressed her hands to the glass, her blue eyes imploring him, and for a heartbeat he swore she was hurting and he could feel it.

She quickly looked off to her right and snatched her hands away from the glass as she backed off. The emotions drained from her face and her eyes, leaving them blank.

He snarled at the two males dressed in white who appeared in view and stopped near her. Too close to her. His mate. She feared these males. Every instinct he possessed told him that.

He would eliminate them for her.

No.

He dragged his hands from the bloodied glass and shook his head as he backed off, his eyes locked on her. She had betrayed him. She was with her people now. Her fear was another lie. A fabrication designed to make him lower his guard for some nefarious reason. He couldn’t allow himself to be duped by her again. He needed to remain distant from her and clearheaded, and focus on his escape.

“Loke… you know where you are?” She stepped forwards and he backed off another one. The hurt returned to her eyes, briefly flickering amidst the blue before she schooled her expression again.

“I am where I cannot be. Your world.” He shifted his gaze to the two males. Scientists. Both wore a look that told him of their intentions. There was too much fascination in it. Too much pleasure and desire. They wanted to
study
him. He lowered his gaze and fought a crippling wave of nausea as it crashed over him. When it receded, he felt weaker. He could feel his life draining from him. He whispered to his bare feet, “I cannot be here.”

“We just need information so we can help our friends.”

“I gave you information,” he snarled, pinning her with a black look, and she averted her gaze. “I gave you all I could… I took you from that battle to save you… to stop the death that awaited you… and in doing so I have condemned myself.”

Her eyes shot up to meet his and she frowned. “What do you mean?”

The fear returned to her expression and she didn’t attempt to hide it from her comrades this time. She approached the glass and pressed her hands to it.

“Loke… what do you mean?” Her eyes pleaded him to answer.

So he did, because he wanted to see her hurt. He needed to see it so he could begin to believe again that what they had shared had been real. He ached to know that she felt something for him and seeing him caged upset her.

“This place is killing me. It will be my death. I cannot be in this realm.”

“No.” Her hands flattened against the glass as she leaned into it, as if bracing herself against a terrible blow. A blow her eyes confirmed as tears lined them. She swallowed hard and her voice was strained as she spoke. “They just want to see.”

“See what?” He tossed a glare at the two males. If it was his insides they wanted to see, they would pay for the pleasure of attempting it with their lives.

“Your dragon. They will release you if you let them see you in your dragon form.” She believed that. He could see it in her eyes.

She was fooling herself.

The males in the white coats had a different look in their eyes, a glint that warned they wanted to do more than just see.

“Show them, Loke.” She pressed closer to the glass. “They’ll release you if you show them.”

Her feelings ran through him, her fear a driving force that demanded he do as she asked to relieve her and steal her pain away. Dread slithered through his veins and icy claws sank deep into his heart as he realised that he had lived for six thousand years dreaming of the mortal realm and his life was going to end because he had been brought to it. He wasn’t even going to get to see it. All he would know of it was a cell and the torture chamber of two scientists.

He had always imagined the mortal realm to be a sort of paradise.

He had been wrong.

It was Hell.

A Hell far worse than the one he lived in and called home.

The two males looked as if they were losing patience and Anais seemed to sense it because the tears in her eyes trembled on the brink of falling from her lashes.

“I cannot.” Those two words leaving his lips seemed to deal another terrible blow to her and she paled, her eyes growing enormous as she shook her head and sent tears tumbling down her cheeks.

“You can,” she said and her expression shifted, turning resolute, even when he could feel the hope draining from her. “Change or they will make you. Please, Loke. Just change and then they will let you go.”

It touched him that she clearly didn’t want them to hurt him and rekindled his faith in her, adding fuel to it so it grew stronger and could finally stand against the part of his heart that insisted she had betrayed him.

He walked on unsteady legs to the glass.

To her.

He pressed his hands to the barrier where hers were on the other side, wishing he could touch her and could feel the soft warmth of her skin against his again. He ached with a need to dash away her tears for her and reassure her somehow, but he wouldn’t lie to her.

Loke looked down into her eyes. “I would shift if I could… but I cannot.”

She shook her head.

He smiled faintly.

“No dragon can shift in this realm.”

“
N
o dragon can shift in this realm.”

Anais believed Loke when he said that, but she had the feeling the two men with her didn’t and it wasn’t going to stop them from attempting to force him to shift. Her stomach churned and her mind raced, her feelings colliding within her as she tried to think of what to do.

She stared at Loke, weathering the curious gazes of the scientists, feeling as if she was the one they were studying now.

The past day had been a blur. From the moment Thorne had teleported them into the Archangel cafeteria in the London headquarters, she had been separated from Loke and pulled from one office to the next, never given a moment to catch her breath. Everyone she had asked had refused to tell her where Loke was.

Only an hour ago, she had been brought into a meeting of the heads of each department and told by them that she would be their bridge—the one who would speak to Loke first and explain the situation to him and gain his compliance.

Anais had the feeling she was being used and tested.

They wanted to see where her allegiance laid.

That stung. They had no reason to doubt her dedication to their cause. She had given them almost a decade of service, risking her life time and again for them, and this was how they repaid her?

She had told them everything that had happened since Loke had taken her from the battlefield and had explained his reasons to them. Of course, she had omitted that they had been together in an intimate way. Archangel didn’t need to know about her personal life. It had nothing to do with them. Her feelings for Loke wouldn’t change her dedication to protecting the humans and good non-humans from those who meant them harm.

Anais had gone along with what they wanted because she had needed to see Loke again. She had expected to find him in one of the secure rooms they used for questioning non-humans. She hadn’t expected the heads of departments to tell her that she would find him in the cellblock.

She stared into the stark white cell at him, her heart on fire, burning with the agony of seeing him caged and knowing it was her fault. If she had spoken up when Sable had come for her, if she had found her courage in that moment when Thorne had fought Loke, all this could have been avoided.

Loke wouldn’t have been looking at her as if she had driven a knife into his back and straight through his heart.

Her act of indifference had shattered the moment she had heard him say that he couldn’t shift and that he was dying. Hearing that had made her die a little inside too. She needed to find a way to get him out of the cell and out of the hands of Archangel. Now. Before it was too late.

He stared at her, aquamarine eyes incredibly bright under the white lights, his bare chest rising and falling at a steady pace. His hands pressed to the glass on the other side of hers and she wanted to reach through it to him and take hold of them. She wanted to clutch them and explain everything, and ask for his forgiveness. She had made a terrible mistake. She had trusted Sable and Archangel, and she shouldn’t have.

She had spent almost a decade protecting her brother-in-law and niece from Archangel, and now she had let them get their hands on Loke.

On the man that she loved.

The one who meant the world to her.

Her stomach turned again, rebelling at the reality of what she had done.

She had sentenced Loke to death because she had clung to her blind faith in Archangel.

Now the people she had trusted were going to subject him to what amounted to torture. She had never condoned what Archangel did to some species by capturing them for study or the methods they employed during those studies. It was the side of Archangel that she didn’t like and she had passed almost a decade pretending that darker side didn’t exist so she could focus on doing her job of protecting the humans and good non-humans. She had refused to believe Archangel’s propaganda that they fed to their hunters, telling them that the studies were necessary. To fight against their enemies effectively, they needed to know that enemy, and that meant knowing every species inside and out.

But Loke wasn’t their enemy.

He hadn’t harmed her or anyone outside of Hell. He hadn’t gone after a good non-human and terrorised them or attempted to kill them.

He had been living a peaceful life until he had saved her from death.

He was right. He had condemned himself by taking her from the battlefield that day and for the first time since it had happened, she wished with all of her heart that he had left her there.

He should have let her die.

“We’ll prep a room for the study and draw up a plan. See if you can convince him to drop the act and admit he can shift.” The lead scientist, a brunet male with steel-grey eyes, stared at her and she managed to pull her gaze away from Loke and nod, when all she really wanted to do was throw up.