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“What is it, princess?” Lars asked her.
“He never told me. My father. I once asked what those were, and he only said it was part of the uniform now.”
“Perhaps he didn’t know.”
She glanced up at him, clearly trying to find comfort in his words.
Even if she didn’t appear to fully believe them.
“So what do we do?” Lars continued, turning to the group at large. “We’ll never even know the bastards are coming.”
The men cast worried looks to one another.
“We’ll deal with that when and if we have to,” Dex said tightly. “But first things first.” He turned to the soldier. “Is our friend alive?”
None of the people around me breathed.
The soldier’s mouth moved again, seeking speech and finding hardly any. “I-I don’t know. They took him, but…” He gave a weak and cowardly shrug, as if somehow that should be a sufficient answer.
Nausea crossed my treluria’s face, and I growled in rage. We would kill anyone who had harmed the boy. We would make it slow because they had brought that anguish to our treluria’s eyes.
“Okay,” Clay said. “Then where did they take him, you piss-soaked fucker?”
The man’s eyes darted around as if seeking an escape.
“Answer us,” my treluria demanded of the soldier, but now a thrum of power carried through her voice. “Now.”
Terror painted itself across the soldier’s face, but still her command dragged the words from him. “I-I’m not sure. We were supposed to take him to the mines, but… lots of times the prisoners don’t make it that far. They… they have accidents instead.”
A growl rumbled from the beast.
“Which way did they go?” my treluria asked.
Trembling, the soldier lifted a hand to point. “Along the northern road to Lumilia. Queen’s orders.”
The nausea and agony on my treluria’s face deepened, and all of it was laced with fear. I would not abide it.
“We will find him,” I growled. “The boy will be alive.”
Her gaze found me, and I froze at the new emotion I saw tangled up with her pain and terror.
Gratitude.
Swallowing hard, she turned from the soldier. “We need to go,” she said to the giants and the vampire. “We can’t let Niko end up in my stepmother’s hands.”
Dex nodded. He bore a cold expression that even the broken one wasn’t sure he had ever seen on the man’s face. One that said the world might have finally gone too far.
And now everything that stood in his path would pay.
A strange feeling rose inside me, and it wasn’t from the broken one. I’d never felt it for anyone before.
These men were predators in their own right. Protective ones who would carve a path through the world itself for those they cared about.
And I… I could respect that.
“Take that one with us,” Dex said with a jerk of his chin at the piss-covered soldier. “We might need him.”
Clay and his brother hefted the man from the earth while the others followed the princess from the forest.
Dex turned away. “Let’s go save Niko.”
