Page 69 of Fae Exile

“It looked likely,” Hiroshi said.

My breathing resumed, but my next inhale was leaden as it filled my lungs, like I might drown under the weight of such cruelty.

“I’m going to murder her.” The promise slipped from my lips without my conscious decision. But I would. Already, I was going to. For this, I’d see her killed a hundred times over. Whatever I had to do to manage it, whatever it took...

She was as good as dead. She and her unjustified arrogance just didn’t know it yet.

“You’ll have to fight me for the chance,” Hiroshi said. “I’m going to make her pay.”

I’d never heard such violence from the drake.

“We all will,” Rush echoed with such vehemence that I recognized it for the oath it was.

With a glance at the blue she-dragon, I told him, “We have to set them free.”

Rush nodded. “Yeah, we do. But it’s not gonna be easy. At least some of them are too injured to fly, and none of us are healers. And flying’s the only way they’re going to get out of there. They won’t fit up the stairs.”

“She had to’ve gotten them in there somehow,” I said. “And I doubt they obeyed her and flew in there under their own will.”

Rush and Hiroshi exchanged a look.

“What?”

Rush sighed and ran a hand along his hair, his fingers coming away blackened and covered in soot and dust. He didn’t even seem to notice. “I think it’s likely she raised them down there.”

I gasped and heard the sound mirrored by Azariah, who muttered an appalled, “By the Etherlands...”

“It looked like she’d been breeding them.”

“Then we have to get them out, and we have to do it right now,” I said, urgency thrumming through my veins.

“We’d love to, trust me,” Rush said, then winced, as if recalling I’d probably never trust him again, casting eyes heavy with regret my way. “But not only do we not know how we’ll be able to get them out, but you can’t forget where we stand. When the queen finds out you’re alive?—”

“She already knows.”

All the color drained from Rush’s face. “What?”

With my chin, I pointed toward the ceiling, where several eyes, ears, and even a mouth bobbed, no doubt relaying everything that went down in the throne room. “She’s watching and listening.”

I tilted a feral, vicious grin up at the nearest eye, the one that used to be Sandor’s with its dark gray iris, void of its former lively, stormy nature. The veins that hung from the eyeball were now blackened and entirely dead. “I’m coming for you,bitch. There’s nowhere you can hide from me. I’m taking you down.”

Rush drew closer, so near I could touch him if I wanted, and did I ever. I caressed Saffron’s arms instead.

Under his breath, and with his hands still pointed harmlessly in the direction of the blue dragon, he whispered, “There’s more.Beyond you just showing up here, and these dragons coming up out of the floor when it shouldn’t be possible, there’s something different abouther. I think she was drinking blood. Then, when she ran, she moved faster than is possible. We have to be prepared for her having even more power than before.”

Rage clenched my muscles, and I had to soften my touch of the dragonling. “I’ll admit to you right now that I have no plan, no idea how I’ll succeed, only that I will.The queen will not survive me.”

If she endured, then at least I wouldn’t be around to suffer at her hands, or worse, to witness the torment of so many others.

Azariah gasped yet another time. But Rush didn’t so much as twitch as those eyes of his swirled with a light as bright as any moon, delving into mine. His tattoos grew impossibly brighter, weaving along his cheekbones to inch across the bridge of his nose, then crawl up his forehead. The man literally took my breath away, and to prevent myself from rushing to him, I had to remind myself I was standing in the middle of a bunch of dragons, in the queen’s literal lair.

The same anguish seemed to writhe within his own stare.

“I believe you can do it,” he said. “And I’ll be at your side every step of the way till you succeed. I’ll never let you down again.”

“Then we’d better move,” Ryder said, and I blinked foggily as I realized that he and West had also moved closer. That even Azariah had emerged from his hiding place to become part of the conversation.

“Time isn’t on our side,” Ryder added. “Wherever she went to, she’ll be back before we’re ready.”

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