Page 15 of The Naga Princess’s Soldier Mate (Serpents of Serant #7)

Reid

I faded in and out of consciousness for quite a while. Darkness filled my vision while air struggled to fill my lungs, and it was becoming harder with each breath I took. A boulder sat on my hips and chest, and each time I exhaled, it became harder to fill my lungs again. There was a name for that: compressive asphyxia. I didn’t know why my brain conjured up a stupid piece of knowledge like that when I had far more pressing matters to worry about. Hah, pressing. I chuckled weakly, but the faint trace of humor brought me more fully to awareness, rousing me from my delirious, rambling thoughts.

Immediately, my brain focused on one thing: Sazzie. My beautiful, brave, but scared princess. My angel. She needed me to be strong. She needed me to overcome this and save her. She needed me, and that was reason enough. Forcing myself to move my arms, I groaned as that action awakened every nerve in my chest. Until then, I had mostly been numb, but now, pain roared through my body. It felt like pins and needles multiplied by a thousand, and, except for the one time I’d woken in a vat in a lab, I could not recall ever feeling this kind of pain before.

“Ah, fuck,” I groaned as I managed to grab hold of the giant block of rock lying on top of me. It was bigger than I expected, but if I wanted to get up so I could rescue Sazzie, it had to go. Tensing my muscles, I began to push, but it did not seem as though the rock would ever move. I refused to give in—not when I knew Sazzie needed help. All I had to do was picture her with that rotten Bitter Storm King, and fury blasted through my veins. Add that Thunder Rock female with the killing intent to the image, and that fury shot through the roof. With it, the boulder moved.

“You crazy bastard,” a voice said hoarsely from my left. I ignored it because the voice belonged to a male in worse shape than I was—the one I believed had called himself Sentinel Sra, the leader of the group that had discovered and attacked us. He had been the opponent I considered most dangerous, and I’d been wrong. The one who got me, I had not even seen or heard.

Twisting my head, I gave a final shove, and the boulder started rolling. If I thought I’d been in pain before, I was wrong. With the pressure gone from my spine and abdomen, everything became so much worse. I must have blacked out for a minute, maybe longer. Sazzie had fed me several of Erish’s nutrient-replenishing pills, and I knew that was what saved me. Already, I was healing—from injuries I should never have been able to come back from. There was no way I hadn’t broken my spine or crushed my pelvis when that rock struck, but I could wiggle my toes inside my boots.

Getting up was much harder, but after breathing through the pain for a few minutes, I managed to sit up. That’s when I discovered Sazzie had left the pouch with capsules behind. “Ah, clever girl,” I said as I picked it up and considered what to do. I could feel how my nanobots surged through my body, repairing every injury in their path. Pain was fading at an astonishing rate, and before my eyes, my left leg straightened from what had been a nasty compound fracture. The question that now remained was how many of the capsules I should take to give myself the strength I needed to rescue Sazzie.

I could feel how all these repairs had already depleted my system again, and I’d need a lot of power if I had to face the entire Hearth cave of Bitter Storm Warriors. The pouch was half-empty by now, and I was tempted to take them all. That way, I could not lose them.

The hoarse cough drew my attention from the pouch of capsules to the Sentinel trapped beneath the rubble on my left. He was still pinned, though not as badly as I had been, but he was injured, and the rocks were too heavy for him to shift. If I did not help him out of there, he would die. It was then, for the first time, that I realized he’d been abandoned here by his own Clan. Why would they do that? I had never heard of such behavior before. If anything, I had been convinced that these Naga followed a strict “no man left behind” mentality.

“Blazing suns,” the male rumbled before coughing a second time. “How are you up and moving? This is impossible. You should be dead.” His red eyes were no longer gleaming with hatred and intelligence, but had dulled with pain and fatigue. He stared up at me as I rose to my feet and took a few testing steps in his direction. All felt good; I felt like myself, but the faintest stirrings of hunger warned me that I needed more fuel. Taking a gamble, I swallowed all of the remaining capsules, one after the other.

“I’m just very motivated, buddy,” I told the pinned Naga. Scanning the tunnel, I took in the devastation that had been wrought. The ceiling above my head bore a large crack reaching up several feet, and a spear with fletching on one end, like a huge crossbow bolt, was stuck inside it. So that’s how they’d done it—a type of ballista to set off the cave-in. I was willing to bet it was an invention of Krashe’s, and I’d have to remember to let him know it worked.

With a thought, my vision sharpened, and I started to see more details in the darkness. It wasn’t dark to my eyes once my nanobots enhanced my vision. Rocks had fallen onto many of the Naga I had fought before, and it was clear that only Sra had survived. What a waste of life—so pointless when you thought about it. And more lives would be lost before the night was over; that much I knew. I would not hesitate to kill to save my mate.

“Wait,” the sentinel said as I stepped over his tail to head toward the Heart Cave and my mate. “Don’t leave me here,” he added. I glanced down and knew it wouldn’t take much to dislodge the rubble that pinned him; he was badly injured. Maybe it evened the scales a little if I gave him a chance. It was not like he was strong enough to stand in my way. From his expression, I did not think he intended to, either.

With a toe, I nudged the nearest rock off his tail, and that seemed to incite the male to speak. A river of words fell from his blackened mouth and razor-sharp teeth. He appeared to think I could not understand him, which seemed to loosen his tongue. “She had the glow of mating marks. I have never seen a female glow with mating marks. How is that possible? And you glowed for her too. How can fate reward you—an abomination—and a pure-blood princess with mating marks? There have not been mating marks in our Clan since the last lorekeeper died.”

He hissed with pain when I picked a rock off his chest and aggravated his injuries. “Ah, not since Krashe glowed for that…” His words trailed off, and his eyes began to glow with an inner fire when they finally settled on my face. It seemed to me like this was the first time he truly looked at me—maybe he stopped seeing our differences and saw our similarities. “Stars above, have mercy on my soul,” he groaned, and then he fell silent at last, just as I shoved the last stone from his scales.

“Unless you have any advice on how to get Sazzie back, you’re on your own,” I told him with a shake of my head. I did not expect him to answer because he definitely did not understand me. Turning, I placed my palm on the side of the tunnel for balance and started to climb over the debris in the direction of the Heart Caves. My heart felt heavy in my chest, the way I imagined Sazzie had felt when she’d been forced to leave me. If only she’d fled as I had wanted her to, but she was too sweet to leave me. I could still hear her despair when she tried to get me to rise, and I’d heard her desire to believe that I would. I was not going to fail her.

“Wait,” the sentinel called out from behind me, and I heard the sliding and hissing as he tried to crawl into a sitting position. “If you are going back for her…” He paused, as if he couldn’t quite believe himself for speaking up. “There’s a back tunnel you should take.” I turned my head, interested now, and met his eyes. He hadn’t fully believed until then that I could understand him, but he believed it now, and he explained to me exactly how to get to their practice arena without being seen.

It was worth the five-minute delay of digging him out when, not much later, I was racing through a warren of tunnels with purpose. Unseen and unmet by any resistance, just like Sra had promised. Some of these passages were lit with a faint radiance coming from the veins of ore running through the rock, and the noise of the Hearth Caves always drew me closer. My fingers tingled, and, with surprise, I pulled them back from the rock to discover that silver coated the tips, and the same radiance clung to them. It was as though my nanobots had drawn the ore straight onto my flesh. That was new, but it was not something I could concern myself with right now.

I was almost there, and my body was so pumped with adrenaline that it felt like I was flying. My boots were a blur as they raced over the stone, but my eyes were sharp as an eagle’s—or better yet, an owl’s, considering the dark. I counted openings until I reached the one Sra said I should take. Silencing my footsteps, I was forced to move more slowly, but the promised single guard never saw me coming. I knocked him out and tied him up, trying to avoid more bloodshed where I could. Then it was a short few hundred feet before I could peer out of the narrow tunnel and into the Hearth Cave.

The training grounds the Bitter Storm warriors normally used for practice stretched out in front of me. They were located in a dugout, oblong-shaped pit with fortified wooden walls. Most of the Clan had gathered around that pit, standing right at the edge, peering inside, and cheering at the sounds of combat. There had to be hundreds of them, mostly males with their red-scaled bodies and long tails. When two of my friends at Haven had been captured by Bitter Storm a while ago, they had mentioned that Aser had put their women in cages. I hadn’t been willing to believe that would remain a long-lasting situation, but the evidence was there: I saw only a handful of Bitter Storm females.

Aser was clearly visible on the other side of the pit, sitting beneath a canopy of red fabric. The sight of blue scales made my breath stall in my lungs, but it wasn’t Sazzie. Astrexa lounged at his side on a pile of pillows as the two gazed down into the fighting pit. From this distance, I could not see what went on inside, but I feared the worst. If they had thrown my angel in there… I did not want to think about how awful she must feel, forced to fight in front of a crowd this huge, forced to commit violence with her tender, gentle heart.

I had to get closer, and for that, I needed a distraction. What I needed was a high-value hostage so I could make them do what the fuck I wanted. My eyes narrowed across the crowd and the fighting pit to the canopy beneath which Aser sat. There was only one such target here.