Page 107 of Bought for Blood

Nadia’s head turns. “When you were in there, they moved you around?”

I nod. “Sometimes they’d move us to another facility for a time, then bring us back.”

“How did they move you?”

“By truck.” I focus on the screen and not on the table.

“Tell me about that,” Nadia says. “When they moved you out of the compound, how did they do it?”

So I tell them. The cuffs and the key that opens them. The van with the bench along one side and the ring bolts in the floor. How many men rode with me and where they sat and what they carried. Nadia writes it all down, and for the first time since I walked into this mountain, I’m not a victim in this room. I’m a source.

“How many people were in that ward when you left?” Viktor asks.

“Twenty. Give or take.”

“And could you identify any of them?”

“Some by sight. We didn’t speak to each other. But I knew the woman in the cell next to me was a dragon. Kalli. Cell seven.”

Craven comes off the wall.

“Say that again.”

“Her name is Kalli. She was in the cell next to mine. They kept her double-cuffed and only drew from her twice a week, and the handlers were afraid of her.”

“Full dragon?” he presses. “Not a hybrid?”

“Full dragon.”

“Describe her.” He’s crossed half the room while I’ve been speaking.

“Red hair, unusual eyes. Dark gold, with a ring around the outside. Older than me, but I couldn’t tell you by how much.”

“Dragons don’t get taken.” There’s no emotion in it. He’s stating a fact. “There are fewer of us than you think, and we count ourselves. Every clan, every name. If someone is missing, I would know about it.”

“She said her clan was small. Hidden. They keep to themselves.”

Craven stands there with one hand on the back of a chair and the air shimmering around him. Everyone in the room is looking at him.

“A dragon, held for over a year in a cage built by people like Vasile Dumitru.” He turns to Viktor. “If she’s in that quarry, this stopped being optional. I’ll need every flight I can raise.”

“You’ll have them by the end of the week,” Viktor says.

Everything in me goes cold. “What?”

“We verify the site. We watch it, we count the guards, we learn the shift pattern, and we build a model of the workings before anyone sets foot past that fence. A quarry is tunnels, pits, and machinery, and I’m not sending people into ground I haven’t mapped.”

“He doesn’t have time.”

“You don’t know that. You don’t even know if—”

“I do.” My voice rises. “He’s alive right now. If you wait, you’ll be mapping the place where he died.”

Viktor looks at me the way he looked at me last night. Kind, and closed.

“Yesterday they knew we were coming before we came,” he says. “Somebody handed them our plan, and twenty prisoners vanished because of it. If I rush this and they see us, that quarryempties like the compound did, and we lose all of them: your friend behind the wall, nineteen others, and Val-Serein too, if he’s there. I won’t be early twice. We plan first.”

“Viktor.” It’s Decker. His hand covers Grace’s on the table. “The animal knows things before you can explain them. Mine did. If her wolf says he’s alive and points at that circle, that’s not a feeling. That’s a report.”