Page 41 of Cops and Robbers

Instead, she nodded. “Let’s go.”

Packed, red-brake lights loomed closer, making the twist in Kate’s chest tighter. She wanted to get to their destination so Raz could tell her what was happening between them, but Chicago traffic had other plans. The tenseness in the car deterred her from asking, as it didn’t seem like the space where Raz wanted to share, but she felt like she was coming out of her skin with the need to know.

“I don’t understand what’s going on,” she said into the silence.

“I know. Let me get us somewhere first.” He rubbed his head.

The pinch between his brows worried her. As the car inched forward, she picked at the fabric of her pants. If she couldn’t talk about that, she needed some other kind of distraction. One question had burned in her mind ever since she brought up Lucifer’s Bell in the meeting. It might not have been the best opportunity for that question, either, but she needed something.

“What’s your connection to Lucifer’s Bell?” she asked.

He flinched. “That’s not an easy conversation.”

His pained reaction hit her hard. She’d seen what the Bell was capable of, so she could only imagine how it might have played a dark part in his life. She shrank into the seat. “I’m sorry. We can talk about something else.”

“No, it’s important.” He wrung his hands around the steering wheel a few times. “It’s just brought a lot of death and suffering into my life. To start from the beginning, I grew up in Germany and lived there through World War I.”

“I’m impressed you don’t have an accent.”

“I’ve lived in the United States for almost a century now.” He rubbed a hand over his face, his vocal cords cracking with his next words. “During World War II, our Centurion, or the leader of Germany and my clan at the time, stumbled upon a relic. Lucifer’s Bell. I could never understand why we stayed away from the conflict, but we raided Nazi supply camps. He’d been looking for it, but instead of destroying it, he…”

He squeezed his eyes shut as if attempting to stop the images that came to mind. Shit. Whatever his next words were, she felt the weight of them in the tightness of her throat. Raz leaned his forehead against the steering wheel, and nausea swept over her in empathetic droves. His reaction, even in the silence, was enough to bring tears to her eyes.

Kate grabbed his arm and squeezed, sending reassurance in any form she could.

“It’s okay.” She trailed her hand up his arm until she reached his hand. Twining her fingers with his, she pulled his tense grip from the steering wheel.

“I don’t understand what drove him.” He lifted his head and moved the car as the light turned green. “He experimented on us. I don’t know if he thought a demon could possess a dragon, but he’d subject anyone to its torture. It just causes us immobilizing pain to hear that tone and sometimes he wouldn’t relent until well after we were seizing and causing a mess all over ourselves.” He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment.

Kate couldn’t imagine that kind of abuse—the image that was seared into his mind and the experience he himself had. The nausea returned and her fists clenched at her sides. No one deserved that kind of treatment.

“He used fear to control us so no one spoke out about it to neighboring Centurions. He was so paranoid he cut out his own eardrums so the Bell wouldn’t affect him.”

She gasped. “That’s so monstrous. What happened?”

“I had a friend. Gerard.” He squeezed her hand as if needing strength. “In the dragon community, we grow up in pods with a Maternal or Paternal dragon to watch over us. Gerard and I became inseparable when we were younger. He always wanted to save the underdog, and because of the fights we got into, we grew stronger together. We were barely a century old when we were first subjected to the Centurion’s experimentation.”

She squeezed his hand harder. Her words failing to reach past the thickness in her throat.

“We rallied a cinder of dragons to take him out, or really, I did, by Gerard’s prompting. On the day of the attack, it was a bloodbath. The Bell’s effects and malnutrition had weakened us. We were no match. And Gerard…he…” His voice broke, and it was all Kate could do not to hug him.

He cleared his throat. “While we were fighting for our lives, he took the Bell for himself. He used me. Fuck. He used us to get what he wanted.”

The anger in his voice cut straight through Kate, and she shivered. She couldn’t believe his own friend would turn on him like that. Used him. Her stomach protested. She understood how betrayal could gut someone. She wanted to yell out obscenities about the fucking bastard, but from Raz’s hunched form, there was more to the story.

“When we finally killed the Centurion, we believed we were free.” A tremor ran through him.

Kate sat silent, waiting for his story.

“But when we returned for everyone else, Gerard had used the Bell to stun and mutilate them.” Raz looked up at the sky as if to keep tears from falling. “That sight still haunts me at night.”

Kate’s hand shook as it clutched his. The burden of his story fell hard on her. This man had been through so much. She wished she could take that pain away from him.

“For reasons I still don’t understand, he chose that dark power over everything. I should have been there to stop him. I abandoned my clan to that fate.”

“Don’t blame yourself. You were saving them, Raz. You couldn’t have known Gerard’s intentions.”

He grinned tightly. “Maybe I could have, though. In the end, I trusted the wrong person. Gerard ran off with the Bell and I was left without a clan. A Rogue dragon. The only thing I could do was escape to the United States, knowing that if anyone found me, they would have killed me on sight. The Europeans don’t tolerate Rogue dragons as well as they do here. I’ve been searching for the Bell’s whereabouts ever since. Then it popped up in the Middle East, and I was so close…but I only ended up getting someone else close to me dead when Midnight stole it.”