Ignacio let out a snarling growl as he slammed his brother’s golden head into the floor. His rage drove him, the heat in his belly burning with such intensity that for a moment he lost sight of himself and gave into it completely. He lunged for his brother’s neck while he had him pinned down, his maw opening with the intent of sinking his long, wickedly sharp teeth into his brother’s scaly neck. It wouldn’t quite kill him, but it would hurt like a bullet wound.
“IGNACIO! NO!” Cried Maia, suddenly.
If anything in the world could pull his mind back into control, it was Maia’s voice. From the first moment he had heard her humming along to her music out in the desert of the Mojave, it had become his anchor in the world. That, of course, and her smile. The sound of it stopped him cold just shy of his brother’s neck, that animalistic look in his amber eyes softening slightly. Unfortunately, that moment of hesitation Maia brought about in Ignacio was enough for Rafael to yank himself free of his brother’s grip and pull his head and neck free from danger. As he did, he swiped hard at Ignacio’s head, intending to shove him into the stone wall of the room while raking a claw across his face.
Ignacio caught the blow, his left eye closing just in time as his brother’s sharp claws as ripped along the side of his face. His scales protected him somewhat, but a dragon’s claws could do serious damage, nevertheless. A hint of blood welled along the wounds where Rafael broke through his brother’s protective scales and hit tender flesh which made Ignacio snarl. The younger brother pushed himself away from the wall and lunged for the elder, grappling him at his scaly shoulders before wrenching him to the side with all of his might.
Rafael went down, and hard. Ignacio slammed him down onto the marble floor and kept him there, holding him down with all of his strength. Rafael found himself caught in a horrible position, with one arm and wing pinned under his own body while his younger brother held the rest of him in an iron grasp. He could move nothing but his tail… and though he could have easily lashed his brother with it… he knew that this battle was over. With a hard snort and a growl of irritation, Rafael forced himself to relax and accept his defeat at the hands of his younger brother.
Ignacio got the message and backed off. The moment he did, both brothers began to transform back into their human forms. As if on cue, likely from years of training, both Lucia and Manuel appeared with bathrobes in hand. It seemed no one had noticed that they had actually slipped away during the actual fighting… and apparently it was to fetch the brothers’ bathrobes for this very moment. Once Ignacio and Rafael had returned to their human forms, they were left standing stark naked in the middle of a well-battered Greeting Hall. Lucia and Manuel handed over the robes and the two men covered themselves… though the tension in the room remained thick enough to cut in half and no one yet dared to speak.
The silence in the room was finally broken when Rafael cleared his throat. He squared his shoulders, looked his younger brother up and down… and then just walked away. He would never admit it, not in this moment nor anytime in the foreseeable future, but he suddenly sensed a newfound respect for his younger brother. Obviously, Ignacio had not only learned to handle himself… but he had learned how to stand up for himself as well. Rafael was impressed, though his bruised ego refused to let any of that show through. So, instead, he gathered up what was left of his pride, and simply walked away.
It was almost as if everyone watching had been holding one collective breath and finally let it loose. Camilla moved down the stairs to meet her husband as he came walking up them. When she reached him, she slipped her arm into his and nuzzled up close beside him. The two left without a single word spoken, nor a glance back. Ignacio stood there in the middle of the Greeting Hall floor and just watched as his brother walked away from him, reaching up to wipe his cut and bloodied cheek with the sleeve of his bathrobe. Thankfully it was black, which gave Lucia less of a heart attack.
Once Rafael had gone, the rest of the room relaxed and began to move about. Both Maia and Elena began to descend the stairs together towards Ignacio, which was a sight that threw the poor man off significantly. Everyone came to a halt once again when the sharp sound of slow clapping cracked through the air around them.
“Now that was magnificent!” Exclaimed Agent Stroyer. “Just amazing, really. You guys should really consider charging people to see that. Very intense.”
He walked out towards the rest of them as he spoke, finally leaving the doorway he had been leaning in while watching the fight. He slipped his hands into his pockets, looking at all of them with that cocky grin coming across his face.
“So! What happens next?” He asked.
Chapter Eight
Tracking Agent James Stroyer without him noticing was a lot harder than it sounded on paper. James had become paranoid over the last 5 years to the extent that he moved through his life now as if he was always being tailed. That made actually tailing him a pure pain in the ass… but if anyone could manage the task, it was Special Agent Erica Hawkins. There was likely no one in the world who knew him better. Or at least… she had.
Agents Stroyer and Hawkins had been quite the couple for some time… up until about 5 years ago when a dashing and dangerous young dragon by the name of Mateo had entered her life in the most unexpected way. But then again, when you run undercover operations in the middle of Las Vegas, you were bound to meet some strange and interesting characters.
Back then, she had been just a regular agent working in tandem with the DEA, running undercover stings to take down the larger drug runners in the grittiest city near the border. But after everything that had happened, she had made it her mission to rise high enough in the ranks to rival Stroyer. She had no choice. No one else was going to stop him.
She was too late, it seemed, to stop him from invading the DeLeon estate down in Ensenada and when she arrived two days behind him, she ran into a brick wall. How would she manage to contact any of the DeLeon family without alerting Stroyer and throwing everything into chaos? She knew that the moment he caught wind of her, he would lose his mind… or worse.
Another 2 days passed before Erica made her move. She had been watching Lucia come and go from the estate on grocery runs or various errands and she knew it was her only shot of getting word into the house. She trailed the woman from nearly the moment she left the estate one evening on a trip to the market… and once Erica was sure Stroyer had no eyes on them… she made her move. A single, simple note was slipped into the woman’s shopping bag. A note to the one person in the house she knew for certain would be on her side. She only hoped Lucia was willing to hold up her end of a bargain she had no idea about.
Later that night, just outside the farthest back wall of the estate property, Erica waited. She had no guarantee anyone was coming to meet her, but she had to hope. She also had to hope that Stroyer hadn’t bothered to confirm the blind spots of the estate’s security system and remedy them.
Her heart stopped cold in her chest when she heard a bit of rustling just overhead, so she froze in place and just listened. It took all of her training not to yelp when someone dropped from the top of the wall down to the ground beside her. For a moment, only a moment, she thought she was looking at Mateo and she nearly cried out. But then he stepped forward enough for her to see him clearly and she realized that it was not Mateo… but his brother. The man she had been waiting here to see.
“Thank God,” she whispered. “I had no idea if that woman would actually hand over the note to you… or if it would end up in Stroyer’s hands.” She offered out a hand to him. “Special Agent Erica Hawkins, FBI. Thanks for meeting me.”
Ignacio just stared at her for a moment, hesitant about trusting an FBI agent in even the slightest way. But he gave in and shook her hand in greeting, though he remained silent. He figured she was going to do all of the talking anyway.
His shoulder tensed, and his mind flashed briefly to Maia, who was likely pacing up in his room right that very moment, pissed
off and restless that he hadn’t let her come along with him. Her tongue lashing had been harsh, but he stood his ground and made her stay behind. All of this was just too dangerous, and he wasn’t willing to risk her safety in the slightest. Not that he was a fan of leaving her in the house with Stroyer… but he had to choose the lesser of two evils and this was it.
“I’ll make this quick,” Erica continued. “I know exactly why Agent Stroyer is here and none of it is good. Your brother Mateo is… involved pretty heavily and to be honest, is the cause of all of this.”
That got Ignacio to make a face. Mateo was the cause of everything? There was no way. But before he had a chance to interject and ask a question, she was talking again. So he shut up and listened.
“Long story short, Ignacio, is that Stroyer and I used to be a couple. I met your brother and… well… things happened,” she rattled off her story quickly, but that didn’t mean it was any less shocking. “Stroyer got jealous… like… really jealous. He took it out on your brother and for the past 5 years he has kept Mateo locked up in the same facility he had been holding you and Maia in.”
“Ok, hold on a second,” he spoke up finally. “Mateo has been held prisoner… for 5 years? What the fuck did he even do!?”
“Well, the real reason James locked him up is because Mateo came between him and I,” she confessed, glancing over her shoulder as she continued. “But on paper, it’s because your brother was running, flying actually, drugs across the border and feeding a major drug ring in Vegas. But James has kept your brother under lock and key, letting him be used as a lab rat, all of these years.”
“But that doesn’t explain how Mateo is responsible for all of this…” Ignacio posed.
“When you had your little… mishap in the Mojave and turned all those miles of desert to glass? That was when James realized how to really hurt Mateo the way he wanted to. He had to go after Mateo’s family… and when you made all of that glass, James knew he had found that family.”
Ignacio tensed up again, putting the pieces together slowly in his head. Thankfully, Erica could see he was having trouble working it all out, so she did the work for him. Not without a short but exasperated sigh, of course.
“I cheated on James with Mateo… James got super jealous and took it out on Mateo,” she explained. “When he realized that Mateo was a dragon, not to mention a drug runner, he decided to lock him up and basically torture him for years as payback. Then you had your little accident and he realized there were more of you, likely family, and that he could make Mateo suffer even more if he managed to capture the whole crew.”
She paused and reached out to gently grab Ignacio’s shoulder, her green eyes locked onto his as she made a silent attempt to emphasize the seriousness of the situation at hand. The shock of red that was her hair, even in the shadowy darkness, was a leery omen in Ignacio’s eyes.
“Ignacio…” She said, softly yet sternly. “Stroyer is going to lock up everyone you love and torture them in front of Mateo until they all die. He doesn’t care about anything else but making Mateo suffer. Do you understand?”
“Of course,” he said, somewhat in shock by all of this information. “What… what do we do about it?”
“We get Mateo out,” she said, flatly. “I know you and Maia managed to escape from there once. I’m hoping you’ll be willing to do it again.”
“For my brother? Anything,” he said, without hesitation. “But it’s going to take more than you, Maia, and me. We nearly died last time. We’re going to need Rafael’s help.”
“Whatever it takes,” she said, squeezing his shoulder before letting it go. “Give word to Lucia when she goes out shopping tomorrow evening. I’ll find her and we’ll go from there.”
Ignacio nodded. There was nothing else to say and so he turned to head back the way he had come, though he seemed to have misjudged the height and couldn’t quite make it high enough to curl his fingers over the edge. Erica stepped in with a smirk, laced her hands together and offered it to him as a step-up. He gladly took it, went up over the wall and set about mentally preparing himself to convince Rafael to join a possibly suicidal rescue mission.
He explained everything to Maia the moment he got back and the two of them came up with a plan. The following morning, they set it into action and hoped it would all pan out. Maia did everything she could to distract Stroyer. She cornered him in the kitchen getting some breakfast and proceeded to play the beg, plead, and cry game with him. When that didn’t work, she tried the not-so-willing seductress angle. Anything to keep him distracted long enough for Rafael and Ignacio to have their little chat, uninterrupted.
Once he was sure Maia had Stroyer pinned down, Ignacio slipped into Rafael’s office. Despite his elder brother’s initial protests, Ignacio forced him to listen and then proceeded to explain everything to him—his loss of control over his own dragon fire while trying to make a gift for Maia in the desert and how he had turned miles of it to glass. He explained about Mateo, his drug running and the love triangle between Mateo, Stroyer, and the redheaded, Agent Hawkins. Everything Ignacio knew about what was happening, he shared with Rafael… and then he asked the big question.
“Will you come with us to rescue Mateo?” Ignacio asked, hopefully.
Rafael remained silent for so long that Ignacio was sure he had decided against helping to save Mateo. Shaking his head, Ignacio forced down his anger towards his brother and attempted a nicer approach.
“Please, Rafael,” he begged. “Mateo is our brother and a member of the DeLeon dragon family. You always say I run from my family duties. Well, isn’t saving a member of our family part of that duty?”
“Oh, spare me the ironic lecture, Ignacio,” Rafael cut him off. “Of course, I will help you. No human, let alone that psychopath Stroyer, should ever be allowed to hold a DeLeon against their will.”
“Thank you, Rafael,” Ignacio said, relaxing with relief.
“Arrange our departure however you need to. I will make sure Lucia and Manuel know what’s going on enough to keep things secure while we’re gone.”
Later that night, just shy of midnight, two men transformed into dragons within the garden walls of the estate, and with a rider on each of their backs, they took off into the night. Ignacio, Rafael, Maia, and Agent Erica Hawkins flew northbound towards the US/Mexico border and the Government bunker in the Mojave where Mateo was being held. They would free him, all four were confident of that.
As they flew, a set of eyes watched them from a darkened upper window of the DeLeon estate. There could only be one reason why they had left like that, and Stroyer knew exactly what that reason was. As he watched them fly off into the darkness of the sky, Agent James Stroyer simply smiled.
Chapter Nine
It seemed the destruction wrought by Maia and Ignacio’s last visit to the bunker had yet to be properly repaired. As the little rescue posse came gliding in, they were able to clearly make out the destroyed portion of the building, a litter of destroyed vehicles scattered through the destruction. Some of it had been cleared and a large tarp was fitted over the hole in the roof, but it was still a glaring weak spot. They easily agreed to focus their attack there.
Ignacio and Rafael made a few passes, waiting until the right moment before they both began to unleash the dragon fire burning within their bellies. They set the place ablaze, shooting blast after blast all around the area until a scene of pure chaos had been created. When a stream of men erupted from the building, weapons in hand, both dragons swooped low to the ground and came in for a landing with another scorching blast of fire. During that moment, Erica and Maia slipped from the dragons’ backs and slipped in amongst the fray.
As Ignacio and Rafael took turns keeping the Government cannon fodder busy and confused with alternating attacks of fire, Maia and Erica made their way into the bunk to find Mateo. As they ran, Erica tried to explain to Maia that she had managed to obtain and memorize the layout of this place and kn
ew exactly where Mateo was. She hoped the information would calm Maia down, since Erica could tell the young woman was freaking out. Maia was brave, that much was obvious, but she was still a regular person and any regular person would certainly be freaking out in that moment.
Erica took them down a series of corridors that led deeper into the compound than where Maia had been held during her… visit… to the place. After what felt like a lifetime listening to the booms and sounds of explosion coming from outside, the two women finally came to a room containing a large cell. It was lined with two sets of triple-thick bars of some intense looking metal. Laying on the cot in the center, sprawled out as if drunk, was Mateo.
“Mateo!” The sight of him stopped Erica’s heart short and she ran straight to the bars. “Mateo, are you alright?”
Maia followed behind her. Looking at the cell, she could see plenty of evidence that Mateo had turned into a dragon and made several attempts to get himself out. It was no use, obviously, so how were they supposed to get him out?
It seemed Erica had been planning this little breakout for some time. From her back pocket, she pulled out what looked like an ID card and went to the control box on the opposite side of the room. She inserted the card into the control box, punched few keys and after a tense few moments… the door of the cell clicked and opened with a pneumatic hiss.
Maia just watched Erica with amazement on her face. Something Erica noticed but brushed off as if it was nothing.
“A techy friend of mine made me up a fry card,” she explained as she crossed the room towards the cell again. “They’re a one-shot deal… but you can get past just about any electrical security system with them.”
Mistakenly Married The Dragon: A Paranormal Shifter Romance (Dragon In My Heart Series Book 2) Page 8
