Page 84 of Robb

If that person ever really existed in the first place…

It was the most upsetting part of the whole situation. James had been a good agent, once. It wasn’t something Robb had just convinced himself of – he knew it. Back in the early days, James had done some incredible work for the Agency that had set Hargreaves back significantly.

What happened to make you change your mind? he wondered helplessly. To change your whole outlook on life?

Robb knew he would never find out exactly, but he could guess.

Power. Money. Freedom from having to make difficult decisions that might benefit others and disadvantage himself.

All the usual things.

“If you’re quite finished with your strutting about,” Anne said crisply, “we have a dragon to awaken, and a new world order to create. Or did you think that I brought you here to make idle chit-chat?”

James looked like he was about to make some sort of not-so-witty reply, but then, in a rare display of common sense, he apparently decided that it would be in his best interests to keep his mouth shut.

Robb, for his part, was wondering why she’d brought James here. He could only suppose that the two of them had been in cahoots since long before James’s arrest. Maybe she’d been the one to recruit him over to Hargreaves.

Anne gave a short, curt nod at James’s apparent acquiescence.

“Well, then. Moving on,” she said, picking up a remote control and pressing a button.

A heavy curtain against the far wall pulled itself back, revealing not a window but a series of rather incongruous TV screens, one of which was particularly enormous.

“Is now really the time for home movies?” Tahnee asked, and Anne’s brow twitched slightly in annoyance. It was almost imperceptible, but it was definitely there.

Robb wasn’t sure if pissing Anne off was a great idea – but, to be honest, he wasn’t sure what the best course of action would be. Right now, he was just looking to buy some time in the hopes that his shifter healing would continue to work its magic, so that he might stand at least half a chance in hell if he managed to get free of the cuffs.

Not if, he told himself. When.

He had to believe it. Tahnee had already managed to get hers off, after all. Convincing Anne to free him would be a little more tricky, but he had confidence that they’d figure something out.

Anne’s face smoothed back out into its usual flat expression.

“I suppose you could call it a home movie of sorts,” she said. “Although that’s a little old-fashioned. The youth these days would probably call it a livestream.”

She pressed another button, and the screens flickered to life.

Robb’s jaw tightened. Over on the sofa, Tahnee gasped.

Because on the screens, being recorded from every possible angle, was an enormous dragon.

Its deep purple-blue scales glinted under the harsh artificial light – as did the mounds and mounds of gold that surrounded it. Unimaginable wealth lay strewn about the cavern the dragon was sleeping in, ranging from dull, bumpy nuggets the size of a small car, to neat stacks of gold bars, to fine jewelry and tableware that sparkled and glimmered.

Dusty and Goldie would lose their absolute minds if they saw this, he thought inanely, thinking back to Trent and Zina’s adopted dragon shifter children and the way they’d reacted to his gold-plated pen. The two of them had a tendency to go crazy for so much as a cheap gold ring – how would they even comprehend so much wealth?

Robb himself was struggling with it a bit, to be honest. He couldn’t even imagine how much more gold was out of the view of the cameras. There was only so much vision they could capture, after all, being in an underground cavern that seemed to stretch off into an endless warren of tunnels, all of which appeared to be stuffed with enough gold to run a small nation. And all of it was just buried here beneath Lyle Castle, and perhaps had been for… well, decades at least.

Getting his mind back into gear after the momentary distraction, he paid closer attention to what he was looking at. The dragon was clearly still asleep, its gargantuan chest rising and falling with slow regularity, and Robb was reminded of nothing so much in that moment as a very sleepy, very satisfied cat.

Besides the dizzying piles of gold, it was also surrounded by what he had to assume were Hargreaves operatives. All of them were armed to the gills with a range of weapons, only some of which Robb could identify. And a lot of them looked nervous.

Robb couldn’t really blame them.

“Isn’t it just stunning?” Anne breathed, and Robb took a moment to look at her.

Her usual nondescript expression had cracked ever so slightly, a hint of wonder in her eyes. Robb would’ve thought that maybe it was a moment in which he might be seeing someone he could reach… except that he knew that wasn’t the case at all.

He was certain that any wonder she might have been feeling had nothing to do with the awe one might feel when beholding such a magnificent creature, and was instead solely around just how much destruction she could get the dragon to wreak.