Free A Royal Rebellion by Revella Hawthorne Page B

Thankful he stayed in shape after leaving the army, he slithered under the bed and let himself fall through the hole in the floor. He landed hard, and lay gasping on the dusty floor of the tunnel for a moment before picking himself up. He stood, and hit the lever next to the trap door. The door slowly lifted back into place, dropping him in total darkness.
    He rested there in the dark, categorizing his injuries, how his body felt. While it was painful moving, and the contusions and burns across his torso hurt like blazes, he’d had worse. Years of being beaten and tortured while on missions for the Crown left him with a higher tolerance for pain and misery, and he was thankful for it now. Even years later, his father’s worst barely matched the least of his ordeals in the military. Though he was older now, and he hadn’t been tortured in a good long while. Physically at least, his marriage to Camilla was horrific on a daily basis. Traveling would still be a bitch, but pain was nothing against the chance for vengeance. He would push himself until he either failed or flourished.
    Mason put a hand to the wall, his eyes useless. He would save the cell’s flashlight app for when the tunnel began to branch out, but for the next several hundred feet it was straight as an arrow. He walked, unafraid, hand flat to the rough stone wall.
    The air was stale, dusty. Smelled of earth and old things. All would be worrisome to others, but it reassured him. No one had been in this passage in years. The secret was still safe.
    Mason put a hand to his chest, the object he took from Airric’s throne safe in his pocket. He had a plan.
    Get out of the palace in one piece. Sort of, but close enough.
    Get out of the city without being captured. Problematic, but doable.
    Find the equipment he needed to start burning down his father’s walls of deceit. About damn time.
    Find Reynard and his charges. Mason would avoid looking towards Hartgrove and the northern mountains. The king and his ministers were cold men, unaware of common things like compassion and real love, so they would look where they would go, and not where decent men would. Hartgrove was were Edward went to feel safe, his place of power, and so Hartgrove was being watched for just that reason.
    Edward and Reynard would take Percy not to a place where they could keep him out of harm’s way and locked away from the world.
    No.
    Edward loved Percy, and would want what was best for Percy, and not himself. That meant they would head east. Towards Elysian and freedom. Mason would find them in that direction.
    He walked on, the dark comforting. More time to think and plan.

Chapter Six
    Percy
     
     
    Dawn was arriving, illuminating the forest. The SUV sat idling, the engine noise barely a ripple of disturbance in the mist and dampened quiet. Gold light seeped through the pines, and Percy huddled in the back on the vehicle, watching over the back of the seats as the guard barracks was revealed by the fleeing mist. Two vehicles, similar to the one he sat in, were parked outside the building, and there was no sign of movement. It was a small building, and never manned all the time from Reynard’s description. It was used as a place for patrols to stop on the way to somewhere else.
    The main road out of the small town went directly by the barracks, and traffic was light, but steadily increasing. Their vehicle wouldn’t be the only one on the road, and Percy relaxed, waiting for Reynard to put it in gear and get them out of there.
    Edward sat in the passenger seat in the front, a gun in his lap. While Edward assured him he knew how to shoot, Percy could see the stress that Edward was under just holding the weapon. He was very aware of it, as if afraid it might come alive at any moment and do something horrible.
    Reynard was flipping through radio channels, static alternating between garish beats and wailing that made Percy’s ears itch in complaint. He wasn’t particularly interested in