Page 12 of Dragon Kissed

“The Richmond District,” he said carefully. “Here in San Francisco.”

“Yes. We lived on Twenty-Fifth Avenue. Above a bakery.”

The dragon whispered.Hunters do not train their children this way. She is innocent. She is in danger. Take her.

He kept his face still. “And your grandmother. Is she —?”

“She passed years ago. When I was fourteen.” She said it flat and final, a script built over time and used without thinking, and something in that flatness — the practiced armor of it — reached into his chest and closed a fist. He knew that armor. He’d worn his own version of it for too many centuries.

“My condolences.”

“Thank you.” She moved her gloved hand a fraction across the page, redirecting them both toward safer ground, and the motion brought her wrist into his peripheral vision — narrow, the bone delicate, a small blue thread of vein against pale skin where the glove ended — and the dragon made a sound inside him that was not a word at all. He wanted to set his lips to that thin blue vein and feel her pulse against his mouth. He looked back at the book.

“Anyway. When I got put on the Crowe lot six weeks ago and saw there were Russian materials, I thought I could help. I didn’t expect to find treasure.” She looked at the book the way she had before. “I don’t think anyone at WMS knew what it was when they brought it in. The catalog notes just saymanuscript, Russian, illuminated, c.1700.Which is wrong on three counts.”

“How so?”

“On its face.” She turned the page.

Her gloved hand passed within four inches of his bare wrist — close enough that the cool of the cotton against the warmth of his skin registered as a near-touch he didn’t get to have, and wanted — and there, on the new spread, in the lower margin of the right-hand page, was the image he’d been hoping not to see.

A family tree. Royal. Ancient. Drakovich. The branching genealogy of the Russian dragon line that had been sealed behind silence since 1917, rendered in pre-reform Cyrillic by a scribe who’d understood exactly how important his task was. He read the names down the central trunk without meaning to, unable to help it — Dmitri Drakovich, the Founder. Pyotr the Long-Lived. Mikhail the Silent. Dozens of names. Centuries of history, all the way down to the last name in the book, a name he knew.Anastasia the Radiant, b. 1912 —

He stopped reading. There was no death listed for her. But he knew.

He had buried Anastasia Drakovich himself, in absentia, twenty years ago. The Draquonir families had held a closed rite for her in a cathedral in Italy, because there had been no body to send home and no immediate family left in Russia to receive it. The hunters who’d murdered most of the Drakovich line had not left one. And the book Anastasia had protected for nearly a hundred years had found its way here — to the estate sale of a human named Elias Crowe, who had taken it and hidden it fordecades. The ancient tome lay open now on a table on Brannan Street, four inches from his hand.

His mouth went dry.

Demetri.The dragon’s voice was lower than he’d ever heard it.This is the Drakovich book.. The one we’ve been hunting for thirty years. It has been here. In our city.

He held his face still through three slow breaths.

Nica was reading.Her finger moved along the genealogy and down to a paragraph beneath it, her lips moving slightly as she read aloud — softly, almost to herself. He suspected she’d forgotten, in the absorption of the page, that he was sitting beside her at all. Forgotten it was a meeting. Forgotten her hand lay four inches from his. He heard the rhythm of the words, heard his own grandfather’s voice in their cadence, and beneath the table his hands clenched into fists against his thighs. She read the mother tongue like she’d been born to it, and the dragon curled around the sound of her voice like a beast around a fire, and Demetri understood he was in far more danger tonight than the woman was.

She was reading dragon magic. Royal wards. The spell-bindings the elves had given the Drakovich family — the words that protected their ancestral home outside St.Petersburg, that named the threshold and the hearth and the elder dead in the family crypt. She did not know what she was reading. She thought it was poetry. It was, in fact, the operating manual for breaching the most heavily warded magical structure in the Russian sphere. And beneath the wards, sketched into the lower margin in fine brown ink, was a map.

Demetri saw it, and his whole body went still.

A network of underground passages, cross-hatched to mark elevation, annotated in the scribe’s hand. He couldn’t read everynote from where he sat, but he didn’t need to. He’d walked one of those tunnels at twenty years old, in his father’s company, on a diplomatic visit to the Drakovich elder before his own emigration — the tunnel that connected the family seat to a private river landing two kilometers north. There were others. The book showed them all. A hunter who held this book could end the entire Drakovich line in a single night.

She finished the paragraph and looked up, her lips suddenly within five inches of his.

She hadn’t, until that second, realized how close she’d drifted. He heard her gasp, watched the small startle of her shoulders, the widening of her pupils, her gloved hand freezing on the page. She didn’t pull back. She didn’t lean in either. She just held the space between them and looked at him, bright and unguarded, her own enthusiasm having pulled her closer than she’d ever have dared. Five inches. He could count her eyelashes. The dragon strained toward her mouth and Demetri fought the urge

“It’s a family chronicle,” she said, softer now, a little breathier, and the dragon nearly broke through his control to get to her. “A real one — a fictional one, I mean — an entire invented noble family. The Drakovichs. They start with someone called Dmitri the Founder in the sixteenth century and run all the way to a woman named Anastasia in 1912. Generations of them. Hundreds of names. And the scribe didn’t just write a tree — they wrote the family’sspells.Their protective magic over the estate. Charms. Wards for doors. Words to seal a threshold.” She laughed, a small, delighted laugh, and he felt her breath against his chin. “It’s as if they were wizards. And the maps, Mr.Vasiliev — look. Tunnels. Underneath the family seat. Some scribe in the late eighteen-hundreds drew the entire underground architecture and labeled every passage. One runs down to the river. Three more run out under the property line,into the forest. It’s the most committed piece of imaginative geography I have ever seen. Whoever wrote thisbelievedit. They weren’t playing. They wrote it as if a member of the family might one day need to read it and use it.” Her smile was blinding. “But I looked them up — ancestry sites, here, Russia, Europe. This family doesn’t exist. No historical records. None.”

She had no idea that the family she called fictional had buried its last keeper twenty years ago. That the bloodline that remained — cousins, distant relatives — lived on that land even now, in that very house. That hunters had killed to obtain the knowledge in her hands. That he’d spent decades waiting for the book she held to surface. She had no idea how much danger she was in. And she was smiling at him about it, delighted, luminous, utterly unguarded, and the wrongness of that — her joy sitting on top of a horror she couldn’t see — made his chest ache in a way nothing in all his long centuries had prepared him for.

Take her. Protect her. Now.The dragon understood perfectly.

He asked his next question. “You posted the video?”

She blinked. “What?”

“On TikTok. Yesterday evening. You read a passage from this manuscript aloud.”

The color came up under her skin so fast he could watch it move — throat to cheekbones, a pulse in the carotid he’d been tracking.