Page 32 of Dragon Kissed

“So should you.” Nica’s face warmed, and Margaret’s eyes sharpened.Damn it.

They climbed to the mezzanine. The storage bay below stood mostly empty — Demetri’s people had moved the Crowe collection overnight, leaving rectangles of bare concrete wherethe crates had rested for weeks, pale ghosts on the dusty floor. Nica had expected relief and felt the emptiness unsettle her instead. The collection had been dangerous, and stolen, and connected to men willing to break into her apartment. But it had also been hers. For six weeks she’d opened every crate, read every label, brushed the dust from histories no one else had bothered to understand. Now the bay looked hollow, and the hollowness echoed the way empty rooms always had for her, the way every place she’d ever been made to leave had looked on the way out the door.

Three red binders sat on Margaret’s desk beside two archival boxes, dozens of pages flagged in yellow. “The provenance is worse than we thought,” Margaret said. “Either Elias Crowe was the most incompetent collector in California, or every reputable dealer on three continents forgot how paperwork works whenever he walked in.”

Nica opened the first binder — handwritten entries, insurance valuations, shipping dates, the names of dealers who did not exist. “What am I looking for?”

“Clusters,” Margaret said. “Objects entering the collection around the same date.”

Nica turned three pages. A silver reliquary. A ceremonial knife. A fragment of illuminated vellum. All acquired within eleven days, from different countries and different sellers — through the same freight forwarder.

She felt Demetri behind her. Not looming. Simply occupying enough space to alter the room’s gravity, a warmth at her back she’d become humiliatingly attuned to in three days. “Do you recognize this company?”

He leaned over her shoulder, and his scent moved around her — cedar and heat and last night, his mouth, his hand at her waist — and every nerve she owned reported for duty. She forced her attention back to the page. Demetri read the name. “Itoperated in Rotterdam for less than a year. Twenty-three years ago.”

Margaret stared. “You know that from memory?”

“Yes.”

Nica looked over her shoulder. His face was close, close enough that she could have turned her head two inches and been kissing him again. “You remember a freight company that existed for one year in Rotterdam?”

“It was connected to a matter I investigated.”

“What kind of matter?”

His eyes met hers. “A disappearance.”

Before he could say more, something crashed below — metal striking concrete — and every security man in the room moved, and Demetri moved first. His body blocked the office door. “Stay here.” A shout came from the storage bay, then a sharp crack that was not construction noise. A gunshot.

“Lock this room,” Demetri told a guard.

“No,” Nica said. His eyes flashed red — actually red. “Lock it.” The door closed, the electronic lock engaged, and Demetri disappeared into the corridor. Nica grabbed the handle; it didn’t move.Of course.Another shot cracked below. The building’s lights flickered and died. Emergency lighting washed the office red. A third shot. Then silence, thick and wrong, the kind of silence that has a body in it.

Something scraped along the office wall — not outside the door,insidethe wall. Nica went still. Someone was striking the drywall from the other side. Once. Twice. A blade punched through, the edge glowing faintly blue, and dragged downward, cutting through plaster and studs as though the wall were paper. Margaret screamed. Nica grabbed her and pulled her behind the desk as a section of wall fell inward and a man stepped through the dust — black clothing, a half-mask, a long knife — and his gaze went straight past them to the red binders.

Nica snatched the heavy brass desk lamp and swung. The base struck his forearm. He cursed; the knife slashed; pain flashed across her sleeve, the fabric opening from elbow to wrist, blood rising in a thin line. The man grabbed a binder, and Margaret launched herself over the desk — “Those are original documents!” — and struck him with an archival box, and the attacker shoved her so hard she hit the bookcase, her head cracking against the wood, and crumpled.

Rage burned through Nica. She drove the lamp into the attacker’s knee. He folded with a shout, the knife sweeping toward her face — and a hand closed around his wrist.

Demetri stood behind him. No sound. No warning. His eyes burning ruby red. The attacker twisted, and Demetri broke his arm; the crack filled the office. He caught the man’s throat and lifted him off the floor — not struggled,lifted, one-handed. Scales moved over his hand, dark red, bright as garnets beneath the skin, his nails lengthening into black claws.

Nica forgot the pain in her arm. Forgot Margaret. Forgot everything except the impossible shape of Demetri’s hand around a man’s throat. “Demetri.” His head turned, and the face she knew remained — almost; his pupils had narrowed to black vertical slits. The claws pressed into the attacker’s neck, and blood appeared.

“Demetri.” Her voice shook. His eyes found hers, and the creature behind them stared out — recognition, possession, a fury so vast it made human anger look small — and then his gaze dropped to the blood on her arm, and a sound tore from his chest, low and inhuman, a sound she felt in the floor.

“Don’t,” Nica whispered. Demetri went still. “Margaret needs help.”

Control returned by force. The scales receded, the claws shortened, his eyes stayed red one heartbeat longer beforeturning gray. He dropped the man, kicked the glowing knife out of reach, and knelt beside Margaret.

Two security men rushed through the broken wall. “Paramedics,” Demetri ordered. “Now.”

Nica crouched beside Margaret, who breathed — shallow but steady. Blood ran from beneath Demetri’s jacket sleeve, a cut at his ribs, deep; the glowing knife had touched him.

“You’re hurt.”

His attention snapped to her arm. “So are you.”

“It’s a scratch.” He rose and crossed to her, and his hands closed around her — not an embrace, an inspection, moving over her shoulders, her face, her neck, her ribs, fast and careful and shaking. “Where else?”