Page 51 of Dragon Kissed

They crossed the bridge, the towers vanishing up into the fog, the water far below flat and pewter. Traffic slowed near the toll plaza. Lewis touched his earpiece. “Rear vehicle, check in.” Static answered. His posture changed — a subtle thing, a tightening she wouldn’t have caught a week ago, before she’d spent days learning to read the small tells of dangerous men. Nica looked through the back window. The second SUV had disappeared. “Where are they?”

“Seat belt. Tighten it.” The light ahead turned red, and Lewis did not slow; he drove onto the shoulder and accelerated. A delivery truck pulled out from an access road, too fast, directlyinto their path. Lewis swore and cut the wheel, and the SUV struck the truck’s front quarter. Metal screamed. Nica’s body snapped against the belt, airbags exploded, and the world filled with white powder and the chemical stink of the propellant as the SUV spun and stopped.

For several seconds Nica heard nothing but a high, thin ringing. “Lewis?” He slumped over the wheel, blood running from his temple. Nica reached for the door. Locked. A shadow moved outside, then another, and the window beside her shattered inward, safety glass raining across her lap. A gloved hand reached through and unlocked the door, and she kicked, her heel striking someone’s chest. Another hand caught her ankle. Nica grabbed the emergency hammer from the console and swung, the pointed end tearing through a black mask, and the man screamed and fell back.

She unlatched the belt. The opposite door opened, and a woman leaned in and fired something — a dart struck Nica’s shoulder, and cold spread through her arm, fast and numbing. “No.” She tore it out. Too late. The street tilted, the fog smearing sideways. She crawled toward Lewis. His hand moved. Alive. Thank God. She reached for his radio, and a gloved fist closed in her hair and pulled, and Nica screamed and drove her elbow backward into something that gave. She got one hand around the radio. “Demetri—” The world darkened at the edges, closing in. Someone took the radio from her, prying her numb fingers loose one by one. A man’s voice spoke near her ear, amused, unhurried. “Tell the dragon we have his little translator.” Then everything disappeared.

CHAPTER 13

Margaret: Veronica the security team lost contact with your vehicle

Margaret: Veronica where are you

Margaret: this isn’t funny. answer me.

Margaret: please.

The first body Demetri found was still breathing. Barely. Lewis lay half inside the ruined SUV, blood covering the side of his face, one hand still closed around a broken radio. Demetri touched two fingers to the man’s throat. Pulse. Weak. Alive. He poured healing magic into him — enough to keep his heart moving until paramedics arrived. The Chain split again, pain tearing up his arm, and he ignored it. Pain had become the least of the things he was carrying.

Nica’s blood scented the back seat. Only a few drops. A shallow cut. No arterial spray. No scent of death.Alive. My mate is alive.He clung to those few drops of her the way a drowningman clings to air, and the dragon roared inside him, all its ancient focus narrowing to a single point.Find her.

Demetri inhaled, dragging the wreck apart with his nose the way another man would with his hands. Chemical sedative. Three human males. One female. Gun oil. Enchanted metal. And something else — dragon magic, faint and old, embedded in a black shard near the broken window. He picked it up: a piece of ward-stone carved with an imperial access rune, a pattern only council officials and territory stewards possessed. Benedikte had been right. The hunters had help inside the Secret Kingdoms. The betrayal of it settled cold beneath the rage, and the dragon filed it away for later killing.

His human mind fractured. For several seconds the roadway vanished, and he stood in snow — Russia, a village burning, his mother screaming his name across two hundred and sixty years — and then San Francisco returned in a burst of horns and flashing lights. The Chain had begun taking memory. It would take everything, eventually, and in the order that hurt most: the old first, then the new, then her.

Caelen appeared beside him, elven glamour making the movement look like a trick of fog. “Demetri.”

“They took her. Council rune.” Caelen looked at the shard, and his face hardened into something old and dangerous. “You cannot shift here.”

“I do not care.”

“She will care.” The words reached him. Barely. It was the only argument in the world that could have reached him, and Caelen knew it, and used it without mercy. Caelen placed one hand on Demetri’s shoulder, cool magic holding the dragon for one breath, then another. “We will find her,” Caelen said.

A phone rang — the broken radio in Lewis’s hand. Caelen took it carefully. Static. Then a man’s voice. “Demetri Vasiliev.” The dragon snarled, every instinct in him lunging toward thesound as though he could reach down the signal and close a claw around the throat that made it. Demetri took the radio. “Who are you?”

“Gideon Rook.” The name had appeared in Benedikte’s files: Crowe’s western lieutenant, weapons broker, twenty-three confirmed magical deaths.

“Let her go.”

Rook laughed. “You don’t want to hear the price?”

“The manuscript. The weapons. Me.” He offered himself without a flicker, the way a man names something worthless, because that was exactly what he was without her.

A pause. “Very good.”

“Release Nica and I will come. Alone.”

“You dragons are remarkably predictable.” The world went still. Demetri had not told him what he was. “You have ten minutes to send proof she is alive.”

“You’ll have it in five.” The transmission ended, and Caelen looked at him. “He saiddragon.The cell knows you. Specifically.”

Demetri opened his hand. The imperial rune lay against his palm, catching the gray light. “Someone told them.”

Benedikte arrivedbefore Rook’s video — landing in dragon form on the abandoned military road above the headlands, the downdraft screaming through the dead grass, shifting as he crossed the asphalt. Demetri gave him the radio, and Benedikte listened to the recorded transmission, his face turning lethal. “Gideon Rook. I nearly killed him in Hamburg. He escaped through a council gate.” He crouched beside a map Caelen had spread across the hood, the wind trying to tear it away. “Rookfavors industrial sites with subterranean access. Old military infrastructure. Tunnels. And he needs a forge — several of Faelar’s weapons are degrading, and he’s been searching for another smith.”

Lirien went white. “No.”

“He will not take Caelen,” Demetri said, and meant it the way he meant every promise now: as a thing he would spend his life or his sanity to keep.