Page 52 of Kidnapped By The Messy Dragon

“There’s a fourth floor?” I’ve ridden this elevator before, and I don’t forget things. There was no fourth button.

I look at Jalen. He just smiles.

The doors open onto pitch black. The elevator light reaches in and quits a little way past the door. I stay right where I am.

Malachi walks straight into it without slowing. The lights come on for him, one long row after another, running away down the hall until the far end is too far to see.

There are no windows anywhere. The floor is dark and polished, and worked into it in lines of gold are dragons, wings out, tail to tail, the pattern repeating all the way down. The walls are carved smooth and bare. The air is cool and still, and it smells faintly of metal and old smoke. At the far end of all that long quiet stand two steel doors, taller than any door needs to be, built wide enough for wings.

Jalen squeezes my hand.

I make myself step out of the elevator.

Malachi steps up to the doors. He leans close to the seam and breathes out slow, and smoke curls off his lips into the crack. Thin vents along the frame pull the smoke in.

Deep in the steel, the locks start to turn.

Then the whole works slams back shut, and the slam comes up through the floor.

“What the hell,” Malachi says.

He plants a hand on the door and tries again, a longer breath this time. The locks grind partway and slam again, harder.

Jalen steps to his brother and sniffs at his shoulder. “You still smell off. The solution’s sitting in your scent. It’s faint, but the door wants a hundred percent of you.”

Malachi stares at his own vault with smoke rising off both ears.

I start lining things up. She sells soap that makes a person smell like nothing. Her cleaner made Roland’s mate smell wrong to him. And she keeps coming back to a valley where the biggest vault in it opens by scent.

“She’s trying to make a key,” I say.

Both dragons turn and look at me.

“The products,” I say. “That’s what they’re for. If they can make an Alpha read as a stranger at his own door, she’s halfway to walking through it.”

“There she is,” Jalen says, grinning at me.

Then he stops. He turns his whole body to face me, and there’s no play left anywhere on him.

“You,” he says.

I blink at him. “Huh?”

“Those ghouls in Millbrook. They were never after you because of what you stole.” He crosses to me and takes my shoulders in his hands. “They were after you because she knew who you were to me.”

I search his face. “What are you talking about?”

He and Malachi trade a long look over my head.

“You can open the safe, Zuri,” Malachi says. “Until we figure out what’s going on, you may need to. It’s tuned to the scent markers of this family and our mates. The system will know you’re his. His blood is still in your system.”

“Go ahead, baby,” Jalen says, and he turns me toward the doors with a hand at my back.

I step up to the seam. I don’t have any smoke, so I lean in close and breathe at it and feel ridiculous doing it.

The vents pull my breath in.

The locks turn over, one heavy sound after another, and this time nothing slams. The seam cracks with a push of cold air, and the doors open for me.