Page 6 of Kidnapped By The Messy Dragon

In my head the day lines up neat: a soap with no smell, a man with pinned ears, a boss with the wrong kind of blue eyes. I don’t forget things. Today handed me plenty to keep.

3

JALEN

Malachi’s seller runs his business out of a law office above the bank, and the meeting is nothing but numbers read out loud. I make it through most of it and stand up while the lawyer is mid-sentence.

“I’m going to walk,” I tell Malachi at the door, “before this room finishes me off.”

He gives me the same eye he’s been giving me since breakfast. “No funny business.”

“Scout’s honor,” I say. I was never a scout.

Millbrook keeps its downtown swept. The bakery window wears a red circle stamped over a wolf silhouette, and no one on the sidewalk meets my eyes. My ear cuffs went on in the car, and my pinned ears have been aching since the town line.

Stillwater Solutions takes up the tallest building on the square. I push through the doors like a man with an appointment.

The lobby smells like lemon polish. One guard sits by the badge gates minding his phone. Cameras hang in the corners where amateurs put them. The directory behind the front desk lists PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT on the top floor, badge accessonly, and next to it sits a name I’ve already underlined in my notebook: D. HALE.

I’m halfway through memorizing the directory when I turn and put my shoulder straight into a woman carrying takeout.

The bag pops loose. My hand gets under it on reflex.

She’s curvy, buttoned into office clothes, with deep brown skin and her hair slicked back into a bun. The wind has pulled a few curls loose at her temples. Her eyes are still wide when I straighten up with her lunch riding easy on my fingers.

“Sorry about that,” I tell her. “I need to watch where I’m going.”

“Thanks,” she says, and takes the bag back with both hands.

Her fingers brush mine on the handoff. Heat climbs the back of my neck, and my dragon leans toward her with everything he has.

Up close, her eyes are dark brown and beautiful, with the kind of tired underneath that a nap won’t fix. She’s lovely, and someone is running her ragged. I want her name.

I breathe her in and get almost nothing: a flat, scrubbed blank where a person should be, with one warm note buried too deep to place. The blank is familiar. It reminds me of the solution, the one that fools shifter noses, and my wrecked nose won’t swear to anything today.

I like women. Women like me back, most towns. Nothing about that has ever followed me home. This one gives me a one-word thank-you and walks off with something of mine I can’t name.

I watch the elevator close on her. My dragon reads it as theft.

Then I sneeze into my elbow, and a thread of smoke slips under my collar. My nose has been lying since sunrise, and I don’t trust a single thing it tells me today. Including whatever that was.

I give the lobby one slow lap for the cameras’ benefit. The service corridor past the mailroom ends in a door with a push-bar and no badge reader. The loading dock takes deliveries until dark. And nothing about this building expects anyone to arrive from the sky.

Tonight, after dark, I’m coming back to read Stillwater’s mail.

My phone buzzes while I’m counting night staff from the pharmacy roof across the square.

“The notary can’t get in until morning,” Malachi says. “We’re staying over. I took rooms at a bed and breakfast off the square. I’m texting you the address.”

“Fancy,” I say.

Papers shuffle on his end of the line. “What are you up to?”

“Sightseeing,” I say, from a rooftop, in the dark, watching a corporate loading dock.

“Uh-huh.” He leaves a long pause where my conscience should be. “Stay off their front page.”

He hangs up. His text with the address comes through while I’m still grinning at the phone.