Page 12 of Kidnapped By The Messy Dragon

He pulls out his phone. “We have connects too. I’ll find out who’s running that place by the end of the week. In the meantime, your job is Zuri. She needs to understand who she is to you, and she needs to be comfortable while she learns it.”

“I’m going to watch her tonight.” I’m already moving for the door.

“Wait, we should—“ He looks up from his phone too late.

I take the back stairs. Behind the bed and breakfast, where the garden blocks the streetlight, my wings come out.

Burnt caramel still threads the air along the streets she walked home. I follow it across town at roof height and come down in the oak across from her building without a sound.

Her windows are dark behind the curtains. Everything in me leans toward that first-floor glass. I keep to my branch.

Then I see the car. An unmarked sedan sits at the curb up the block from her door, and two people sit inside it. The engine is off, and no one gets out. People park and go inside. These two face her building and stay.

They’re waiting on someone, and every window they’re facing is hers.

I bank my fire and memorize the backs of their heads.

The branch dips under new weight, and Malachi folds in beside me with his wings settling flat. “Don’t piss me off, Jay.”

I don’t turn around. “They’re already watching her.”

That buys me a stretch of silence. He follows my line of sight down to the sedan.

“Someone at Stillwater must know about you,” he says. “Have you been making yourself obvious?”

I sneeze into my shoulder, and smoke rolls out of my nose and off both ears. “I’m not trying.”

Malachi groans. “You’re getting that looked at when we get home.”

He straightens up on the branch. “I don’t want to do this. But we have no choice.”

“What?” I ask.

“We take Zuri back to Shadow Wolf Creek.” His grip tightens on the branch. “Against her will, if that’s what it comes to.”

I finally turn from the sedan. “You mean kidnap her?”

He tips his head at the car below us. “You want her to stay here and find out what those two are waiting on?”

“Mal, I’m fighting to keep my dragon down right now.” My hands ache where they grip the bark. “He wants to kill them.”

“Great,” he says. “Exactly what I thought.”

The wind moves the leaves around us and nothing else on the street.

Sleep well, Zuri. Tomorrow gets complicated.

6

ZURI

Ibarely slept. Around dawn I gave up and got dressed with the lamp on. All night I’d been listening to the radiator and the pipes, waiting for a sound that didn’t belong.

I want out of this mess, and the fastest way out is backward: put everything back where I found it and mind my business. Last night I was going to warn a town full of strangers. That was before the dog, and the dark, and a whole night of ceiling.

The folder and the little white bottle sit in my desk drawer where I left them. I put both in my tote. If I can slide the folder into any box on that cart before the guards count anything, this never happened. The soap goes back on the sink. I become the most boring employee Stillwater has ever paid.

I slip on my shoes at the door, pull my coat over everything, and step out into the cold morning.