Page 15 of Kidnapped By The Messy Dragon

Behind his shoulders, the bullets are working their way back out of him. They pop loose one at a time and ping off the concrete.

“You tried to hurt her,” Jay says. “My mate.”

“I didn’t know.” The ghoul gets his hands up between them.

Jay opens his mouth, and the roar that comes out of him is nothing a man could make. The alley walls throw it back doubled. Fire follows it, one short burst, and it catches the ghoul’s raised right hand.

It’s the hand that hit me.

The scream is worse than the roar. I don’t look away.

“I want to kill you for it,” Jay says over the sound. “But I don’t have a good enough reason.” He rises out of his crouch. “Soon I will.”

Then he turns to us, and the monster is gone off his face, and the smile he aims at me has nothing in it but warmth. My mouth is still hanging open. I leave it that way.

“You okay to fly?” Malachi asks him.

Jay answers by spreading his wings to their full reach. They’re the deep brown of him, shading black at the tips, and they stretch wider than the alley. Thin morning light comes through them at the edges. The bullet holes are already closing.

Malachi’s own wings open over me, and we leave the ground.

The last thing I see is the sedan getting small below us, one ghoul still laid out across the windshield. After that I don’t see anything at all.

7

JALEN

Malachi drives with the radio off and both hands on the wheel, checking his mirrors more than the empty road calls for. I ride in the back of his SUV with Zuri asleep across my lap and her tote on the seat beside us. We cross into Shadow Wolf Creek territory at the old wooden sign, and my shoulders finally come down.

This is treaty land. On this side of the line, anyone who wants her has to come through every pack and clan in the valley first.

I’ve spent the whole drive on her face. Her bun lost the fight somewhere back in that alley, and her curls have come loose all around her face. There’s dried blood at the corner of her mouth. The bruise on her cheek has gone dark at its center, and my fire climbs every time I cross it, so I try not to cross it. I keep failing.

She is so damn beautiful. I clocked it in that lobby with a whole investigation on my mind. Asleep on my lap, she has my full attention.

My nose has been quiet since I picked her up. I file that with everything else I can’t explain.

I can’t help myself. I ease a loose curl back from her face with one finger and stare at her while the town slides past the windows.

We pass the shopping center, and the road bends up the mountain. The closer we get to the Caves, the quieter my dragon sits. I can’t remember him ever sitting this calm.

“You’ll have to put her in the guest room,” Malachi says from the front. “No way is she staying in that trashy room of yours.”

I scowl at the back of his head. He smirks at me in the rearview mirror.

A phone starts ringing inside her tote.

Zuri stirs against me. Malachi turns off the road onto the Caves’ drive, and the phone quits, then starts again, buzzing this time.

She moans low and brings her hand up to her bruised cheek. Her eyes open a little at a time.

She registers me. Then she registers whose lap she’s in. She snaps upright too fast, and she winces and sways where she sits.

I put both hands up between us. “Whoa, whoa. It’s okay. You’re okay.”

She lunges across me for the door handle while the SUV is still rolling.

“Shit—“ I get an arm around her waist and my hand flat on the door, and I haul it shut just as it swings open. The door thuds back into its frame under my hand.