Page 22 of Kidnapped By The Messy Dragon

“My brothers hoard treasure. Malachi does it with money, stocks and trades and land. Dorian’s is real estate and machines, things he can put his hands on.” I glance up at her from the floor. “But me? I hoard information.”

Her legs hang off the edge of my bed, and I want them across my lap. I want more than that, and she’s sitting on it. I groan low and get back to stacking papers.

“That room is too big,” she says from the bed. “I don’t want to be alone.”

I stand up. “Then stay here with me. I don’t mind it at all.”

She groans and drags her tote into her lap. Then she opens it and pulls out a folder. She holds it out to me.

“I think this is why they’re after me,” she says.

I stare at the folder in her hand. Then I ease it from her fingers and open it.

The letterhead is Stillwater’s. The heading reads PROJECT UNMATCHED, and under it, FATED SCENT SUPPRESSION, PHASE THREE.

I read the heading again, since the first pass doesn’t feel real.

I read it and see a weapon. Suppressing the fated scent is the product. Someone built an entire line whose only job is to keep mates from finding each other. It’s on phase three, and phases one and two are already out in the world.

Heat rises through my hands. I make myself hold the folder loose before I scorch the only copy.

“And then there’s this.” She digs back into her tote and comes out with a small white pump bottle. “Something’s off about it. It has no smell at all. Not like soap, not like anything.”

I take the bottle, and she rolls her eyes at me.

She pulls her knees up onto my bed and talks, and for once in my life I don’t interrupt.

“Renee and I got pulled off our regular work to shred confidential files. Guards in the room, no manifest, everything rushed.” She runs her thumb along the seam of her tote. “It was shady, and I got curious, and I took one folder off the cart when no one was looking. At home I read it. And then I couldn’t unread it.”

She squares her shoulders before the next part.

“I had planned to find you—“ She catches it. “Well. A journalist. Someone from Shadow Wolf Creek who’d know what to do with it. I still don’t understand why Millbrook hates y’all this much.”

The heat in my chest rolls warm all the same.

And there it is, the why Malachi wanted. They’re hunting the woman who reached into their shredder and walked out with proof. The timing stacks in my head: I walked their lobby, and the next morning their files went into the teeth. They started destroying evidence the day after a dragon came through their front door, and my mate beat them to one folder on pure nerve.

Then I bring the bottle up to my nose, and under the nothing there’s a note I know. It’s the smell of the Settling, the gargoyles’ own crowd-magic, baked faint into a bottle of hand soap. Thewarning tingle fires up behind my nose, and I turn my head and sneeze smoke at my own floor. I blame whatever I’m coming down with and wave the air clear.

This is why the lobby gave me a blank.

“You used this?” I ask her.

She nods. “Yes. Just a few times. But it’s weird.”

I set the folder and the soap on my desk, and then I come back and sit on the edge of the bed beside her.

“The woman running Stillwater is not a woman,” I say. “She’s a witch named Delilah. She’s worked this valley for years, cons and trades and worse, and now she’s doing it from inside a company, wearing a human name. Della Hale.”

“You mean my boss?” She comes up off the bed. “Ms. Hale?”

“The same. And she’s carried a beef against Shadow Wolf Creek for a long time. My best guess is that all of this, the products, the phases, is her way of getting back at us shifters.”

Her eyes go wide. “My boss is a witch.”

I tilt my head at her. “Was she wearing contacts or something? Because there is no world where you sat in that office believing a Black woman with eyes that blue was just out here being normal.”

She sits back down on the bed. “Damn,” she says. “You messy.”