Page 53 of Kidnapped By The Messy Dragon

They swing wide, and gold light spills out over my feet.

I step through, and I quit thinking.

The vault is a shaft cut straight down through the mountain. I walk out onto a metal gallery with a railing, and the railing is the only thing between me and floors of treasure. Gold goes down in a tower, level after level of it, past lights strung on every tier, all the way down until the bottom is a guess.

I grip the rail and look down, and the height pulls at my stomach. Every level below me glitters. Coins have drifted into dunes against the walls. Whole chests sit open like someone got interrupted counting them. Far down, deeper than the lights reach clean, a green shine blinks up at me when I move my head.

I kept a year of Stillwater’s records straight down to the last file. I look at this, and I reach for a number and come back with nothing. My mouth is hanging open, and I don’t fix it.

Jalen comes in behind me and presses a gentle hand to my back.

“You okay, baby? Your scent is off.”

I look up at him slow, with my eyes narrowed.

I keep it behind my face. This dragon is sitting on enough gold to end world hunger, and he spends his time running a messy podcast about a diner cook.

What in the actual fuck.

Malachi groans at us and steps around, headed down the gallery on his own business. Jalen starts to follow. Then he looks back at me instead.

“Baby,” he says.

I wave my hand at all of it, the shaft, the gold, the green shine at the bottom. “You’re sitting on all of this.”

He leans against the railing with his back to a couple hundred fortunes. “It’s more Malachi and Dorian than me. They’re the bigger hoarders. And it’s not all ours. There’s treasure in here from all over Shadow Wolf Creek. Even the gargoyles bank with us. We’re just the better clan at guarding it.”

He takes my hand. “Come on. Let’s go get what the witch is looking for.”

Deeper along the gallery, Malachi stops at a second door set into the wall, a safe inside the safe. He leans in and breathes at it, and the locks start to turn and slam shut on him. He groans and steps aside. “Zuri. You’re needed again.”

I go to the vented panel beside the door and breathe at it. The vents take my scent, the locks roll over clean, and the small door swings open.

“I want every bottle from Stillwater out of this town,” Malachi says to Jalen. “Immediately.”

“Already on it,” Jalen says.

Malachi reaches into the safe, and when his hand comes back out, the amulet hangs from his fist by its chain, dark and older-looking than its picture. He holds it out to me.

I don’t take it. I put my hands behind my back.

“Now what?” Malachi says.

I look over at Jalen. He’s grinning.

“I have a plan,” he says.

I total up my own leverage while the two of them stare at each other. The witch can’t turn me. There’s no family she could threaten that would move me, and nothing I own is worth taking.

Then I remember the one entry I left off the sheet. There’s one person in that hateful town who could still hurt me.

Renee.

I don’t explain. I walk.

I stay ahead of them the whole way down to our floor, and by the hall I’m power walking, and by our door I’m nearly running. I push through into our room and go straight for my tote bag sitting beside the dresser.

I dump it on the bed and dig. My phone is at the bottom, dead as I left it. I sit down and dig until I find the charger too. I’m hunting the wall for a plug when Jalen tosses the amulet onto the quilt beside me.