Page 136 of Nobody Told Me Thrift Shops Sell Stolen Dragon Heirlooms

Still, with Rafe inside it, the space felt like it had been translated into a language with too many class markers.

I couldn’t read his face, which made my stomach drop.

“It’s not much,” I said quickly. “But it’s home.”

His attention came back to me at once. “You’ve made it lovely.”

He didn’t say it like a rich man being kind about exposed brick and old radiators. He said it as if he had noticed the lamp, the books, the clean hooks by the door, the framed print above Max’s bed, and the careful order I had made inside a place where nothing had been handed to me polished.

I hated how much I needed that to be true.

“Thank you,” I said, and turned away before my face could become too honest.

Max went straight to his water bowl. I filled it, then washed my hands and measured out his dinner, adding the supplement from the blue-lidded container and a few pieces of fresh beef I’d picked up from the butcher that morning. Rafe stood near the doorway, watching without making me feel watched in the wrong way. When Max finished drinking and came over to lean against my leg, I rubbed his ears and checked his paws for grit or burrs.

“You always do that?” Rafe asked.

“After big runs, yes.” I lifted one of Max’s paws and inspected it. “He’ll keep going past his limits if he’s excited. It’s my job to notice.”

Rafe said nothing. When I looked up, he had that look again. The one I couldn’t quite place. It made me feel seen in a way that wasn’t simple or safe.

I cleared my throat. “I’ll be right back.”

I changed into jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers, then grabbed a hair tie from the dresser and paused with my hand on the drawer.

I was about to fly over New York on a dragon. On Rafe’s back. At night.

This wasn’t a normal Saturday.

This wasn’t a normal life.

I looked in the mirror and found myself grinning. Whatever decisions I had made, the consequences could wait until later.

When I came back out, Rafe was crouched beside Max, one hand resting lightly on the floor near him. Max had stretched on his side, already halfway asleep. His eyes opened when I entered, then closed again.

Traitor.

“I gave him a little more water,” Rafe said.

“Thank you.”

He stood. “Ready?”

Absolutely not. “Yes.”

The roof access was technically not supposed to be used by tenants unless there was an emergency, but in our building, rules were more like decorative suggestions. I had been up there a few times to watch fireworks or breathe when my apartment felt too full of my own thoughts. We climbed the last flight of stairs in silence, the air cooling as we neared the roof.

I pushed open the metal door.

The roof spread out under the evening sky, the city rising around us in lit windows and rooftop tanks. Manhattan hummed below and beyond us. Car horns and sirens beat through the air. Music drifted through someone’s open window. The constant, living noise of millions of people refusing to stop being busy.

Rafe stepped past me and looked around.

“This will do,” he said.

I chuckled. “You’re about to turn into a dragon on the roof of my rent-stabilized building, and your review is ‘this will do.’”

“It has sufficient space.”