Page 32 of Nobody Told Me Thrift Shops Sell Stolen Dragon Heirlooms

Devon stood beside me, eyes wide, holding the candle-stabbed vanilla cupcake for Marvin from Records. Marvin was smiling in the vague, trapped way of a man who hadn’t wanted this much attention before lunch. I’d just finished the last line of “Happy Birthday” when a stranger stepped into our little circle and spoke in a voice so low and exact it cut cleanly through the fluorescent office air. Obviously a dragon shifter.

I immediately understood why entire mythologies had formed around dragons.

He was very tall. Not just tall in the way men put on dating profiles when they wanted more swipes, but actually large: broad-shouldered, long-limbed, built on a scale that made the hallway seem like an inadequate space. His hair was black and thick, swept back from a face that carried both old European severity and Japanese elegance: dark eyes, fine bones, a mouth too composed to be kind.

His suit was dark and perfectly cut. Its expense announced itself in the fit, and he wore it like armor.

His face was composed, but only barely. The effort of that composure was visible around his mouth, around his eyes, in the absolute stillness of him.

And all of it—the impossibly handsome face, the expensive suit, the torrential mood—was directed at me.

Or, more specifically, at my throat.

My hand went there before I thought about it, fingers closing around the old coin pendant resting against my collarbone.

The necklace.

Oh.

Oh.

Before I could say anything, Moira appeared at my shoulder like a summoned spirit of liability management, followed by James Payton and Helena Wallace, both moving with the fast, purposeful calm of people who made seven figures a year solving problems created by other people’s emotions.

“Mr. Virelli,” James said smoothly. “Is there an issue?”

Virelli.

The dragon client I’d overheard the partners talking about last week. They’d spoken about him in hushed tones, dazzled by the size of the contract and wary of what came attached to it.

This was the client Moira had spent the last twenty-four hours triaging.

And I was apparently wearing his property.

Well. That wasn’t ideal.

Mr. Virelli didn’t look away from the necklace as he answered. “That belongs to my family.”

Marvin lowered his cupcake. Devon took a prudent half-step back. Moira’s gaze moved from the dragon’s face to my necklace to my face, quick and clinical.

James Payton glanced at me. “Ms. Bradley?”

I swallowed.

“I bought it,” I said.

Mr. Virelli finally looked at my face then, and that was somehow worse. His eyes were very dark and very steady. Not wild or theatrical or accusatory in a way I could dismiss. He looked like he had been moving through one life and had just run headfirst into a ghost from another.

“I don’t know how she came by it,” he said. “But it is one of the pieces I’ve been trying to recover.”

Helena stepped closer, voice calm. “One of the family artifacts?”

“Yes.”

James gave the necklace a narrowed look. “You’re certain?”

Mr. Virelli’s jaw shifted. “I am.”

James was, to his credit, a lawyer before he was impressed by clients, even clients who could presumably turn into fire-breathing lizards large enough to alter zoning. “And you believe a family heirloom lost for centuries has simply turned up on the neck of one of our interns?”