Page 13 of Flames and Blood

“Do you want her age at first cycle?”

“If the clan file has it, use the clan file.”

The clan file.

“You could ask me,” I say, though I have no intention of discussing my freaking heat cycles with him. “I’m right here. I’ve been right here for over a year.”

He doesn’t react. He doesn’t even pause.

“Whoever sold you my file,” I say, “did they throw in the rest of my family or was I the whole order?”

Nothing. He wipes his hands on a cloth from his case, and that’s it, that’s the entire response, and it’s worse than if he’d hit me.

My dragon rises at him slow. Not the surge from before. She wants his throat, and she’s in no hurry about it. For one long breath, I hold her back and can’t think of a single reason she’s wrong.

“Metrics verified to contract standard.” He closes the case. “Match confirmed compatible. Client timetable moves forward.”

“I think he’ll be pleased.” For the first time, she shows something other than cool detachment.

“That’s not for us to decide.”

He’ll be pleased? Who the fuck will be pleased? And why?

My heart is going hard enough to hurt. My dragon wants to take that flat expression off his face.

“Transport prep tonight or morning?” the woman asks.

“That’s their decision, not ours.” He turns his back on me. Every other person in this building has been afraid of me since the day I arrived. He isn’t.

Because he’s a dragon. Like me.

The door shuts. The lock runs through. I stand exactly where he left me, feet still the width apart his shoe put them, until the boots are gone from the hall.

My breath comes out in a rush.

I’m not being sold to a buyer. I’ve been matched to one. My own kind put me in here, and my own kind are taking me out and handing me to a man who wants to know about my heat cycles.

I know what that means.

I make it to the drain before I’m sick.

Chapter 4

Crowe

I know the site’s wrong before I’m past the tree line. New. Too quiet. Half the yard lights dark on a building that should be running a full shift this hour. No idling engines outside, no floodlit loading bay, none of the noise a working site makes. Two guards at the gate, neither facing the trees, one of them already out of his tactical vest with his keys in his hand.

Kent settles onto his heels next to me.

“That’s a man going home,” he says.

“It is.”

“So it’s empty.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“So she’s in there.”