Page 43 of Dragon Bodyguard
She’d always known that, but this monstrosity was on a whole other level. He’d used her and manipulated her. She wanted to know why. She had to know why, or her head was going to explode.
Her inner dragon stirred, heat in her belly, but she knew that Misha was right. They had to be smarter about it. They had to do it the right way and the only right way within the family hierarchy was to have someone at the same level of status as her father question his choices. She wasn’t entirely convinced Dmitri would condemn them, but he might at least save her from whatever her father had planned for her. Dmitri was a good man, as far as that went in their line of business. He was fair. He wouldn’t let her father sell her or trade her or whatever it was he was trying to do to her.
“We need clothes,” she said, Misha laughing in agreement.
Then a noise reached them.
A siren, blaring out from the house.
“They must’ve seen us,” Misha said. “No surprise there,” he added breezily. “We’ll be fine. We just need to duck our heads and, you know, run.”
“Seems like that’s all we’re doing,” she commented.
He gave her a lopsided grin, pulling her along as he moved them off the cliff and into the dense forest. They did duck down, running as fast as they could until the lights of the house began to glint between the trunks.
“Isn’t anyone coming after us?” she asked.
“I don’t think Dmitri is interested in hunting us,” Misha said. “He’s telling me to get my ass back to the house and he’ll deal with our breach of protocol face to face. He doesn’t know about Ilya’s involvement. Unless Byron’s already spilled.”
“Do you think he would?”
“Not unless the right questions are asked,” Misha said. “He’ll protect Ilya. Make it seem like he’s the one on the take, not your father doing shady business. Yeah,” Misha said slowly, mulling it over further but landing at the same conclusion. “Byron will most likely make it out as though he’s the traitor.”
“He might already be dead,” Kristina said, the truth of it hitting her, worry like a fluttering bird between her ribs. “What do we do if he’s dead?”
“He won’t be,” Misha said. “I think,” he added, non-reassuringly. “Come on, let’s go get some clothes. There’ll be some in the gardening shed.”
The gardening shed was nearly the same size as the cottage and just as well-kept, with a white-washed stone façade and rose bushes under every ground-floor window.
“Wow,” she said once they were crouching at the tree line, the front door of the shed a stone’s throw away. She raised her eyebrows before rolling her eyes at the proud look on Misha’s face. “So, you love living here. Got it.”
He huffed a quiet laugh.
They both tensed, waiting for any sign of movement from the shed or its surroundings. When there weren’t any, they got themselves moving across the short lawn. The front door was unlocked, and they hurried inside. Misha knew where the gardener overalls were kept, making quick work of getting two out of the old-fashioned wardrobe. He tossed one to her before pulling his on. She watched his muscles work as he stepped into them, pulling them over his strong things, slender hips, broad chest and shoulders.
“I know,” he said with a cocky smile. “But get dressed,” he added.
It was her turn to huff a laugh and she followed suit, enjoying how she could feel his eyes as admiringly on her as hers had been on him.
She had blue scales beneath her smooth skin.
The truth of that still hadn’t quite sunk in.
She just wanted to understand what it all meant.
Both dressed, they headed back to the front door. Misha paused, opening the door a crack to take in their surroundings again. When all was quiet, he signed for her to follow him, crouching down and running back across the lawn, into the forest. Kristina stayed tight on his heel, following him as he continued through the trees, making a beeline for the house.
They were back at the treeline, both of them taking a knee as they surveyed the house.
“This is where it gets a bit tricky,” Misha said. “We could technically just stroll in there and pretend that everything’s fine.”
“But.”
“But we don’t know who knows what’s going on and who doesn’t,” he said. “We don’t know if the focus is on us breaking the rules and shifting, or on you getting attacked. Has Dmitri informed the entire household of Byron getting into your room, or is he keeping it on the down low? It would be more strategic to wait until he has more information to declare that there’s been another breach of security since every single man working for him will know it had to have been an inside job. Either they’ll turn on each other, accusing one another of all sorts of terrible things. Or they’ll turn on Ilya and Aleksander, assuming they must have had something to do with it.”
Misha stopped talking. She eyed him for a moment.
“That’s a lot of words,” she commended. He gave her a sideways glare. “So, what does that mean for us?”
