Page 45 of The Dragon's Captured Heart
“By the way,” Cal muttered from where he still lay on his back, staring at the sky. “Tomorrow. Barbecue at my parents’ place with the family. You can come if you want.”
“Callum?”
“Yeah?” he said warmly.
“You have shit timing.”
“So, you’re coming?”
I don’t know. I shouldn’t. It will be so awkward. They’ll all think I’m his new girl, trying to be the other one, but also, I’m a human. It’s not worth it. I should stay home.
“Sure, why the hell not,” I heard myself say instead.
Oh, this was going to be bad.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Callum
“What the hell do you mean you can’t find him?”
In my eagerness to leave the guard office, I’d nearly missed what Vicek was saying to me. My mind was totally focused on the afternoon festivities at my parents’ place and, more specifically, on how things would play out once I arrived with Madison.
She didn’t want to go. I could tell. Her saying yes in the first place had shocked me completely. Truthfully, I hadn’t even meant to ask her to come along. The question had just sort of slipped out of my brain in the fuzzy afterglow of sex.
And wasn’tthatjust something to think about. Think I had while stroking myself in bed to the memory of her body on top of mine later that night. Even just reliving that memory was enough to stir the blood in my body, forcing it between my legs.
I corralled the beast within my mind and brought it to heel, however, because the news that had just been delivered to me was not at all what I’d expected.
“Is that why it’s you telling me this and not Jair?”
Vicek nodded. “I thought it best to deliver the news to you in person.”
I stared at him, watching his eyes, the same brilliant green as his mother. They never strayed from me, instead intently watching my reaction to the news that one of the two guards who’d found Noa’s body was now apparently missing.
“He’s supposed to be meeting me for an interview,” I said, restating the obvious. “Could it be he’s here already?”
“There were no signs that anyone had been at his place for a couple of days now,” Vicek said.
“Dyson just up and left? That doesn’t make any sense,” I said, scoffing. “All I wanted to do was talk to him about that day, get him to tell me about it in his own words. He wasn’t in any trouble.”
With the reports taking forever to be dragged out of archives, I’d been filled with the need to dosomething. So, I’d asked for and received permission to interview both Dyson and the other guard who had found Noa’s body.
I’d expected pushback, irritation, a general reluctance to answer the questions again so much later. But this was just straight-up weird.
“There’s one way in which it could make sense,” Vicek offered.
I stared at him, knowing full well what he was getting at. “You think he killed Noa? That’s preposterous!”
“Why else would he run?”
“But they didn’t even know one another to the best of my knowledge.”
Vicek shrugged then moved out of the doorframe as a pair of guards came in from the end of their shift, both nodding respectfully to the heir to the kingdom.
“Come,” Vicek said, gesturing for me to follow. “This is no place to discuss such things.”
Such things.
