The Dragon CEO's Assistant (Dreamspun Beyond Book 39) Read online

  At five after six, there was a knock on the door. Smiling, Aidan opened it.

  “Hey, Aidan,” Rye said.

  And he punched Aidan in the nose.

  AIDAN leaned his head back on the threadbare couch, glad he didn’t have to worry about getting blood on the cushions. They were already ragged and marred with a few stains of indeterminate origin, so a drop or two of blood wasn’t going to make a difference. He pressed the cool, damp cloth to his aching nose and glared at Rye, who reentered the room after cursing up a storm in the kitchen. The promised Chinese food was notably absent.

  “Seriously? No beer?”

  Aidan stayed quiet. He wasn’t sure what to make of this guy. His demeanor didn’t match the violence he’d greeted Aidan with. He acted like they were best friends. Hell, he even helped Aidan up off the floor and retrieved a cool cloth to stop the bleeding. But there was something in his eyes….

  Darkness. Pain. He had a sense that Rye had seen shit, and a lot of it. But his smile was easy and, other than the fist-to-the-face greeting, he gave no hint that he was anything but a friendly, happy guy. That and the height thing—he couldn’t be more than five six or seven—made Aidan think he was young. But then there were those “seen it all” eyes. A study in contradictions, this one.

  “I’m not going to apologize.” He flicked a finger to indicate Aidan’s abused nose. “You deserved it.”

  “Deserved it how? I don’t even know you.”

  “Yeah, I know. You fucked up your brain again.” Rye sat heavily in the battered armchair across from the couch. “I’m Ryan. Ryan Dolan.”

  Aidan froze. “Again?”

  “Yeah, again. Honestly I thought you’d done something back in March when you cut off contact, but Kader kept acting normally, so….” He shrugged. “I figured I’d give you a couple of months’ benefit of the doubt, you know?”

  Cut off contact? Benefit of the doubt? “I don’t have a fucking clue what you’re talking about.”

  “Right.” Ryan sighed. “Goddamn anemoi.”

  “So I knew. That I was mythos.”

  “Yeah. Of course you knew.”

  Aidan closed his eyes. The confirmation hurt. “And we’ve been friends for…?”

  “Since you saved my life when I was thirteen. Ring a bell?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, short version. I was at camp, swimming in Lake What-the-fuck-ever-it-was-called, and I decided I was a big shot and could swim from one side to the other. Yeah, not so much, especially not when a storm rolled in. I started floundering and sinking, and it’s fucking hard to shift when you’re sucking water into your lungs. Did you know that?”

  “Shift?”

  “Oh. Right. I’m a dragon.”

  Aidan’s eyes widened. “Yeah? But you’re so—”

  “I will fucking punch you again, so help me gods.”

  “Got it.”

  “So I was drowning, basically, and you appeared out of nowhere and started dragging me back to shore. Except the waves were getting higher and harder to swim against. You got me to the diving dock at the edge of the swimming area, and then you went under.” He shook his head. “I felt like shit, man. They couldn’t even search for you right away because of the weather. Then two days later, there you were, washed up on the beach, perfectly healthy but without a fucking clue of who you were. It wasn’t hard to put two and two together and come up with mythos, but it took a little longer to figure out what kind.”

  Not everyone had access to the Gryphon King to confirm one’s mythos identity, Aidan supposed. But that was about the only thing Ryan had said that made sense. He frowned and hissed as pain shot through his nose. “You’re saying I… what? Died?”

  “Fuck if I know.”

  “But I saved your life.”

  “Yeah, and I saved yours right back.” Ryan’s shadow-filled eyes bored into Aidan’s. “You had no one. You get that? You were all alone. Vulnerable. I gave you an identity. A reason.”

  “What about my parents?”

  “What parents? Don’t you understand what alone means?”

  “But I—I was just a kid.”

  Ryan laughed. “No, man, you looked pretty much the same as you do now.”

  “What?” Aidan breathed.

  “I don’t know how anemoi age, but you haven’t changed in all the years I’ve known you.”

  “But… the cops told me my mother had died….”

  Ryan waved a hand. “Background for your identity. That’s all. I don’t know if you have parents or if you ever had parents.”

  Aidan’s pulse thundered in his ears. That feeling of being untethered, the sensation he thought he’d left behind, flared and grew in intensity. He gripped the arm of the couch hard enough to make his fingers hurt.

  “Did you actually think you were twenty-five?” Ryan smiled, and it wasn’t a pleasant expression. “Or that Aidan Bishop was your real name?”

  The air had thinned in the apartment. It must have, because Aidan suddenly couldn’t breathe.

  “Come on, Aidan. You used to be smarter than that.”

  Deliberately, carefully, Aidan moved the cloth away from his nose. “I think you should go.”

  Ryan scoffed. “No. See, I’ve been waiting to talk to you again. And this time I’m not gonna lose my temper.” He leaned forward. “We’re going to come to an agreement.”

  Ice splintered through Aidan’s veins. Again… this time he wouldn’t lose his temper…. He didn’t like the picture those phrases were painting. “What sort of agreement?”

  Instead of answering right away, Ryan pulled out his phone and poked at the screen. Then he held it up as a video started to play. “You’re going to finish what I asked you to do. I taped this just in case I needed to remind you of where you stand.”

  The footage wasn’t great, but it was clear enough that Aidan recognized Ryan… and himself. They sat on a couch, casual and relaxed. Aidan looked unconcerned as Ryan leaned toward him, his smile sharp and predatory. But something in the way Aidan held himself made him think he wasn’t as easygoing in Ryan’s presence as he seemed to be.

  “It’s all set up, then?” Aidan asked Ryan in the video.

  “Guaranteed an interview,” Ryan confirmed. “You’d better not fuck this up.”

  “I’m not going to fuck this up.” Video Aidan frowned.

  “What?”

  “Isn’t there another way we can convince your grandfather to let you build your own clan?”

  “You’d better not be chickening out on me now.”

  “No,” Video Aidan said quickly. “I just—”

  “The Kader torque is our key to independence.”

  Torque? Why was that word familiar?

  “We get it, we show Duke Rudel that we’ve got initiative, that we can think outside the box. He’ll see that I should have my own clan, and we can finally stop listening to fucking Andel Červeny.”

  Ryan was part of the Červeny clan?

  “This is the only way to get close to Kader, since the asshole is just about a recluse,” Ryan continued. “He never goes out. He never socializes. His group of friends is pathetically small and not open to new additions. But now… you can work for him, get to know him, maybe get an invite to his house, and then find and steal the torque.”

  “You make it sound so easy.”

  Video Ryan slapped Aidan’s cheek, hard enough that Aidan lifted a hand to it. “Watch the mouth. I slept with the goddamned HR director to get you that guaranteed interview. You think I enjoyed that?” He poked Aidan in the shoulder. “I did my part. You do yours. That’s all there is to it.”

  As Aidan watched the video, he wondered if Ryan—now or then—noticed how Aidan drew in a deep, fortifying breath.

  “Got it,” he said quietly.

  Ryan turned off the video.

  Aidan’s head was spinning. “I—I’m a thief?”

  “Sometimes. Being able to turn into a cloud is a very useful talent.”

&
nbsp; “No—I wouldn’t—”

  “Oh, stop with the dramatic denials. You would and you did.”

  “That’s not me. That’s not who I am.”

  “Maybe not now. Now you’ve bought into the goody-goody persona you adopted for the job—something that started even before our chat. Which is a fucking shame, man.” Ryan grunted. “Did you think you could walk away without a fucking word? Not like you can answer, so let’s assume you did think that. It was a very stupid thing to think.”

  Every word Ryan spoke added to Aidan’s confusion. Planning a theft of an important dragon symbol seemed the least likely thing Aidan would ever be involved in, but he couldn’t deny his presence on the video. All of his questions and whirling thoughts distilled down to a single question—why? Why would he go along with it? If Nassim was right and Aidan-with-memories and Aidan-without-memories seemed to have the same personality, why would he allow Ryan to dictate his actions?

  It made no sense. And his lack of memory meant he couldn’t puzzle it out.

  “So here’s the plan. You’re gonna take me to Kader’s apartment, and we’ll crack his safe. I assume he’s got a safe?”

  “I… have no idea.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You’re going to get me into Nassim’s apartment, and we’ll both search for it.”

  “Wait—no. I’m not going to help you with this.”

  Ryan’s grin was darkly violent as the door to Aidan’s apartment swung open and slammed into the wall. Six men, all tall, muscular, and with take-no-shit expressions filed into the small apartment. Their presence seemed to suck out the air.

  “Let me be perfectly fucking clear,” Ryan growled, dragonfire flaring in his eyes. The temperature rose, and sweat trickled down Aidan’s nose. “You’re going to help me. Or this time it won’t be you that I kill.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  AIDAN stared at Nassim’s apartment building from the back seat of a beat-up SUV. Ryan sat on one side of him, one hand wrapped tightly around Aidan’s wrist, and on the other side was one of the brutes who’d burst into Aidan’s apartment. Two more dragons sat in the front seats, and the other three were in the back row. Aidan felt numb, divorced from reality, and the one thing keeping him from losing his human form and slipping away was the knowledge that if he did, Ryan and his gang were going to kill Nassim.

  Just like he killed Aidan.

  Aidan didn’t remember it, which was probably a good thing. But he could picture it, particularly when Ryan related the details in a voice that chilled Aidan to the bone—how he met with Ryan after work that night, how they argued over Aidan fulfilling his role with Nassim, how Ryan followed him out of the door of the bar, dragged him into an alley beside it, and stabbed him until his human form died.

  He couldn’t remember it, but it made him want to vomit.

  Where he was between that night and when he stepped out of the trees behind Tuninas, he couldn’t say. Recovering? Recuperating? Regenerating? But he finally knew why he emerged there. It was so simple. Tuninas was more home to him than his apartment. He felt safe there. He felt comfortable there—all because of Nassim.

  He didn’t doubt Nassim could take on Ryan alone. Maybe even one or two others. He was in the war, after all. Aidan assumed that meant he knew how to fight. But seven against one were odds Aidan didn’t want to consider.

  “Where’s his signal?” Ryan asked the driver.

  “Out of town still.”

  Apparently Aidan had slipped a tracking bug onto Nassim’s phone at some point, back when he was invested in Ryan’s plan. What changed his mind? Obviously Nassim and what he felt for him, but he wanted to know what specific moment had swayed him away from the plan. He wanted to be able to point to something definitive and say that was why he changed loyalties.

  Ryan squeezed Aidan’s wrist, and the pressure compressed the bones to the point of pain. “And you’re sure he won’t fly back to town?”

  Aidan shook his head. “He doesn’t like to worry humans in the city.”

  “All right.” Ryan released Aidan’s wrist. “Let’s go.”

  The night was colder than Aidan expected it to be. The wind whispered in his ears, the iciness of it like little knives piercing his skin. A warning or a premonition?

  “You’ve gotta make this good, Aidan,” Ryan hissed as they approached the doors of the apartment building with a pair of dragons trailing behind them. “You warn the guards at the desk, and I’ll shoot them.”

  “Got it,” Aidan growled.

  “Just making sure. ’Cause if I have to shoot them, I’ll be pissed. And if I get pissed, I’ll take it out on you.” Ryan nudged his shoulder. “How’d you like to lose your memories again, huh?”

  Aidan swallowed and shook his head. Not that. Nassim dying would be worse, but losing his memories again? After he’d fought so hard to regain pieces of himself? He still didn’t have a full picture, and there was so much more he wanted to know. So no. Losing his memories was not an option.

  But he wasn’t naïve. Once Ryan had the torque, he wouldn’t need Aidan, and he wouldn’t want Aidan to report him. Before he handed Ryan the torque, Aidan needed a plan to get away in one piece—except Ryan’s threats were making it difficult to concentrate. Aidan’s thoughts kept bouncing around his brain, refusing to be pinned down for longer than a second, and he felt shaky, as though he were walking on crumbling bedrock.

  “Good evening, Mr. Bishop,” Claude, the head guard, greeted him as they stepped into the lobby. His gaze roamed over the two dragons behind them, but if he thought anything was weird, he gave no sign.

  “Hi.” Aidan managed to find a smile and hoped it looked genuine. “This is Ryan Dolan, an old friend of mine. Ryan, Claude.”

  The brief tightening around Ryan’s mouth indicated he was not happy with Aidan handing out his name. Too fucking bad.

  Claude lifted a hand in a brief wave. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Likewise,” Ryan said. “Hey, Aidan, we’d better get moving if we’re gonna make our movie time.”

  “Right. See you later, Claude.” Aidan gave the guard a nod and started for the elevator.

  “Oh, Mr. Bishop—un moment, s’il vous plaît.”

  Aidan froze as Claude came around the desk. He tried to keep his face pleasant, but all he wanted to do was scream at Claude to run. He was a nice guy. Aidan didn’t want to see him lying dead on the floor.

  “Sorry,” Claude said as he walked toward them. “I need you to come back to the desk, please.”

  Aidan glanced at Ryan. His hand seemed to be casually shoved into his jacket pocket, but Aidan knew better. The other dragons were tense too. He swallowed and renewed his smile as he gestured at the elevators. “I need to grab a—a different shirt, for our movie.”

  “I’m sorry for the delay. The new biometric scanner was installed today while you were out, so we need your thumbprint.”

  “Oh. Sure, no problem.” Relief swept through Aidan, and Ryan seemed to deflate too as Aidan headed back toward the desk—

  Only to freeze at the sight of Detective Morgan entering the lobby.

  “Aidan. I’m glad I caught you.”

  Aidan held on to his fake smile with everything he had in him. “Detective. What a surprise.”

  His mind raced. Despite their last intense encounter, Aidan felt if he could somehow signal Morgan that he was in trouble, Morgan would help. He was a cop, after all. But what if that endangered Claude and the other guards? Aidan glanced at Ryan to see that he was staring at Morgan with an unreadable expression.

  “I had a few more questions for you.” He returned Ryan’s look with a cool stare of his own, and then he flicked his eyes to the other two dragons. “Who are your friends?”

  “Ryan and, uh, Mike and John.” Absently Aidan followed the instructions Claude gave him and pressed his thumb to the scanner, all the while praying the dragons were smart enough to go along with his lies. “About the questions—that’s good, because I’ve remembered a lot.�
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  Morgan raised his brows in surprise. “Really?”

  “Yeah. Maybe you want to go get Detective Hough, and we can have a chat?”

  “Why don’t I come upstairs for a few minutes, and you can fill me in?”

  “I really think Detective Hough should be there.”

  “She’s chasing down another lead. C’mon, let’s go upstairs.”

  Aidan glanced at Claude, who gave a nod. “Oui, you’re good to go.”

  He looked to Ryan, who shrugged.

  Wonderful.

  Aidan forced himself to breathe evenly as the five of them walked to the bank of elevators. One opened immediately, and Aidan pressed his thumb to the scanner. The door closed—

  And Morgan struck, taking out the two guards with throat jabs before they could react. He slammed Ryan against the wall, his forearm cutting off Ryan’s air, and retrieved two small somethings from his pocket. Glowing pebbles? He threw one at one of the dragons, and they both stopped moving.

  What the hell?

  Morgan pressed harder on Ryan’s throat. “What are you up to, you little prick?”

  “You fuck,” Ryan gasped. “Doesn’t my grandfather keep you busy enough?”

  “Yeah. Right now I’m trying to figure out what his shit of a grandson is plotting.”

  Ryan made a choking sound as Morgan increased the pressure on his throat, but he shoved him hard enough that Morgan staggered back. Morgan drew his gun.

  And all the while, Aidan tried to puzzle out what he was witnessing. “You work for Andel Červeny? You’re dirty?”

  Morgan stretched his neck and smoothed his suit jacket, the hand with the gun never wavering. “There are two ways up in this town,” he said with that crooked grin, which Aidan now realized was more of a smirk. “Sleeping with the politicians or sleeping with the dragons. Metaphorically speaking. I can’t stand politicians, so….” He shrugged. “Your grandfather is not happy with you, Ryan.”