Page 80 of Kenna's Dragon

Shit.

“I’d like to ask you about your recent kidnapping. This is you, isn’t it?”

Slowly, I shake my head. “I’ve got nothing to say about that. And it wasn’t a kidnapping. It was just… a misunderstanding.”

He arches a brow, clearly skeptical. “Is that so? And is that what you told the Seattle PD when they interviewed you about it?”

“Uh-huh.”

He pauses for a moment, like he’s waiting for me to elaborate, but I have absolutely no intention of giving him anything more. I didn’t say anything to the police, and whatever he wants to know about what happened can’t be good for me or Ewan or the Bureau.

“Right,” he says, slowly, like he’s talking to an idiot. “And this article from a local news source, the Whisper, it claims the dragon who kidnapped you was a Bureau employee.”

“Not a kidnapping,” I reiterate. “And it had nothing to do with the Bureau.”

The half-truth slides easier off my tongue than I expected. It’s notexactlya lie. What’s been going on with Ewan and I really doesn’t have anything at all to do with our work at the Bureau, and even if it did, some part of me knows I’d still lie to protect him. My instincts are screaming at me that something about this guy is off, and I want to keep Ewan’s name out of it.

“Well—” Harrison starts, but I cut him off before he can get another word in.

“How did you know to find me up here, anyway?” I ask. “It’s after work hours and I didn’t tell anyone I was coming up here.”

A small glint of satisfaction crosses his face. “You should be aware that messages sent on internal Bureau software aren’t confidential, Miss Byrne.”

Double shit.

If he knew I was going to be up here, then he also must have seen the message from…

“Harrison.” Ewan’s voice cuts through the weighted silence as he appears at the top of the stairs. “What are you doing up here?”

His eyes track from Harrison to me and back again, and my heart skips a beat. He doesn’t think I had anything to do with this, does he?

“I was just filling Miss Byrne in on the proper use of Bureau technology,” Harrison says in a smug, satisfied tone. “And on the fact that chat logs can be monitored.”

I see the moment it registers on Ewan’s face that we’ve been caught, that we won’t be able to play this off as some kind of coincidence or accidental meeting. His eyes harden, and with a few more decisive strides, he comes to stand in front of me, putting himself between me and Harrison.

His posture is rigid, and standing this close to him I can almost feel the waves of tension and anger rolling off of him.

Triple shit.

“You need to leave,” he tells Harrison. “Your business here has concluded.”

“My business withyouis concluded,” Harrison says. “Kenna and I were still in the middle of a discussion.”

At Harrison’s use of my name, Ewan goes absolutely still, and I catch the faintest rumblings of a snarl building in his chest.

“Ewan,” I whisper. “Stop it.”

He needs to calm the fuck down. If Harrison hasn’t realized by now there’s something far, far beyond an employee-supervisor relationship going on, thenhe’sthe idiot.

“Leave,” Ewan says again, this time with a low, inhuman growl to his voice.

Bad. Very bad. I try to take a step forward and put myself between them, but that riles up Ewan even further as he keeps me behind him with a firm, unmovable grip on my wrist.

“Very well, Director Blair,” Harrison says, still with that greasy little smile on his face. “I’ll go. This will be an interesting sidebar to my conversation with Secretary Thompson.”

Ewan doesn’t say anything as Harrison walks away, and he doesn’t let me move, either. He keeps me tucked behind him until the deputy secretary has disappeared into the stairwell at the other end of the garage.

“Ewan,” I say, irritation rising. “You need to let me go now.”

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