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I’m preparing a proposal for Kerri Vaughn, one of the best-selling monster romance authors in the business. She’s starting an all-new series of monster romcoms next year, and she reached out to me a while back about doing the covers for them. For a dozen of them.

I’ve worked with a few smaller authors, but this contract would blow every other commission I’ve done out of the water. She loved the first samples I sent over, and if the concept art I’m working on now fits her vision, she’s going to give me the green light to move forward with the entire project. Along with a big, fat advance on my work.

God, I want this job.

Getting a contract with Kerri would open so many doors. In addition to the paycheck, the exposure I’ll get almost guarantees me more clients. The possibility that I might be moving closer to making illustration an actual career puts a bubble of mixed excitement and nerves into the bottom of my stomach.

I’ve got my digital sketchpad with me today, and I take out my stylus and get to work. My plan is to do some touch-ups on the proposal images I’m sending to Kerri.

Only, that’s not what happens.

My hands itch and my impulse control flies out the window when I open up a blank page. Before I know it, I’m sketching the graceful arc of two enormous wings, obsidian black talons, two eyes with flames kindling in their depths. I’m filling in golden scales and wickedly curved horns, a wide mouth full of razor-sharp teeth.

I work like I’m in a trance, drawing from memory and my own fantasies, until I’ve got the beginnings of a golden dragon framed by ink-black pines and a million stars keeping watch above.

Goddamn it. That damned dragon has wormed his way into my subconscious.

Even while I’m mentally cursing his name, the drawing is coming together beautifully. I spend the next hour refining and filling in the details, and when I take a breath to zoom out and get some perspective on whatever madness I’ve been working on, I can’t deny what I’m looking at.

It’s good. Really good. And the visual reminder of how Blair looked on the night he took me, how simultaneously afraid and in awe I was, the way I couldn’t take my eyes off him, makes my heart start to ache and a fizzy, anticipatory heat spread from the center of my chest outwards.

I’m still staring at the drawing when the motion of two people approaching makes my head snap up. I find a pair of young women standing there—a blond and a brunette, maybe around twenty—looking at me like they recognize me.

“Can I help you?” I ask, quickly clicking the lock button on my tablet and sitting up straighter in my seat.

“Are you Kenna Byrne?” the blond asks, shifting nervously.

I nod. “Uh, yeah, that’s me. Sorry, have we met?”

“No,” the brunette answers quickly. “We just recognized you from Twitter.”

My stomach drops. “What do you mean?”

The blond pulls her phone from her pocket, scrolls through it for a moment, and then flashes the screen toward me.

“It’s you, right?” she asks, getting excited now. “With that dragon? I mean, how freaking crazy…”

I don’t hear the rest of what she says over the buzz of panic in my ears.

Right there, on the Seattle Whisper’s official account—a gossip site dedicated to all things salacious going on in the city—is a pinned post about the dragon incident last Friday night.

A pinned post with ‘Kenna Byrne’ in the headline and the profile picture from my Twitter account as the featured image.

What the actual fuck?

“I have to go,” I say, cutting off the blond who’s still talking.

The two girls nod in unison and scurry away, and my heart is beating fast and fluttery in my chest as I shove my tablet back into my bag. I make a beeline toward the stairs, pulling my phone from my bag and opening up Twitter.

I have a thousand new followers.

Quickly setting my profile to private and making a mental note to go through later and block all the weirdos, I open up the Whisper’s feed and find the article.

“Hey! It’s you!” someone calls out as I reach the library’s front doors and head out onto the street.

I don’t stop for a moment, but pull my hood up over my head to hide my face as best I can. Dodging people on the sidewalk, I scan the article as I walk. One line near the beginning immediately jumps out at me.

Byrne was identified by a confidential source, one who has provided proof he was on a date with her at the time of the kidnapping.