Page 4 of Dragon Enchanted (Secret Kingdoms: The Draquonir #1)

CHAPTER 3

R aven sat in the waiting room, fingers curled around a coffee cup that had long since gone cold. The bright fluorescent lighting hummed above, casting everything in a sterile, artificial glow.

Then, they walked in.

A group of men—tall, powerful, with an effortless command over the space. Their tailored clothing fit too well, exuding wealth and authority. Every nurse, every bystander, turned to watch them. Even Raven couldn’t look away.

They moved with lethal grace, confidence carved into every step. One of them, a man with sharp, nearly black eyes and a deadly air, spoke to a nurse in hushed tones. She nodded, subdued, as if compelled by something unseen.

Raven’s heart pounded. They had to be here for him . The man she found on the cliffs. Several of them had the same silver-blond hair. But the injured man’s eyes were green. These men had eyes like glaciers, ice blue and just as cold. Her gut told her she was looking at something more than an ordinary gang. This was organized. Dangerous. Controlled.

The dark eyed man turned toward her. He wore black from head to toe. His hair was dark and hung past his shoulders. He had it tied at the base of his neck in a style she imagined had been all the rage a couple hundred years ago. He looked out of place. In the wrong time.

They disappeared inside one of the hospital rooms. Then—nurses shouting. An alarm went off.

She jumped to her feet and tried to ask someone what was going on. The hospital staff ignored her.

She paced, uneasy, until the black haired man and one of the others walked back in through the front doors. Eyes black as midnight stared into hers. She took a step forward before she realized she’d moved.

He blinked. Slowly. She saw death in his eyes.

Then… nothing.

Hours later…

Sunlight filtered through her windshield. Raven blinked groggily, her head resting against the car seat.

She was in her car. Parked in the same spot outside her new listing. She glanced over to discover the drone she’d used to take the aerial shots of the property safely nestled in the passenger seat. She reached for the device and scanned the video, making sure she’d covered all the important bits.

Yep. Perfect. But this kink in her neck was brutal, like she’d been out for hours.

She frowned. Had she fallen asleep? The memories were hazy, fragmented. Something about men in expensive suits, a commanding presence, an eerie pull...

A dream? Had to be. Just a weird, crazy, vivid dream. She checked her phone for drone footage. The aerial view of the property she was listing was perfect. Still, something felt off.

When did she fall asleep? That wasn’t like her. She couldn’t remember even being tired. Must be all the extra hours she’d been putting in. This was her first big property listing and she’d been working a lot of hours. If she could find the right buyer, the property would sell itself. It was her dream house, if she was honest. She’d accepted the fact that she’d probably never be able to afford a home like this, but she could make an offer on a cute little cottage in town once she earned the commission on this sale.

Someone would absolutely buy this impressive home. Lots of living space, seven bedrooms, an actual, old-fashioned ballroom for entertaining, a kitchen designed for a master chef, and the entire estate built––or rather updated––to be completely self-sufficient with solar power, access to water, a huge garden, lots of land, state of the art security system, helipad for easy travel. The amenities were mind boggling. The house itself wasn’t just massive, it was gorgeous, the view from the cliffs overlooking the ocean, fantastic. With a bit of scrambling, one could make their way down near the water for some peaceful solitude with nothing but pounding surf for company. A bit isolated, but she could get used to that, especially if she had someone to share it all with.

Emerald green eyes flashed across her memory.

She shook her head, amused by her runaway imagination. But the vision persisted. Stop daydreaming and focus on the road! No one has eyes like that.

As she navigated the narrow gravel road back to town, she tried to ignore the unsettling feeling creeping up her spine. No one has eyes like that..

Two weeks later…

The wind whipped across the cliffs, salt-laced and biting. Raven stood motionless on the hilltop overlooking the exact spot where she had found the dying man. Her arms tightened across her chest, her gaze fixed on the ground below. She was freezing, the cold sea air cutting through her blouse and pants like a thousand tiny knives.

She hadn’t meant to stay out here this long. But once she reached the cliffs, she couldn’t bring herself to leave. To admit defeat.

She’d lost an entire day, and no one believed her. She’d nearly convinced herself she was going mad, until she saw the time stamps on the drone footage.

How many times had she watched the drone’s video footage now? A hundred? More?

More. A lot more.

And still— she had no answers. No leads. No hospital records. No police reports. No witnesses. Nothing.

Well, nothing except expertly edited video with time stamps almost twenty-four hours apart. The video started on a beautiful, brisk evening… the angle of the sun almost perfect, the swooping views of the ocean and cliffs dramatic. The Northern Lights in the background? Stunning. She’d almost been convinced that she imaged the whole thing. The missing time. The wounded man. The moment the drone had flown over his bloody, injured body and sent the live images to her cell phone.

But she’d looked, checked the footage. And there it was, two date stamps. The time? Mere minutes apart, nearly perfect. As long as one didn’t dig into the metadata on the video and discover that the beginning and the ending of the video were on two different days.

Someone had doctored the video and erased the man. Somehow, they’d erased her memory of it and dumped her back in her car none the wiser.

“Fuckers couldn’t time travel though, could they?” She felt violated. Confused. Freaked the fuck out. How did one lose a whole day?

When the memories started to return, she’d argued them away. There was no blood in her car or on her clothes. Zero evidence that she’d dragged a huge man from the cliffs all the way to her car and then driven like a bat out of hell to the nearest hospital. Not a hair out of place. She didn’t even have bruises or sore muscles.

She’d nearly been convinced the whole thing was, indeed, the dream it appeared to be until two days ago. She’d been walking the property after a showing, admiring the view, when her heart nearly thundered out of her chest with anxiety as a particular patch of wildflowers and grass came into view. She’d leaned over the cliff’s edge expectantly when the memory of silver hair and unnaturally green eyes—eyes like emeralds—made her gasp.

He was real. She’d stake her life on it.

She had called the local authorities, the hospital—pursued every avenue she could think of to get some kind of answer. But it was as if the injured man, and the entire event, had been erased from existence. There was no police report, no hospital records. She’d gone to the station, looked the officer in the eye, and seen no hint of deception. Same with the nurse at the hospital.

Both had looked at her with not just exasperation, but pity. Like she was the crazy one.

Yet, she remembered the uncomfortable chair she’d occupied in the hospital waiting room, worried and afraid that he would die, that she’d found him too late. She remembered the bitter taste of lukewarm, stale, hospital coffee. Most of all, she vividly remembered the panic she’d felt dragging him to her car when her cell phone wouldn’t work, and she’d realized she was his only chance for survival.

She’d looked back through her cell phone records. No record of her calling the emergency number. That was gone, too. Anything she might have used to prove her memories were real was gone.

Which meant someone had erased it. All of it. Someone with powerful connections. Hospital records. Police records. Phone records. Poof. And the police officer? The nurse?

She wondered how much money it took to make multiple people conveniently forget a half dead, bleeding, injured man ever existed.

A lot.

She should be grateful. She should be relieved that no one had come after her, that she hadn’t been dragged into whatever criminal web she had accidentally stumbled upon. Normal people didn’t cut up a gorgeous man and dump him on the side of a cliff, exposed to the elements, left to die. Definitely bad guys. Really, really evil people, the kind of people she’d moved across the country to escape.

And yet—she couldn’t let it go. Couldn’t stop thinking about him. Wondering who he was and how he came to be there. Wondering if he was still alive.

Wondering if he wondered about her. He’d become both ghost and obsession.

She hadn’t just imagined the encounter. She had the drone footage. Or at least, what was left of it.

She had woken up in her car and gone home. But that night, she dreamed. Even then, she’d convinced herself it had all been some weird fever dream—until she checked the drone footage, the video time stamps.

There was missing time. She was not crazy. She was missing an entire day.

Her logical mind had forced the pieces together into an explanation that made sense—organized crime. They’d drugged her and dumped her in her car. Paid off everyone else. Disappeared all records.

Nothing else fit. Because once she remembered him, the rest came back to her piece by piece. Driving to the hospital. Waiting. Speaking to the authorities. The tingling in her spine when the group of powerful, brutal men had walked in like they owned the place. The dark one, the one who had leaned over and made the nurse swoon and blink like she had just smoked enough marijuana to get an elephant high. The way the men moved. The expensive suits.

“Leave it alone, Raven.” People like that were dangerous. She’d escaped relatively unscathed. She should pretend it never happened and just live her life.

But she couldn’t stop thinking about him. Could. Not. Stop. When she closed her eyes, she dreamed of him. Saw his face. Those eyes.

She’d never been an obsessive personality, never been a fanatic or a fan. Never cared about celebrities, royalty, sports teams or any of that nonsense. Never been unable to walk away from anyone or anything. Until this. Until him.

So here she was, standing in the exact same place, staring down at the empty space where he had almost died, looking for evidence. For blood. Clothing. Footprints. A broken flower stem or trampled grass. Anything to confirm that her memories were real and not due to a mental break of some kind.

She should leave. She should move on. She should just let him go.

She could not. If anything, with every dead end, every blank look from the hospital staff, the fact that there was no record of the man—or the statement she gave to the police—only hardened her resolve to find him. He’d become more than obsession. She needed to find him, to know he was alive. The need made no sense, but it was elemental to her now, like thirst or the need for sleep. She couldn’t let go.

“He needs me.” She made the declaration to the wind, not expecting a response.

“Perhaps.” A male voice. A whisper of movement behind her sent a jolt through her system.

Raven spun, heart hammering.

Two men stood a few feet away.

Not just any men. The same men from the hospital. Darkness and light.

One was lean, tall, and just like at the hospital, dressed in black from head to toe, his dark hair pulled back at the nape of his neck. He had the air of something ancient and deadly, his movements too smooth, his presence too silent. His sharp features were almost too perfect—cold and beautiful in a way that sent alarms screaming in her head. He was a stone cold killer. She’d run into enough of them to recognize the dead look in his dark eyes.

The other one was broader, built like a soldier, with pale hair and intense, ice blue eyes. He had the look of the north, of someone who enjoyed a good fight and a good joke in equal measure, but his gaze was just as watchful, just as dangerous.

“We need you to come with us,” the dark one, the assassin, spoke.

Raven’s throat went dry.

Everything inside her recoiled. No. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

Neither man so much as blinked but it was the blond who answered. “I’m afraid, Miss MacInnes, this is not a request.”

Her pulse slammed into overdrive. They knew her name. Of course, they fucking did.

Her instinct was to run—but logic killed that thought before it could fully form. They had found her. Tracked her. Revealed themselves to her. That meant they had already decided she was a loose end.

Still—she didn’t move.

She met their gazes in turn, forcing steel into her voice when she spoke directly to the death dealer. “What do you want?”

The dark-haired one—the one who looked like he’d been cut from marble and brought to life with something colder than ice—tilted his head slightly. “There is someone who would like to speak with you.” He tilted his head, the smallest hint of a smile on his lips, as if her defiance amused him. “If we wanted you dead, you’d be dead already. There is no need to be afraid.”

“Said the spider to the fly,” Raven whispered. The man in black’s cruel lips widened into an actual grin.

The blond man—bigger, bulkier—gave her an unreadable look and no words of comfort.

Well, at least he wasn’t bothering to lie to her. She swallowed, her gut screaming that this was a mistake. But what choice did she really have?

A few minutes later she sat inside a Sikorsky S-92 VIP, a beast of a helicopter with a faint odor of fire and spice lingering in the air. Her father—God rest his soul—had loved everything that flew and been more than happy to share his love with his only daughter. So, Raven was familiar enough with aircraft to recognize the ultra-long-range helicopter often used by heads of state and royalty. Royalty .

Who the hell had she pissed off?

Her old piece-of-shit car was being driven to their destination by the dark-eyed man—the silent one who barely seemed to breathe––or so they told her.

The pilot, a huge man the others addressed as ‘Lorien’, sat quietly flying her to God only knew where. No music. No humming. No talking.

Ice blue eyes held her gaze in the rear view mirror. “He can put you to sleep, if you prefer.”

“No.” Her hands twisted into a knot on her lap as her blond kidnapper shifted in his seat beside her. He’d said his name was Talon. How was Talon going to do that? Land and punch her? Inject her with something? “Thank you.” She added the last because if she didn’t give her mouth something to do, she would have vomited all over her one decent pair of shoes.

Her heart had not stopped hammering since the moment the helicopter blades began to whir. She’d been so focused on figuring out the truth, she hadn’t even heard it land in the first place. She needed to start paying more attention to her surroundings.

They hadn’t restrained her other than to help her fasten the safety harness. They hadn’t made any physical threats. They didn’t have to.

The quiet power, the absolute control in their movements, was more terrifying than any direct threat could have been.

She tried to calm herself. Tried to rationalize. Tried to stop shivering.

Maybe they were going to make her sign some kind of non-disclosure agreement. Maybe they were going to intimidate her into silence.

Or maybe?—

Maybe she wouldn’t come back at all.

Talon noticed her discomfort and tossed a blanket on her lap. Grateful, she wrapped it around herself and tried not to let her very dark, very busy imagination run wild. They flew for several hours before landing to refuel. Maybe longer. She couldn’t be sure because they’d taken her phone. The blond man, Talon, was gorgeous, had the same vibrant kind of energy that made her skin tingle and her thoughts chase one another around inside her head like a bunch of two-year-olds chasing kittens. He exuded power and confidence, but not one damn word came out of his mouth. Not even when she asked him a direct question like where are we going? Or who are you?

There was only one inquiry he’d responded to—whether or not the man she’d found on the side of that cliff was still alive. That had earned her a single word. “Yes.”

That one word shouldn’t have settled something fractured and broken inside her, but somehow, it did.

She settled in and imagined a hundred different scenarios that might take place once the helicopter landed, each worse and more terrifying than the last. They were some kind of mafia family and the man she’d saved was their leader. Or the leader’s son. Maybe they were a group of special operations soldiers from America and the man she’d found was like a Navy SEAL. Or a spy for MI5. He was working undercover for Interpol and the bad guys realized he was an agent, cut him up and left him for dead. Or maybe he was a drug lord. A weapons dealer. A secret royal in hiding from assassins and spooks. A prince.

She snorted. Talon looked over. “Are you well?”

“No. I’m being kidnapped.” She rolled her eyes and looked out the window, gasped when Lorien banked the helicopter toward a long, winding drive; toward what she could only describe as a castle, a massive, ridiculous, beautiful castle high on a cliff.

The estate wasn’t just a house—it was a fortress. Sprawling and ancient, built into the cliffs themselves.

Her unease twisted into something sharper as Lorien landed. Talon jumped down helped her get her feet on solid ground. The other man pulled up to the front entrance down below in her car—apparently, he’d been able to keep up with them the whole time, but how the hell he managed that against a helicopter that could fly almost 200 miles per hour, defied explanation.

Maybe Lorien had flown slow.

But hey. Great. Now if she disappeared, her car would vanish with her. Although, who would come looking? No one. She had a new job in a new town and no new friends. Not yet. Not that she’d tell these people that sad truth. If she didn’t show up for work, they’d probably just assume she had gone back to her old life in Edinburgh.

Talon led her inside as Lorien and the dark haired assassin fell into step behind them. The other men vanished somehow. One moment they were there, walking close to her. The next, they…weren’t.

God. Maybe she really was losing her mind.

She stepped inside the castle and looked around. Marble floors. Priceless art in every nook. Stained glass windows built into granite walls filled with stunning, detailed images of dragons and starlight. Flickering firelight making everything even more surreal. Stone archways that looked older than civilization itself.

This was not a mafia house. This was not guns, drugs, or prostitution money.

It was something much, much worse. Old money. Power. Secrets—or bodies—buried so deep they might never be unearthed. These were the kind of people who ruled the world from the shadows.

Her gut clenched.

What the hell had she gotten herself into?