Page 16 of Tempest Blazing (The Dragonne Library #3)

Draven

I tracked Tess across the café like prey I had no intention of hunting… at the moment.

Force of habit—my eyes cataloged every micro-expression, every shift in posture, the way her fingers drummed against her thigh when she was nervous.

A decade of reading people had made it automatic, but with Tess it felt different.

Sharper. Like my senses were tuned to a frequency I didn't recognize.

She sat across from Garanth Kreel, and every instinct I'd honed screamed wrong . The demon leaned forward, that trademark smirk stretching across his features, and I watched Tess go still. Not calm—still. The kind of stillness that came right before a predator struck.

My jaw clenched.

I'd been around beautiful women my entire life. Hell, I was an incubus—attraction was literally my nature. But this wasn't that. This was something else entirely, something that made my chest tight and my control slip in ways that should've concerned me more than they did.

Maybe it was because she was human, like my mother had been. Vulnerable in a world that chewed up the innocent and spat out the bones. Maybe it was her dragon bond—the strategic part of my brain whispered that being close to the first human Dragon Rider could open doors, create opportunities.

But that felt like bullshit even as I thought it.

No, there was something about Tess Whittaker that cut straight through every defense I'd built.

The way she looked at the world like she was trying to solve a puzzle no one else could see.

The way her energy hummed—not just magical, but alive in a way that made my incubus side purr with interest while the rest of me wanted to wrap her in protective barriers and hide her from everything dangerous in this world.

Starting with the demon sitting across from her.

Garanth reached into his jacket, and my muscles coiled. Whatever he pulled out, it wouldn't be good. Demons like him didn't do social calls—they collected debts, delivered threats, or worse.

A coin. Small, dark, unremarkable except for the way it seemed to drink in the light around it.

Every nerve in my body fired at once.

The thing hummed wrong —like static wrapped in rot, like something that had been touched by places it shouldn't have been. I started to rise, my chair scraping against the floor, but Garanth was already sliding it across the table toward Tess.

"Don't—" The warning died in my throat as her fingers twitched toward it.

Professional training screamed through my head: Enchanted object. Unknown origin. Hostile intent probable. But my body was already moving, pushing through the space between tables, knowing I was too far away, too slow.

Her skin brushed the metal.

The air imploded .

Reality folded in on itself with a sound like breaking glass and tearing fabric. Light bent inward, pulling everything toward a point that shouldn't exist, and then—

Tess was gone.

Just... gone.

My energy surged through me like a live wire, demanding release I couldn't give it.

The incubus side of my nature clawed at the absence of her presence, leaving me raw and aching.

I lunged toward the empty space where she'd been sitting.

Customers scattered, shouting, but their voices sounded muffled and distant.

All I could hear was the echo of that sickening crack, the way the world had twisted around her and swallowed her whole.

I dropped to my knees where she'd been, palm pressed flat against the floor. Still warm. The wood held the ghost of her presence—that bright, chaotic energy that made my incubus side want to feed and my human side want to protect.

Panic clawed up from my gut, but I shoved it down.

Over ten years of military and security training didn't just disappear because the stakes had gotten personal.

I forced myself to move methodically—scanning for sigils etched into the wood, burn marks on the table, any trace of magical residue that could point me in the right direction.

A crushed napkin caught my eye, soaked with coffee that still steamed. I knelt beside it, and Garanth's scent hit me like a physical blow—sulfur and malice and something older, darker. Demoncraft.

I closed my eyes and extended my senses, probing for traces of the portal's signature. Cold. Brittle. Layered with power that felt ancient and wrong. And underneath it all, a familiar thread of corruption that made my stomach clench with recognition.

A powerful demon. One I'd tangled with before.

The magical signature was subtle but unmistakable—I'd felt it before, three years ago when PRISM sent me undercover to investigate his trafficking operations.

That mission had ended with two agents dead and the demon vanishing into the wind, but not before I'd gotten close enough to memorize the particular way his magic tasted. Like ash and broken promises.

My mind conjured images I couldn't stop—Tess trapped in some nightmare realm, her soft human flesh torn by claws designed for torment.

Demons didn't just kill. They savored fear, fed on screams, broke minds before they broke bodies.

What would they do to someone like her? Someone untrained, defenseless… human?

How the hell did this happen?

I was supposed to be watching her. Protecting her. Ten years in security, and I'd let her get snatched right in front of me because I'd been too busy cataloging the way her hair caught the light to notice the threat sitting three feet away.

Her absence left a void that made my teeth ache, made my hands shake with the need to do something, anything, to get her back.

Movement in my peripheral vision.

Shadows peeled away from the corner like living things, coalescing into a figure that shouldn't have been able to approach without me sensing him.

Tall, lean, with silver-streaked dark hair and eyes like winter storms. The fury radiating off him hit me in waves—cold, controlled, and absolutely lethal.

It made my teeth ache, made every instinct I had scream warnings about predators and power far beyond my own.

Threat.

Raw instinct took over—ten years of training compressed into a single, violent impulse.

Protect. Eliminate. Find her. I launched myself at him before conscious thought could intervene, a decade of combat training taking over.

My fist connected with his ribs, but he twisted with liquid grace, shadow wrapping around my wrist like a living restraint.

His elbow drove toward my solar plexus. I caught it, used his momentum to spin him around, but darkness erupted from his skin like smoke. It wrapped around my throat, not quite solid but pressure enough to make breathing difficult.

I grabbed for his jacket, hauling him closer so I could drive my knee up, but he anticipated it. Shadow-slick fingers found pressure points along my arm that sent lightning down to my fingertips.

We broke apart, circling each other like wolves, when he snarled a single word that stopped my heart.

" Tess. "

We both froze.

His eyes—impossibly dark, like staring into deep water—locked onto mine. Recognition flickered there, followed by something that looked like reluctant acceptance.

"You're Draven Loto." Not a question. His voice carried an accent I couldn't place, cultured but with edges that suggested violence was always an option.

I kept my stance loose, ready to move. "And you are?"

"Ciaran." The name meant nothing to me, but the power rolling off him in waves meant everything. Ancient. Predatory. The kind of supernatural heavyweight that could level city blocks without breaking a sweat.

"Are you a threat to her?" I demanded.

His laugh was bitter as winter wind. "She's my mate."

The words hit like a punch to the solar plexus.

Mate. I'd seen enough supernatural bonds to know what that meant—the kind of connection that went deeper than choice, deeper than logic.

But the possessive snarl that rose in my throat surprised me with its intensity.

She wasn't mine to claim. Hell, I barely knew her.

That didn't stop the sick twist of jealousy from carving through my chest, or the way my incubus nature recoiled at the thought of another male's claim on her.

"Then where the hell were you when she got taken?" I snarled.

His eyes flashed dangerous. "Where were you ? I can smell your magic all over this place—you were watching her, weren't you?"

Heat crawled up my neck. "I was three tables away—"

"And you let her get within arm's reach of a demon with a portal coin." His voice dropped to something that promised violence. "A decade in private security, and you couldn't spot a basic snatch-and-grab setup."

"How do you—" I cut myself off. Of course he knew who I was. If Tess was his mate, he'd have run background checks on everyone in her orbit. "You want to trade accusations, or you want to find her?"

Neither of us moved first. Neither of us blinked.

But we were both listening for the same thing: her voice, her heartbeat, any sign that she was still alive somewhere we could reach.

The silence stretched between us, heavy with unspoken fears.

A human woman in the hands of demons. The terrible things they could do to someone so fragile, so unprepared for the kind of cruelty that lived in the supernatural world's shadows.

My imagination supplied a dozen scenarios, each worse than the last—torture, experimentation, slow death designed to break her spirit before it broke her body.

Ciaran crouched beside the magical residue, fingertips brushing the floor with a gentleness that didn't match the murder in his eyes. "This wasn't random," he muttered. "Someone marked her. Targeted her specifically."

My heart slammed once, hard enough to bruise my ribs. I nodded—tight, reluctant. The professional in me recognized the truth even as every other part of me wanted to deny it.

"Yeah," I said, voice rougher than I'd intended. "I think I know who."

The magical signature, the precision of the snatch, the way Garanth had played it—all of it pointed to the demon crime lord who'd been a thorn in my side since my PRISM days. And if he had her...

The silence that followed was jagged, heavy with unspoken blame and the weight of our shared failure. I scraped a hand through my hair, jaw tight enough to ache.

"We don't have time for this dick-measuring contest," I muttered, hating how helpless I sounded. "She's out there, and whoever did this knows she's human. Vulnerable."

Ciaran rose slowly, shadows still writhing around him like living things. His silver eyes never left mine, and I saw something shift in their depths. Not forgiveness—we were too far past that—but recognition. We both wanted the same thing.

"If you know where she is," he said, voice deadly quiet, "I can get us there. But you follow my lead."

The words scraped against every instinct I'd developed through my military and private security work.

I didn't follow. I led. I controlled the situation, the variables, the outcome.

Yielding to someone else—especially someone whose power I couldn't fully gauge—went against everything that had kept me alive this long.

But if it meant getting to Tess faster...

"Only if it gets us to her," I said.

The air shifted around us as we moved toward the exit—reluctant allies bound by desperation and a shared purpose that felt bigger than either of our egos.

Get Tess back.

Everything else could wait.