‘‘Enough talk,’’ Bao said, boredom evident in her voice. ‘‘I grow weary of this.’’

‘‘Then let me tell you a little story, something that will relieve the tedium of your mind,’’ Fiat said, turning to face her. ‘‘Once upon a time, as the mortals so dearly love to say, there lived a wyvern by the name of Baltic. He was a peaceful man, but forced into war by the stupidity and greed of others, dragons who wanted to see his sept disbanded. One day he found his friends departed, his sept all but eliminated, and his very own heir determined to see him dead.’’

‘‘I have no time for this,’’ Bao said, but was interrupted before she could continue.

‘‘With death and the destruction of everything he worked so hard for staring him in the face, Baltic did the only thing he could do.’’

‘‘Die,’’ Bao said. ‘‘At the hands of his heir. Baltic was not a brilliant wyvern any more than this is a brilliant anecdote, although perhaps, given your situation, it is apropos.’’

‘‘More so than you can possibly imagine,’’ Fiat said with a smile that chilled my blood.

Bao snorted again and started to say something, but her words were cut short when Fiat, moving so fast he was just a blur, snatched the sword from behind him and leaped out of view, toward Bao.

There was a horrible sucking noise, followed by a wet gurgle, and a thump as something heavy hit the floor.

Fiat backed into view again, wiping a now bloodied blade on a piece of cloth. ‘‘As my good friend says, power flows to the wyvern, not away from him.’’

He smiled contentedly as he replaced the sword on the wall.

Chapter Seventeen

I clapped a hand over Cyrene’s mouth even before she could draw breath to scream.

‘‘Don’t make a sound,’’ I whispered, my mouth close to her ear.

Her eyes widened, and she struggled as if she was going to pull away from me and scream her lungs out.

‘‘There is a madman with a very lethal sword just a few feet away,’’ I pointed out.

She stopped struggling and nodded. I released her and reapplied my eye to the narrow space in the doorway.

Fiat stood at the opened door opposite, calling to someone. A couple of his bodyguards and two others trooped into the room.

‘‘Remove that,’’ he said nonchalantly, waving toward the area where Bao had stood.

The stark expressions of disbelief on his men’s faces had to match the one I wore; they certainly mirrored Cyrene’s.

‘‘What are you waiting for?’’ Fiat demanded, raising his voice as his dragons just stood there, clearly too astounded to do anything. ‘‘I want that removed, and this place cleaned up. There is much I must attend to, and little time in which to ensure there will be no trouble from the red dragons.’’

One of the bodyguards grabbed a blanket that was draped over a chair and moved out of view. He returned hauling what I could only assume was Bao’s body, thankfully covered with the blanket. Another man followed with another object, also wrapped.

‘‘Clean up the blood,’’ Fiat barked, waving an authoritative hand. ‘‘And remove all signs that she was here. Stephano, go upstairs and take care of her guards.’’

A handsome blond man lifted his eyebrows in silent question.

Fiat growled, ‘‘Just get rid of them. I won’t have them interfering.’’

Stephano hesitated for a moment, but eventually nodded and left. I closed the door carefully, my heart beating wildly as I turned to look at a shaken Cyrene. Maata stood with an impassive look on her face, but her eyes were bright with emotion.

‘‘We have to get out of here,’’ I told them softly. ‘‘I really do not want Fiat to know we’re here, or what we’ve seen.’’

‘‘We will go out the way we came in,’’ Maata agreed.

She waited until Cyrene and I hurried through the door to the tunnel before following us.

‘‘That means we’ll have to go back out through the lake,’’ I pointed out, flipping on the tiny flashlight.

She grimaced. ‘‘It can’t be helped. We must report this news to Gabriel.’’

Our trip out of the depths of Fiat’s tunnels was fraught with tension, but no real danger. It was a bit of a battle to get Maata out, since she refused when Cyrene offered to deck her, but in the end we managed by dint of yet another sleeper hold.

Maata and I both ended up swallowing water in the struggle to get her out, however, and I swore, as I crawled onto the banks of the lake and collapsed, hacking and wheezing as I tried to replace the water in my lungs with air, that I heard her mutter something about never again accepting watchdog duty.

I had to admit I didn’t blame her.

Gabriel, however, had another opinion, one that was made all too clear when, several hours later, we straggled into the Paris suite.

‘‘You did what?’’ he asked Maata as she stood before him, his lovely smooth voice going a bit gravelly around the edges. His fingers flexed, a sign that I was coming to know also meant he was upset.

‘‘You can yell all you want. I’m going to find Kostya,’’ Cyrene said, dark smudges beneath her eyes. She didn’t even say good-bye, just turned around and walked out of the room.

‘‘May wished to follow the man she thought was Baltic, so we did. I did not leave her side at any time, and we were in no actual danger—’’ I heard Maata say as I went to the bedroom to drop off my overnight bag, but she was interrupted when Gabriel growled out a word I didn’t recognize.

Maata’s face, when I emerged from the bedroom, had adopted a stony look that spoke volumes. ‘‘I’m sorry, Gabriel. I thought—’’

‘‘Well, I’m not sorry, not one little bit,’’ I said, stopping her before she could apologize further.

Tipene sat at a table beyond, silently tapping away at a laptop, but glancing between his wyvern and fellow bodyguard.

‘‘Little bird,’’ Gabriel started to say, but I held up a hand.

‘‘Don’t even think of telling me this is none of my business. Maata didn’t want me to go after the mysterious dragon, but I weighed the options and decided that the chance to find out who he was made it worth the risk. So if you want to vent your spleen on someone, do it on me and not her.’’