I guess gun battles and car chases work up quite the appetite. Not to mention nearly being shot to death.

My stomach turned, and my appetite vanished as quickly as it had come. Shivering, I left the fries to harden on the tray and crawled beneath the covers of the huge bed, pulling the quilt over my face. Curling into myself, I listened to the babble of the television filling the suffocating quiet, wishing I could just turn off my brain for a few hours. Garret, Dante and Riley all crowded my mind, each pulling at different emotions until I was a tangled knot of feeling inside. I finally drifted off, but kept jerking awake throughout the night as their faces, and the face of the man I’d killed, continued to chase me through my dreams.

Riley

“You’ve gone mad for the girl, haven’t you?” Wes remarked.

I glared at him from across the room. He sat on the bed with his computer in his lap, finishing off his bottle of soda. Lowering his arm, he raised a shaggy eyebrow at my expression.

“Don’t try to deny it, mate.” He gestured at me with the bottle, sending a spatter of Mountain Dew across the white bedcover. “I saw the two of you in the doorway, and you were a half second away from a full-on snog fest.”

“Dragons don’t ‘snog,’ idiot.”

“Oh, sod off. You know what I mean.” Wes shook his head, half closing his laptop to stare at me over the lid. “You’re losing it, Riley,” he said. “Ever since that bloody hatchling crashed into our affairs, your priorities have been screwed to hell and back. For Christ’s sake, we have a bloody soldier of St. George following us around! I still don’t know why you haven’t told the blighter to shove off.”

“He’s useful,” I argued. “Since he’s here, I figured we might as well take advantage of having the enemy with us. If we can get him to give up secrets about the Order—”

“Bull. Crap.” Wes glared at me. “That’s not the reason and you bloody well know it’s not. Don’t lie to me, Riley. I’ve known you too long for that.” He narrowed his eyes, his scruffy jaw tightening in anger. “It’s because of her. Everything we’ve done, everything that’s happened to us since Crescent Beach, is because of her. And now we’re holed up here, with Talon and St. George on our tail, and you’re making promises you have no way of keeping. Dangerous promises. Promises that will get us all killed. If anyone else suggested we contact someone in the organization, you would’ve either laughed in their face and told them to sod off, or punched their bloody lights out.”

“I have no intention of sending Ember’s traitor brother any kind of message,” I said, rolling my eyes. “So you can relax. I didn’t promise her anything, and I’m sure as hell not giving that Talon clone another chance to turn us in. Once was enough.”

“You’re missing the point, mate.” Wes rubbed the bridge of his nose, sounding tired. “Listen to what you just said. Once was enough?” He shook his head. “It should never have come to that. You knew that brother of hers was bad news. You knew he would sell us out to Talon, and you still let her go back for him. And what happened? Fucking Lilith, the organization’s best Viper assassin, tracked you down and nearly killed you both. Because that hatchling has you so twisted around her little claw, you don’t know which way is up anymore.”

I took a breath to cool the sudden rise of heat in my lungs. “How about I worry about running this circus, and you worry about keeping enemy forces from sneaking in the back door?” I suggested in a flat voice. “What I do with Ember is none of your business.”

“It’s my sodding business if it gets us all killed!”

“I’ve protected this underground for years!” I snapped in return. “Before Ember even knew what a human was, I’ve been fighting to get my kind out of Talon. I’ve worked for it, bled for it, nearly died for it more times than I can count. I’m not going to throw that away, and I’m certainly not going to lose it now. You should know me better than that.”

Wes slumped against the pillow. “I know,” he murmured. “I know you’d do anything to keep those kids safe, just like I’d do anything to screw with Talon and throw a wrench into their plans for world domination, or whatever it is they’re planning. But I’ve never seen you like this, mate. We’ve worked too hard to build this underground, to get dragons out of the organization, to weaken Talon however we can. I just want to be certain your priorities are still the same.”

“No,” I said, making him frown. “Weakening Talon, screwing with their plans, plotting to overthrow the evil empire, that’s always been your objective. One more hatchling that I get out of Talon is one less dragon they can use in the future. I go after hatchlings because I want my kind to be free. You go after them because you have this crazy notion that someday Talon will fall because of us. Because of what we’re doing right now.”

“Everyone has their dreams, mate.” Wes’s voice was low, his eyes hard. “I know you don’t believe it will happen, that Talon is too big, but I’ve seen giants crumble and empires brought down. It has to start somewhere. And if you don’t think that what we’re doing now will matter, even if it’s beyond our lifetimes, then what is the bloody point of all this?”

An ominous beep from his laptop interrupted us. Wes jumped and pushed the lid back, bending low. His fingers flew across the keyboard as he hunched forward, his nose only a few inches from the screen, brow furrowed in concentration. I moved up beside him, feeling tense and slightly sick, hoping that alarm didn’t mean what I feared it would.