“Start over,” Isla said.
Her voice came out steadier than she felt.
Her heart was doing its best impression of a drumline in her chest. Her thumb throbbed under the bandage. The air tasted electric, sharp on her tongue.
The man—Cael, Tim had called him, although her brain was still catching up to the fact that this was the *same presence* that had brushed against her in the archives—watched her with a focus that made her skin prickle.
His eyes were wrong.
At first glance, they were just… intense. Dark, with a ring of old-gold around the pupil. But as she looked, the pupils themselves narrowed, contracting into vertical slits before widening again.
She’d seen the same thing in the reptile house at the zoo, when a snake came out from under its heat lamp.
The thought did not help.
Tim shifted his weight, putting his body half between them in a way that looked casual and wasn’t.
“Isla,” he said. “I need you to stay calm.”
She laughed once, brittle. “You brought a barefoot stranger with weird eyes into my gallery. Define ‘calm.’”
“I didn’t bring him here,” Tim said. “He… woke up here.”
Cael’s mouth curled.
“Woke me,” he corrected softly. His gaze never left Isla. “With her blood.”
She jerked.
Her hand flew to her thumb, protective instinct overriding reason. The Band-Aid was still there, a little frayed at the edge.
Tim’s attention snapped to it too.
“Is that from the Schmiedler crate?” he asked sharply. “The one you said you found an… organic object in?”
“Wait,” Isla said. “How do you—”
“We’ll get to that,” Tim cut in. “Answer the question.”
She bristled.
“I cut myself on something,” she said stiffly. “In the archives. It happens.”
“On my scale,” Cael said.
The words slid over her skin like oil and flame.
She turned to him fully, squaring her shoulders.
“You,” she said, “are about two seconds away from being escorted out of this building in zip ties.”
Jay, hovering awkwardly a few feet away, muttered, “Oh, I like her.”
Cael ignored him.
“You felt it,” he said to Isla, low and sure. “When you touched it. When your blood fell on it.”
Her stomach clenched.
“I fainted,” she said. “Because I hadn’t eaten. Because I’d been on my feet for six hours. Because I’m a professional who knows that sometimes bodies do unhelpful things.”
His head cocked.
“And now?”
“Now,” she said through her teeth, “I would like some answers.”
“Then stop denying what you already know,” he said.
Heat flared in her cheeks.
“I do *not* know—”
“You know you didn’t just faint,” he said, stepping around Tim before the guard could stop him.
He stopped close enough that she had to tilt her head back to meet his eyes.
Too close.
He smelled like dust and something faintly metallic, like old coins warmed in the sun. Underneath that, there was a trace of smoke, as if he’d just walked away from a campfire.
Her pulse jumped.
She refused to step back.
“I know I had… an experience,” she said carefully. “Which is why I was planning to get my head examined on my day off, not have a… *conversation* about it in front of a thirteenth-century tapestry.”
His mouth curved, not quite a smile.
“You will not find your answers in a healer’s book,” he said. “They will pat your head and give you potions that make you foggy, and the thing that woke in you will sleep.” His gaze dragged down over her, slow and assessing. “For a time.”
The implication brushed lower than was strictly professional.
Her skin heated.
“Okay,” she said. “First? Do not talk about things waking in me. Ever. Second, we’re done. Tim, get him out of here. I’ll call Halpern and—”
“She is the only one who can help me,” Cael said, not looking away from Isla even as he addressed Tim.
Tim sighed. “I had a feeling you were going to say that.”
Isla frowned between them. “Help you *what*?”
Cael’s jaw tightened.
He did not like asking.
She could see it.
“I am not from here,” he said finally.
Jay snorted softly. “Understatement of the century.”
Cael shot him a look that promised many imaginative deaths.
Jay shut up.
“I am… older than this place,” Cael went on. “Older than the stone under it. I slept under another building, in another age. I was *put* to sleep. Bound.” His hand came up, fingers brushing the raised scars along his ribs, glowing faintly as if in memory. “By a man whose blood held the leash to a piece of me. A scale, torn from my hide. When that man’s line ended, the leash snapped. Your blood fell on the scale, curator. It woke. It woke *me*.”
The words were absurd.
They were also the closest thing she’d heard that fit the… whatever-it-was that had happened to her in the basement.
Her scientist brain—her conservator brain, the part of her that believed in measurability and materials and spectra—reared up in protest.
Her other brain—ten-year-old Isla, standing in front of that battered Spanish shield and feeling history crack open under her—leaned forward.
“And you expect me to believe you’re a *dragon*,” she said, deliberately flat.
He held her gaze.
Then, without breaking eye contact, he inhaled slowly and exhaled.
Smoke drifted from his lips.
Not a lot. Not the billows she’d seen in movies. Just a thin, curling thread that smelled faintly of char.
Her heart stopped.
“That could be a trick,” she said hoarsely. “A vape pen. A chemical reaction. Something.”
He bared his teeth.
The canister of hand sanitizer on the pedestal beside them burst into flame.
“Shit!” Isla yelped, leaping back on instinct.
Tim cursed and smacked at the small fire with the sleeve of his jacket, beating it out before the sprinkler system decided to christen every medieval object in the room.
“Are you *insane?*” Isla snapped at Cael. “Do you have any idea how fragile these pieces are? The humidity change alone could—”
He blinked.
Then, slowly, the corner of his mouth curled.
“You care more for the things than for yourself,” he said. “Good.”
“I care for both,” she shot back. Her hands shook. She crossed her arms to hide it. “You don’t get points for arson-adjacent party tricks.”
Tim exhaled hard. “Okay. Everyone take a breath. No more impromptu barbecues.”
Jay recovered first. “So, uh,” he said, “on the ‘is he crazy’ versus ‘is he actually a dragon’ spectrum, I’m leaning toward ‘dragon.’”
“Do not be ridiculous,” Isla snapped, because someone had to keep the universe tethered to sanity.
Jay gestured helplessly. “He just breathed fire.”
“Probably not literal fire,” Isla said automatically. “Some kind of—”
“Isla,” Tim cut in gently. “He set hand sanitizer on fire.”
She glared at him.
He met her gaze, not unkindly. “I know this is a lot,” he said. “But we’ve been dealing with his… existence for a couple hours now. You’re playing catch-up.”
Her temples pounded.
She pinched the bridge of her nose.
“So you believe him,” she said. “Just like that.”
“I believe *something* is going on that I don’t understand,” Tim said. “I believe he knows things he shouldn’t. About the collection. About the building. And I believe that if we don’t figure it out, people could get hurt.”
Cael made a small derisive sound. “Now who’s telling stories.”
Tim ignored him.
“He says parts of his… hoard are here,” Tim said to Isla. “In our medieval collection. The Schmiedler stuff, especially.”
Isla’s stomach dropped.
“How many?” she asked.
Cael’s gaze slid to the cases.
“Here?” He took a slow, deliberate look around, tasting the air, feeling the tug. “Twenty-three. In this wing alone. Scattered among the human trash.”
“Hey,” Jay protested weakly. “That ‘trash’ paid for my last raise.”
Isla ignored him.
“Schmiedler donated almost a hundred medieval pieces,” she said slowly. “Mostly arms, armor, liturgical items. Some reliquaries. Textiles. And that’s just our institution. His estate was split between three major museums.” Her mouth went dry. “And you’re saying…”
“Many of them are mine,” Cael said. “Taken while I slept.”
“And you want them back,” she finished.
His jaw clenched.
“Yes.”
Her gaze slid to the nearest case.
To the chalice she’d cleaned herself, hands careful, breath held.
She thought of the accession records. The fragile paper trails tracking each piece’s legal—if ethically murky—transfer from private hands to public trust.
She thought of the grant applications she’d written, talking about accessibility and stewardship and cultural heritage.
“You realize,” she said slowly, “that these objects are not… just things. We’re a public institution. A lot of them were acquired in… questionable ways, yes, but they’ve been part of the collection for decades. Some for a century. They’re insured. Cataloged. Studied. People come here to see them. We can’t just… *give* them to you.”
“Can’t,” Cael repeated, as if testing the word.
“We *won’t,*” she corrected.
His gaze sharpened.
“You will,” he said softly.
Anger flared in her chest, hot and stubborn.
“I’m not stealing from my own museum because some man with good cheekbones and a parlor trick says he’s a dragon.”
He looked genuinely puzzled.
“What do my cheekbones have to do with anything?”
She flushed.
“Nothing,” she snapped.
Jay coughed into his fist. “Uh, guys? Focus. End of the world. Not thirst.”
Tim rubbed a hand over his face.
“Look,” he said. “We don’t have to solve this right now. What we *do* have to do is keep things from escalating. Cael says he goes… unstable without his hoard. Or parts of it. Or something. He made a promise not to hurt anyone in the building for twenty-four hours. After that…”
“We keep him for observation?” Jay suggested weakly.
“After that, I start by burning this place down,” Cael said flatly.
Isla’s blood iced.
“No,” she said.
He raised an eyebrow. “You believe me now?”
“I believe you are capable of doing serious damage,” she said. “And I believe you don’t care about the cost.”
“Wrong,” he said. “I care very much. The cost is already too high.”
Something in his voice cracked on the last word.
She caught a glimpse then—fleeting, like a reflection in warped glass—of the weight he carried.
Three hundred years of sleep.
Three hundred years of loss.
Three hundred years of *alone*.
It didn’t excuse burning down a museum, but it complicated the arithmetic.
She looked at the chalice again.
At the sword.
At the necklace.
Each piece had its own weight of history. Its own chain of human hands. Its own stories.
And beyond that, beyond the practical and the ethical and the personal, there was something else.
The part of her that had touched the scale and felt the world tilt knew, with a deep bone certainty, that if she walked away from this, something in her would shrivel.
“You said my blood woke you,” she said to Cael. “Why? What does that… *mean*?”
He studied her.
“Blood is power,” he said simply. “Old magic. Old bindings. The sorcerer who cursed me tied the leash for that scale to his bloodline. When the last of that line died, the leash snapped. But the scale still needed… *something* to anchor it. Your blood fell. You smelled… right.”
She swallowed.
“Right how.”
His gaze dropped, briefly, to her hands.
“Strong,” he said. “Stubborn. Loyal to things that are not yourself.” His eyes met hers again. “The scale chose you. Through it, you chose me.”
“I did not choose—”
“You held it,” he cut in. “You did not let go. You *caught* it. Most of your kind would have dropped it and fled.”
She remembered the flash of light between her fingers. The heat. The sense of something *sliding* into place inside her, like a puzzle piece snapping home.
“I didn’t know what I was doing,” she said.
“Intention matters more than knowledge,” he said. “Ones who stumble into power with no desire to wield it are more dangerous than any wizard.”
“Comforting,” she muttered.
“So,” Jay said, clapping his hands once in a brittle attempt at levity. “We’ve got a cursed dragon with separation anxiety, a curator accidentally bonded to him, and a medieval collection full of contraband hoard bits.” He looked at Tim. “Does your job description cover this? Because mine doesn’t.”
Tim’s expression was grim. “My job description covers ‘protect the people in this building.’” He looked at Isla. “You’re one of them.”
“So are you,” she said.
He shrugged. “I made my choices. You didn’t choose this.”
She wanted to protest that she had chosen, in her own way. That every decision she’d made—staying in this city, working in this museum, pressing her hands into the past day after day—had led her here.
But the truth was, if Cael was right, the choice had been more instinct than intention.
“So what are you asking me to do?” she demanded. “Specifically.”
Tim hesitated.
Cael didn’t.
“Help me reclaim my hoard,” he said. “You have knowledge of this place. Of its rules. Its secrets.” His mouth twisted, like the word tasted wrong. “Museums.”
“You mean security weaknesses,” she said flatly.
“Yes,” he said, unapologetic.
She stared.
“Do you have any idea what you’re asking?” she whispered. “You want me to sabotage my own institution. To betray every professional ethic I have. Not to mention the law. I could… lose everything. My job. My reputation. My ability to work in this field ever again.”
“Better than losing your mind,” he said quietly.
Her laugh came out too loud.
“This is not about me.”
“Isn’t it?” he asked.
His gaze slid down to her hand.
Her thumb burned.
She curled her fingers into a fist.
“What happens if I say no?” she asked. “If I walk away. If I block this out. If I let someone else deal with you?”
His expression went flat.
“I find someone else,” he said. “Less suited. Less… careful. Someone who will grab and run and leave bodies behind. Or I break my promise, burn through the binding, and tear this building apart piece by piece until I have what is mine.”
Her vision swam for a second.
“You’re threatening me,” she said.
“I am telling you the truth,” he said. “I do not want to harm your kind. They are… not all terrible.” His mouth twisted around the reluctant concession. “But you built your treasures on the bones of others. On theft. On war. This”—he nodded toward the cases—“is my heart scattered. You guard it with glass but not with honor.”
“That’s not fair,” she snapped. “We preserve. We research. We make the past accessible. Yes, acquisition was messy, but we’re trying to do better now. Repatriation. Community engagement. Contextualization.”
He blinked slowly.
“Big words,” he said. “Where was your… contextualization… when they dragged my hoard away to sell at auction?”
“You weren’t exactly sending emails,” she shot back.
“Emails,” he repeated, bemused.
“Later,” Jay murmured.
Tim stepped between them more fully now, not bothering to pretend it was casual.
“Enough,” he said. “We’re not going to solve three hundred years of colonialism and magical malfeasance in one argument.”
“Colonialism,” Cael said, tasting the word.
“This is above us,” Tim went on. “I get that. We’re museum staff and security, not… I don’t know. Avengers.”
“Speak for yourself,” Jay muttered.
Tim gave him a look.
“But we’re *here*,” Tim said. “Right now. We’re the ones who know. And that means we’re the ones who decide how the next twenty-four hours go.”
He turned to Isla.
“I won’t tell you what to do,” he said. “That’s not my call. But if you walk away and pretend this is someone else’s problem, you don’t get to be mad about how they handle it.”
Guilt prickled at her spine.
She hated that he was right.
She hated even more that some stubborn part of her had known, the moment she’d picked up that scale, that she’d crossed a line she couldn’t easily step back from.
“You don’t know me,” she said to him, voice low. “You don’t know what I can live with.”
“I’ve watched you down there for eight years,” Tim said softly. “You talk to the objects when you think no one’s listening. You cry when something we can’t fix shatters. You get angry when the board wants to ‘refresh’ the medieval wing with interactive touchscreens.” His mouth quirked. “You love this place like it’s a person. Don’t tell me you’re going to stand by and watch it burn because you’re afraid of a criminal record.”
She sucked in a sharp breath.
“You’ve been *spying* on me?”
“Doing my job,” he said. “Which happens to involve watching the cameras.”
She glared at him.
Her anger had edges now, not aimless but directed: at him, at Cael, at the board who would sell off entire wings if it meant better donor cocktails, at the sorcerer three hundred years dead who’d started this mess.
At herself.
She’d wanted the past.
She’d gotten it.
And it had teeth.
“What’s your plan?” she asked finally, turning to Cael. “Because I guarantee it’s terrible.”
He bared his teeth in something that might have been a smile.
“You will tell me where the pieces of my hoard are,” he said. “In this building. In this city. Beyond. You will show me how your kind watches. Where the eyes are. Where the gaps are. I will do the rest.”
“That’s not a plan,” she said. “That’s a wish.”
He shrugged.
“Humans love wishes,” he said. “You build entire shrines around them.”
Jay made a strangled noise. “He’s not wrong.”
Isla exhaled, long and slow, trying to think.
“We can’t just… take things,” she said. “Even if I wanted to help you, which I do *not* admit yet, we’d have to be careful. Silent. There’d have to be a… a story. A cover. ‘Oh, wow, something went missing from the medieval wing, how strange, must be an internal error.’”
She winced as she said it.
The idea of being the kind of person who let an irreplaceable object “vanish” on her watch made her stomach twist.
“Donors would freak out,” Jay said. “Insurance would breathe down our necks. The board would fire someone as a sacrifice to the PR gods.”
“Probably me,” Isla said.
“Probably,” Jay agreed.
“Or me,” Tim said. “If it looked like a security breach.”
“Perks of the job,” Jay muttered.
Cael watched their back-and-forth with the wary detachment of a predator watching prey argue among themselves.
“You are making this harder than it needs to be,” he said.
“Because you’re not the one with an employee ID,” Isla snapped.
He opened his mouth.
She cut him off.
“Look. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I believe you. That you’re a dragon. That those pieces in our collection are part of your hoard. That you need them back or you go ‘unmoored’ and we all die in a blaze of historically inaccurate glory.”
“That is an… ungenerous summary,” he said.
She ignored him.
“What happens if we get you *some* of them?” she asked. “Not all. Not yet. Enough to… stabilize you. Buy time.”
He hesitated.
She pounced.
“You said you feel them,” she said. “Pieces in this building. In the city. Elsewhere. There’s no way we can get them all at once. Not without drawing attention. But maybe we can start small. Hedge bets. See if your whole ‘I’ll go crazy and slaughter everyone’ doom prophecy is even accurate.”
“It is not a prophecy,” he said through his teeth. “It is experience.”
“Yours?” she asked. “Have you lost a hoard before?”
He flinched.
Ah.
“No,” he said.
“But you’ve seen what happens,” she said softly. “To others.”
His jaw clenched.
Images flickered across his eyes, too quick for her to parse. Fire. Blood. A mountain split open.
“Yes,” he said.
“Okay,” she said, gentler now. “Then you have some idea of… thresholds. Of how much you can lose before it gets dangerous. We work with that.”
“We,” he repeated.
“You dragged me into this,” she said. “I get a say in how we handle it.”
He eyed her.
“You are a tiny human woman with ink on your fingers,” he said. “You have no claws. No armor. No teeth.”
“I have a key card,” she said. “And Halpern’s password.”
Jay let out a low whistle. “She’s not wrong. That’s, like, +10 to all stealth rolls right there.”
Cael’s brows knit. “I do not know what that means.”
“Later,” Jay and Tim said in unison.
Cael considered Isla, head tilted slightly.
She tried not to fidget under the weight of his scrutiny.
“You are not afraid of me,” he said slowly.
She snorted. “Oh, I am *definitely* afraid of you. I’m just more afraid of you without a plan.”
The corner of his mouth twitched.
“You are strange,” he said.
“You woke up under a museum in 2023 and asked to eat a janitor,” she retorted. “Glass houses.”
Tim coughed, half-amused, half-worried.
“Okay,” he said. “Ground rules.”
He looked between them, his gaze sharp.
“One,” he said. “No one goes anywhere with anyone alone. Not yet. You two want to scheme about heists and dragon-hoard logistics, you do it with someone else in the room.”
“I do not—” Cael began.
Tim held up a hand. “Non-negotiable. You made a promise. I’m holding you to it. And Isla…”
She swallowed.
He softened.
“You don’t owe him anything,” he said. “At any point. You decide this is too much, you say the word, and we pull out. I’ll take the heat.”
Guilt squeezed her chest.
“Why?” she asked, genuine bewilderment in her voice. “Why are you… doing this?”
“Because I’ve watched too many people get chewed up by institutions that don’t care,” he said. “Because whatever this is, it’s bigger than me, and that scares the shit out of me, and when I’m scared, my instinct is to grab the people I trust and hold the line.” He shrugged. “I trust you.”
Her throat tightened.
“You barely know me,” she said.
“I know enough,” he said simply.
Silence stretched between them for a beat, thick with things she did not have the bandwidth to unpack.
Cael shifted, drawing her attention back.
His eyes were on Tim now, assessing, respectful in a way she hadn’t seen yet.
“You would stand between a dragon and your people,” he said. “You are either very brave or very foolish.”
“Occupational hazard,” Tim said dryly.
“Rule two,” Jay said briskly, as if he couldn’t stand the emotional tension. “No fire in the galleries.”
Cael made a small, disgruntled sound.
“Rule three,” Isla said, surprising herself. “No eating anyone. Even if they’re rude. Even if they touch the art.”
Cael’s lip curled. “You spoil all my fun.”
“Consider it… enrichment,” she said.
His gaze slid back to her.
The heat in it had changed.
It wasn’t just the hoard-sense now. There was something else there too, slower and more deliberate.
Her pulse skipped.
“Very well,” he said softly. “No eating.”
“Rule four,” Tim added. “No stealing anything without a plan. I don’t care how much it sings to you.”
“*Sings*,” Cael repeated, intrigued.
“You can… *hear* them?” Isla asked, curious despite herself.
He hesitated.
“Yes,” he said. “In a way. They hum. The ones that are mine. Like your… security system buzzes.”
Her mind raced.
“Could you… tell the difference?” she asked. “Between your pieces and similar ones? If I handed you two goblets that looked alike, could you tell which was yours?”
“Yes,” he said, without hesitation.
Her conservator brain lit up like a switchboard.
“That’s… incredible,” she breathed. “Do you know what that could mean? For provenance research? For verifying attributions? You could—”
Cael raised an eyebrow.
“Curator,” he said dryly. “Focus.”
Heat flooded her face.
“Right,” she said. “Sorry. Professional reflex.”
He watched her with an expression she couldn’t quite parse.
“You love your work,” he said.
“Yes,” she said.
“You would give it up,” he said, “to help a stranger.”
“Who said anything about giving it up?” she shot back. “I plan to keep it. I just also… plan to extract information from the database after hours and maybe, possibly, commit a felony.”
Jay whistled low. “Listen to her. Our girl’s gone full rogue archivist.”
“Do not call me ‘our girl,’” Isla said automatically.
Cael’s gaze darkened at the phrase anyway.
Mine, something in him snarled.
He did not say it aloud.
Yet.
“Okay,” Tim said. “Here’s what we’re going to do. Isla, you dig. Quietly. You figure out exactly which objects in our collection—and in the other Schmiedler collections—match what Cael feels. You cross-reference with our loan database, see where the rest are. You do not take anything out of the cases. Yet.”
She nodded, the weight of that responsibility settling heavy and strange on her shoulders.
“Cael,” Tim went on. “You stay out of sight. You’re a security nightmare. We’ll find you somewhere to hole up where the cameras don’t reach, but you *do not* wander the building unsupervised. You want to see Isla, you ask.”
Cael bristled. “I do not—”
Tim cut him off. “Ask. Or I call in backup, and I let the city deal with you. Maybe they’ll believe the ‘dragon’ thing. Maybe they won’t. Either way, you lose control.”
The word hooked something deep in Cael’s chest.
Control.
Dragons did not give it up easily.
He thought of the long, cold sleep. Of the helplessness. Of waking to find his hoard scattered.
He thought of this tiny, fierce woman with ink on her fingers and fire in her eyes, standing in front of his stolen treasures and daring him to be better.
He ground his teeth.
“Fine,” he said.
“Good,” Tim said. “Jay, you’re on research duty too. See if anyone in the historical records mentioned a… I don’t know, freak cave collapse during the construction of the original building. Or any weird reports about dragon sightings in 1724.”
Jay’s eyes lit. “On it,” he said, already thumbing his phone. “I’ve got a buddy at the historical society who owes me a favor.”
“You have a buddy everywhere,” Tim said.
“Networking,” Jay said smugly. “It’s called networking.”
Cael watched this flurry of human organization with a mixture of bemusement and reluctant respect.
They moved quickly.
They might actually pull this off.
If he didn’t snap and burn something down first.
Isla turned to him.
“We’re going to need more from you,” she said. “Details. Names. Places. You said your hoard was under another building. What building? What city? What country?”
He blinked.
“The city has another name now,” he said. “Different tongue. Different flags. When I slept, they called this place…” He trailed off, searching his memory. “Saint… something. St. Bartholomew’s Keep. The sorcerer built his tower on the bones of an older fort.”
Isla’s heart kicked.
She knew this.
“San Bartolomé,” she whispered. “The old Spanish fort. The original colonial outpost. They knocked most of it down when they built the first municipal building.” Her eyes widened. “The first municipal building that eventually became… this museum’s first wing.”
Cael inclined his head.
“At least your memory is not completely useless,” he said.
She glared at him.
“You cursed dragon,” she muttered.
“Correct,” he said, lips twitching.
Tim shook his head.
“Okay,” he said. “We’re in way over our heads, and I have exactly three hours before my shift ends and I’m supposed to go home and pretend none of you exist.” He looked at Isla. “Can you meet us in the staff lounge at six? After closing?”
She nodded.
“I need to run a couple of tests in the lab anyway,” she said. “And pull some accession records. I’ll… see what I can find.”
Cael’s gaze pinned her.
“You will come,” he said. Not a question. A statement layered with something that felt like magic and possessiveness and a hint of command.
She bristled.
“I will meet with Tim,” she said pointedly. “Because I trust him. If you happen to be there, I will not run screaming.”
He frowned.
“You have no idea what you’ve tied yourself to,” he said quietly.
She met his gaze, chin up.
“Neither do you,” she said. “You woke up in *my* museum, fire-breath or not. That makes this *my* problem.”
Heat flared behind his eyes.
He took a step closer, invading her space again, and stopped only when Tim cleared his throat meaningfully.
“You are a very small woman to make such big claims,” he murmured.
Her body reacted to the low rumble of his voice before her brain could catch up.
Goosebumps prickled along her arms.
“I work with relics that have survived five hundred years of neglect, war, and idiots with bad cleaning products,” she said. “Don’t underestimate small women.”
His gaze dropped briefly to her mouth.
“I am learning,” he said.
Something electric snapped in the air between them, sharp enough that even Jay seemed to feel it. He shifted his weight, clearing his throat.
“Right,” he said. “Okay. Break. Everyone go be normal for a few hours.”
“Define normal,” Isla muttered.
“Not breathing fire,” Jay said.
Cael snorted.
Tim clapped a hand lightly on Cael’s shoulder, steering him away.
“C’mon, Puff,” he said. “Let’s find you a nice cozy broom closet to hide in.”
Cael stiffened. “Do not call me—”
The rest was lost as they moved down the gallery.
Isla watched them go, numb.
When they disappeared around the corner, the medieval wing seemed to exhale.
The hum of the ceiling lights returned. The faint audio guide in the next room babbled about feudalism.
She sagged back against the nearest column, knees weak.
“What the hell am I doing?” she whispered.
No one answered.
The chalice glinted under its lights.
Her thumb burned, a quiet, constant pulse.
She straightened.
“Okay,” she told the room. “We’re doing this.”
The saints on the tapestries did not object.
***
The staff lounge at six was almost empty.
Most of the day staff had gone home. The night crew hadn’t come in yet. The vending machines hummed in the corner. The coffee machine burbled, struggling to make something that could legally still be called coffee.
Isla wrapped her hands around a chipped mug anyway, more for something to do with her fingers than for the lukewarm liquid inside.
She’d spent the last four hours in a blur.
She’d run a non-destructive spectrographic analysis on the “scale”—okay, fine, the *scale*—and the resulting data had made her head spin. The composition didn’t match any known biological material. It also didn’t match any synthetic polymer or resin. The lattice structure was… unique. Complex. Alive, almost.
She’d pulled accession files. Cross-referenced Schmiedler donations with known auction records. Flagged a dozen items that matched Cael’s descriptions a little too well.
She’d sat in the tiny bathroom stall and had a quiet, controlled panic attack into her hands, then washed her face and gone back to work.
Now she waited.
The door opened.
Tim slipped in, shoulders tense.
Jay followed, balancing a stack of files and a laptop.
Cael came last.
He’d found a shirt somewhere. It didn’t fit quite right—too tight across the shoulders, the museum logo stretched comically on his chest—but it made him look slightly less like someone who’d escaped from a very specific kind of photoshoot.
His presence still filled the room.
Isla’s heartbeat picked up.
“You’re late,” she said, because it was safer than saying, *You look different in a t-shirt.*
Tim checked his watch. “We said six. It’s 6:03.”
“Punctuality matters,” she muttered.
“I like punctuality,” Cael said. “It means prey moves when you expect it to.”
She shot him a look.
“See, that? That’s why I don’t trust you,” she said. “You keep saying things like that.”
He tilted his head. “You do not like honesty?”
“I don’t like being compared to prey,” she said.
“You are not prey,” he said.
The words landed with more weight than they should have.
She looked away.
Jay dumped the files on the table and opened his laptop with a flourish.
“Okay, team,” he said. “Welcome to Dragon Heist 101.”
Tim groaned softly.
Isla rubbed her temples.
“I did not agree to a heist,” she said.
“You agreed to research,” Tim said. “Which is step one of any good heist.”
Cael lowered himself into the chair opposite her.
It creaked ominously.
“Explain,” he said curtly.
Isla took a breath.
“First,” she said. “There are… twenty-three objects in our medieval collection that you’ve identified as part of your hoard.”
He nodded once.
“Plus at least thirty more from Schmiedler’s donations to other institutions,” she went on. “Based on the auction catalogs I found and some… creative sleuthing on Jay’s part.”
Jay waggled his eyebrows. “Never underestimate the power of bored grad students and digitized archives.”
“Those are just the ones with paper trails,” Isla added. “Schmiedler was sloppy. He bought things under the table. Some pieces may be in private collections we don’t even know about.”
Cael’s jaw clenched.
“But…” She held up a hand. “We start small. Here. Now. These four.”
She slid a list across the table toward him.
“Sword,” she said. “Chalice. Necklace. One of the reliquaries. They’re all in the same wing. They all have relatively simple mounts. We… *could* remove them without triggering alarms, if we’re careful. And we… might be able to make it look like a cataloging error for a little while.”
Tim raised an eyebrow. “Might?”
She grimaced. “We’d have to… fudge some paperwork. Say they’re in the lab for treatment. Or out on a study loan. It would only buy us a week or two before someone noticed there’s no actual loan agreement or treatment report. But it’s… something.”
Cael’s fingers brushed the list.
His breath hitched almost inaudibly.
“You would… give them to me,” he said.
The way he said it—soft, surprised, almost reverent—twisted something in her chest.
“Don’t get sentimental,” she said gruffly. “This is triage.”
He looked up at her.
The force of his gaze felt like a hand on the back of her neck.
“You would still give them,” he said.
She swallowed.
“I’m not doing this for you,” she said.
His lips curved.
“Liar,” he said gently.
Her cheeks flamed.
Tim cleared his throat loudly.
“Timing is everything,” he said. “We do this after closing. Before the night crew does their rounds. I can reroute one of the camera feeds for a few minutes without raising alarms. Jay can cover for Sam in the sub-basement, make sure no one wanders down unexpectedly. Isla, you’re our in. You know the cases. How long it takes to get into them. What we need to watch for.”
Her palms went clammy.
She’d opened a hundred display cases in her career. For cleaning. For treatment. For rotation.
She’d *never* done it with the intent to remove something off the books.
“I can get them out,” she said quietly. “Quickly. Safely.”
Cael’s eyes darkened.
He leaned forward, forearms braced on his thighs.
“Then do it,” he said.
She met his gaze.
“Under one condition,” she said.
He raised an eyebrow. “Condition.”
“You don’t leave,” she said. “Not yet. You don’t take them and vanish. You stay. You… work with us. No going rogue. No… impulse burning.”
His mouth twitched.
“You do not trust me,” he said.
“Not as far as I can throw you,” she said.
“You could not throw me at all,” he said smugly.
She scowled.
“You want your hoard back?” she said. “You play by our rules.”
He leaned back slowly, studying her.
She refused to look away.
Finally, he inclined his head.
“For now,” he said.
It wasn’t perfect.
It was something.
Tim let out a breath he’d clearly been holding.
“Okay,” he said. “We’ve got about two hours before closing. Isla, you go pretend everything is normal. Don’t change your routine. Don’t give anyone a reason to look at you twice. Jay and I will get the security side prepped. Cael…”
He hesitated.
“You sit here and don’t set anything on fire,” Jay supplied.
Cael made a low, offended noise.
Isla stood on unsteady legs.
As she reached for her mug, her fingers brushed Cael’s hand.
A jolt shot up her arm.
For a second, the staff lounge vanished.
She was… somewhere else.
Darkness pressed in on all sides.
Under her bare feet, coins shifted—a million small metallic whispers. The air smelled like stone and smoke and some wild, sharp scent she couldn’t name.
A low, steady heartbeat thrummed through the world.
*Ours,* a voice in her head whispered.
She yanked her hand back.
The mug wobbled.
Liquid sloshed over her fingers, hot and real and dragging her back.
She sucked in a breath.
Cael stared at her, eyes wide.
“You felt that,” he said.
“Yes,” she said hoarsely.
He exhaled.
“So,” he murmured. “It begins.”
***
End of Chapter Three.
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