Beside her, Dreya noticed Braden looked as curious as the rest of them.
She grinned. “Maybe I cheated and used my feline night-vision goggles.”
Danica laughed. “Nice try, but like Clayne said, we would have seen the green glow of your eyes.”
John regarded her thoughtfully. “I once heard about a wolf shifter whose nose is so good, she can navigate a dark shoot house like this by scent. Is that what you did?”
Dreya wished her nose was that good. “No, nothing that amazing. I just memorized the building’s floor plan when we did our walkthrough earlier.”
“How’d you know we’d turn out the lights?” Clayne asked.
“I didn’t.” She shrugged. “I memorized it because it’s what I do.”
Braden had holstered his gun and now crossed his arms over his chest with a frown. “What do you mean, it’s what you do?”
“I’m a thief,” she reminded him, then quickly added, “or used to be one. I never knew what kind of safe I was going to run into or what kind of security system a place would have, never mind when I might have needed an alternate escape route. It’s not like I could climb around with a laptop in my backpack, so I memorized everything.”
That explanation didn’t exactly clear up the surprise on the faces around her, especially Braden’s.
“How long do you remember the stuff you commit to memory, like the floor plan of this shoot house?” he asked.
Dreya gave them another shrug. “Pretty much forever, I guess.”
Braden looked even more stunned at that, as did Danica and Clayne. While John seemed equally amazed, he also looked intrigued, like he thought that might be another skill the DCO could have her use.
“That’s even more impressive than your performance in the shoot house then,” Clayne said. “We’ve got the computer analysis of what you guys did in there if you’re interested?”
“Hell, yeah,” Braden said.
Dreya almost laughed at the excitement on his face. He looked like a kid at Christmas.
“I wasn’t just saying that, by the way,” John said to her as Braden joined Clayne and Danica by the computer console inside the small room off the shoot house. “I really am impressed. Not just by what you were able to do today but how you’ve handled yourself since we brought you in. You’ve come a very long way from where you started.”
She snorted. “I don’t know about that. I’ve only been here four days. I haven’t really accomplished much beyond running myself ragged.”
Although if he measured her performance by how far she’d run since she’d gotten here, maybe she had done something. But she doubted that was what he meant.
John smiled. “Trust me, you’ve accomplished much more than you think.” He tilted his head, regarding her thoughtfully. “What do you think of the DCO so far? Can you see yourself fitting in here?”
If someone had told her that she’d be contemplating going to work for a covert government organization, she would have told them they were crazy.
“Maybe,” she admitted. “Though to be honest, I’m still not exactly sure what you expect me to do here.”
John chuckled. “I wasn’t real clear about it that first day, was I? Right now, the goal is simply to find a way for you to use your special skills to make a difference in the world. How exactly we do that is mostly up to you.”
Dreya considered that. “Well, I’m good at two things—designing jewelry and stealing stuff. I’m not sure the DCO has a need for either of those skills.”
It was kind of weird telling her prospective employer something like that, but it wasn’t like he didn’t know she’d been a thief in her other life.
John’s mouth twitched. “Maybe not jewelry designing, but someone who can steal things without getting caught? You’d be surprised how valuable that skill is.”
She glanced at Braden. He was deep in conversation with Clayne and Danica, not paying attention to anything she and John were saying.
“I’m not so sure my partner would agree,” she murmured. “Since he’s a cop and all, I mean.”
John followed her gaze. “How do you like working with Braden?”
She smiled. “Actually, I like it a lot more than I ever thought I would.”
