Page 65 of Connor and the Dragons

I nodded. “We’ll formulate a plan once we understand the obstacles. Kessrin, tonight, your job is to keep Harrowgate on the hook. Flirt, appear open to his advances, but coy all the same.”

“Very coy. So coy he’d better not fucking touch you,” Oallian muttered.

Kess blushed. “Okay.”

“Oallian, your job is to protect Kessrin.”

Oallian nodded curtly.

“And if there’s any sign of real danger, you two transform, we flee, and do our best to make the night look like a dragon hoard grab.”

“Connor, they can’t see us.”

“How would they know where two dragons come from?” I said. “There’s no link back to Qoksmere.”

Oallian nodded. “We’re wild dragons building our hoard. Grab everything. Paintings, plate, jewelry, whatever’s loose and shiny. And we can tuck the mirror into the mess.”

“Right. But I’d rather something cleaner, safer. So let’s hope we find something tonight that helps us strategize. None of it is worth either of you getting hurt.”

“Or you,” Kessrin said, still looking out the window.

“Kess. It’s easier for me to slip out in the aftermath, just a stray human. No one will even notice me.”

“You will ride me.” He said it the way he said the number of articles in a treaty. “I will keep you safe.”

Oallian’s eyes went very wide. “I would also offer you my back. I am extremely comfortable.”

“Noted. But you will escape without me if you must,” I said firmly.

Neither dragon answered.

I huffed out a breath. “Disobedient brats.”

“You may punish us later,” Kessrin said, meeting my eyes. “Thoroughly.”

The carriage turned off the main road and started up a long drive between two rows of trees, and none of us said anything the rest of the way.

The house was enormous.

It sat up on the rise behind a stone wall with its whole front lit with some sort of magical lanterns. There was gold leaf on the ironwork of the gate, and the windows on the second floor ran from the floor to the ceiling. It was the sort of grand, beautiful house we studied in architectural history classes, except the textbook plates had never come with gold leaf and lanterns lit by magic.

I frowned, thinking about how Alistair Harrowgate had come to be alone in it. If the man wasn’t trying to seduce Kess away from me, I might feel a twinge of sadness for him.

A man at the gate asked for the password and I gave it, and the hired coach dropped us on the circular drive. We climbed a staircase wide enough to drive a car up, and I did my best to look like a man who saw houses this size in his everyday life.

The party was not forty people.

Alistair Harrowgate had targeted us, targeted Kess, and invited a few other people like they were an afterthought. The afterthoughts were sprawled on a few clusters of sofas at the other end of the room, and none of them cared that we had arrived. A man and a woman were fucking slowly on a couch by the near fire while two other guests watched. Nobody looked up except for Alistair Harrowgate himself.

Harrowgate sprang to his feet the moment the butler announced our arrival, and guided us away from the action, greeting us and welcoming us to his home, and not bothering to explain how different his party was from what he’d described.

He took Kessrin’s arm and led the three of us back to a more private alcove. Kessrin somehow managed not to turn the man into a block of ice, though I suspected it was a close call.

As Harrowgate gestured for us to sit, I firmly took Kess’s hand and pulled him into a small settee with me. Oallian kneeled at my feet without being asked, casting a worried glance at Kess, then very carefully sliding his hand around the ice dragon’s calf.

“Are we not joining the… festivities?” I asked, eying the guests across the room.

“It is just that I wanted to ask you more about your control of frost,” Harrowgate said, taking a chair across from us. He moved with the casual grace of someone born into wealth and privilege, and he never once turned his back on me.