Free Dragon Soul by Jaida Jones

soon as it had started, it was all over.
    “I require a very special part of the Volstov dragons for my plan,” I heard him say. “Only one survived the crashes at the end of the war. Some foolish creature ran off with this part after the capture of her pilot—thought he’d sell it, no doubt. The trick of it is he actually managed to unload the thing before I caught up with him.
That
is what I need, and it is the only thing I need, aside from your fair personage, of course; I can’t be distracted by every discarded talon and scale scattered about our fair countryside. I’ve calibrated this device to find what I desire, and
only
that. Even a dung beetle should be able to handle so simple a task.”
    I blinked, tears sparking in the corners of my eyes. I wasn’t about to let anyone see me cry, certainly not these bastards, but it was my body reacting to pain and not my heart reacting to any deeper hurt.
    For there, implanted into the palm of my hand, was my treasure. It was the perfect size.
    “You’re going to need some gloves,” the madman said.
ROOK
    The facts, as my fucking blabbermouth brother was so fond of saying, were these:
    That idiot with the broken face knew even less than I’d given him credit for. Either that, or he was the best liar I’d ever seen, but considering some of the shit I’d threatened him with, I doubted it. He didn’t seem like the fucking type.
    He’d bought the scale off some guy living in the Cobalt foothills—the kind of rat bastard who made a profit off of everyone else’s misfortune. When pressed—my boot on his neck and the sound of Thom’s pen scritching away at the page as he took notes like this was a fucking ’Versity class on how to shit-kick information out of somebody—he added that
that
rat bastard had said something about the scale coming fresh from the Ke-Han capital, which was where all the good stuff was being sold these days.
    That was when I’d yanked Ginger up by his collar and held him there until he started turning all sorts of pretty blue and purple. It was a rare fucking son-of-a who could lie through something like that, and I wasn’t about to go waltzing back into Ke-Han territory based on information some Cindy trying to save his own ass fed me.
    And that was pretty much where the transcription had ended too, since Thom had some kind of prissy problem with writing down words when they were being choked out of a prisoner. Prisoner my ass, since Ginger deserved what he was getting, and worse, but in the end none of that mattered.
    He wasn’t lying and he’d told me all he knew.
    He could get out, get lost, get a bunch of his friends to come after me, get revenge, whatever he wanted. I could deal with that; I’d dealt with a whole lot worse.
    Anyway, I didn’t even have to prepare myself because I’d done enough to make Ginger piss himself sideways trying to get away from me, and still I refused to let him go. After the little mother-licking piece of shit fainted I let him drop, storming out of the room and waiting for Thom to follow.
    “What do you think?” I asked. I didn’t have any more room for getting angry, since I’d about taken up all the room in my body already. But if I
had
, I’d have been pretty fucking pissed that I’d stooped to asking my kid brother his opinion on something to do with the corps and my girl.
    Fuck me, but I didn’t have anyone else to ask.
    He was busy folding up his notes like he was just as surprised to geta consult on the subject as I was, but his head flew up like a startled fucking rabbit’s once he caught on. At least he’d held his own in that brawl downstairs, but barely. And my attentions were divided the entire time because
I
needed to be looking out for
him
, which wasn’t anything like brawling used to be.
    “He had little reason to lie to us,” Thom said, rubbing his sleeve over his mouth. There was still ink under his nose, but fuck if I was gonna be the one to point it out. Hell, I