One magic thief, one dragon shifter, and a whole lot of deadly mayhem…

  Myra has made many mistakes in her life. Breaking into a dragon king’s hoard… Not one of her most successful mistakes. As a thief with a touch of magic, though, she adores a good challenge. Unfortunately, the dragon king adores a good repayment for damages done. Not that she even stole anything! They caught her before she could.

  But no one argues with a dragon king. Do the job for him, or suffer the consequences.

  The job in question… Steal back the dragon king’s son.

  Myra never suspects when she reluctantly agrees to the king’s terms that the youngling she’s sent to rescue will turn out to be a sexy hunk of a dragon shifter whose deep voice and outstanding height push all her buttons. Or that her night will turn out so…interesting. Or that escaping his kidnappers will toss them into a deadly race against time.

  But Myra loves a good challenge. Especially an interesting one.

  Dragon Thief

  A Dragon Thief Story

  Dragon Thief

  Book One

  Kat Simons

  DRAGON THIEF

  Copyright © 2023 by Katrina Tipton

  Cover design: © 2024 T&D Publishing

  Cover Art: © Branislav Ostojic, © Vac, © Photovs | Dreamstime.com

  Published by: T&D Publishing

  T&D Publishing: https://www.tanddpublishing.com

  Kat Simons Website: https://www.katsimons.com

  Kat Simons Newsletter: https://bit.ly/KatSimonsNewsletter

  All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously, and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  eBooks are not transferable.

  They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Don’t Miss

  Thank You

  Books By Kat Simons

  More Books by Kat Simons

  About the Author

  To my own tall man. Love you, sweetie.

  And to my heroes in training…

  Who are making fine work of that training.

  One

  Who steals a dragon?

  Myra had stolen a lot of things in her life. Jewels. Magic objects. Money. But a dragon?

  Even she wasn’t that brazen.

  Yet, here she was, breaking into a high security building the middle of downtown Manhattan because someone else had the stupid idea to steal a dragon shifter. Just… Myra wasn’t even sure what to call it. Hutzpah. But that felt too complimentary. Gall felt too weak. Idiocy maybe? Idiocy seemed like a good word.

  She felt like a bit of an idiot, too, for allowing herself to get roped into this.

  But she supposed this was what you got when you messed with a dragon king.

  She crept silently from the closet where she’d used an untraceable, and disposable, laptop to hack into the building’s security system and disable the motion sensors along the routes she needed. She’d also set the security cameras on a loop so they wouldn’t record her activity. The guards outside her destination were going to be a little trickier, but according to the schedule she’d found in the security records, they’d be changing in less than ten minutes which gave her a tiny window of opportunity.

  She just had to get into the locked room. She’d be getting back out again through a route that bypassed those guards.

  If all went to plan, she’d get in, get the dragon king’s son, and get out again without anyone being the wiser. His kidnappers would walk in to discover an empty room, and it would take them a week to figure out how it had all happened.

  But that was if all went to plan.

  Unfortunately, in Myra’s experience, things rarely went to plan.

  She waited in a corridor where she could see the guards outside her destination, but hear the changing guard coming in. There would be a moment, when they stood outside the antechamber exchanging codes and information. Not long. Forty-five seconds maybe. But that should give her enough time to pick the lock and get inside.

  The sounds of the approaching guards had her gut tightening and a small smile played across her mouth. She did love her job. Even the anxiety was a rush.

  Using a little touch of magic to disguise herself—hiding her scent and any visual cues that might give her away to people used to working with shapeshifters—she waited for the guards inside the antechamber to step out and speak with the incoming guards. All of them were large, three men, one woman, every single one dressed in a pants suit, except one of the men who wore a kilt. She admired the fashion sense in what would otherwise be a pretty matched set of individuals.

  She snuck across the hall behind them, relying on her magical screening spell to keep herself hidden, then paused just inside the antechamber and listened. No alerts. No one had heard her.

  So far so good.

  Hurrying to the locked door, she pulled her lockpicks out from inside her multi-pocket vest and knelt down. It wasn’t a complicated lock. Mostly there for show. What they had inside couldn’t be contained with an ordinary door lock.

  She finessed it in fourteen seconds, without even having to use a magical push, and slid inside, quietly closing the door behind her. She relocked the door from inside, just in case someone thought to test it. Then she held perfectly still, her ear to the door, listening as the new guards settled into place with a minimum of conversation.

  When no one sounded an alarm, she took a deep breath and turned to face the room. Smiling. One step down. Now the important part.

  The room was a large, bare, concrete box. The floor, the walls, even the ceiling just bare concrete. No paint or decoration. No rugs or carpets. No wood. Nothing that would easily burn. There were no windows either, even though the room was located on an outside corner of the high-rise.

  The door she’d come through was “wood” on the outside, but inside it was obviously solid steel. From this side, it looked like a vault door. A vault door with a shitty and useless lock, but still pretty solid.

  It wasn’t the lock that was keeping the occupant inside the bare concrete room, though.

  No. That was the chains.

  Because the lights in the room were very low, barely above nightlight for visibility purposes, she heard the chains before she saw them. The dragon king had warned her those would be there. She came prepared. Still, hearing the chink chink against the concrete floor gave her a little shiver. Poor kid.

  She didn’t dare speak until she got closer, because while the guards looked like ordinary humans who relied on more mundane forms of security, they were guards used to working with shifters and might well be shifters themselves. She didn’t dare tempt their hearing. She was only confident they wouldn’t pick up her scent because she’d disguised that to open the door.

  They weren’t the only ones used to working around shifters.

  She wasn’t one herself. Just a garden variety thief. With the right kind of magic to make that job infinitely more fun. But when you went in to steal a certain grade of collectibles, it did put you in the way of shifters as well as other members of the magical community.

  Myra didn’t mind. She liked the challenge.

  Though, as she crept closer to the hunched form opposite the door, huddled under what looked like a thick blanket, she decided dealing with dragons who could breathe fire and crisp her in under a second was not the kind of challenge she wanted to repeat in the future if she could at all help it.

  She stared at that hunched form under the blanket as she approached carefully, wondering if the kid was okay since he wasn’t moving. She had no idea what to expect from the dragon king’s son. She hadn’t even been shown a picture. Something something, no pictures of royal family taken, something something. Hadn’t made sense to her, but whatever. The dragons could do as they liked. She was just told the stolen shifter was the king’s son. And he wasn’t being held for ransom or anything normal like that. Apparently, there was some other nefarious plot afoot. Which the king had also not seen fit to explain to her.

  And that was fine, too. She didn’t need to know what the kidnappers had in mind for the king’s son. She just needed to know where he was so she could get him out. Steal him back, so to speak. Then she got the dragon king off her back for their little misunderstanding, and all would be right in Myra’s world. She could go back to stealing what she wanted to steal.

  The hunched form remained motionless as she neared. She was pretty sure the little guy would know she was here by now, because even though her spell to confuse shifter senses was still in place, she suspected a dragon shifter, even a young one, would just feel someone in the room with them.

  Not taking that into account was what had gotten her into trouble with the dragon king.

  But the closer she got to the king’s son, the more she worried. Was he okay? The king said he was young, but hadn’t said how young, and her imagination conjured images of a shivering, shaking, terrified child trying not to show just how scared he was as he huddled underneath the blanket.

  When she was close enough to whisper without being easily overheard by the guards, she murmured, “Hey, it’s okay. I’m here to get you out. You don’t have to be scared of me. I’m a friend of your dad’s. I’ll have you out of here and back to him soon.”

  The hunched form finally moved a little, so Myra stilled, giving the boy time to adjust to her. She didn’t want him to accidentally fry her with a blast of fire he couldn’t control because of fear.

  But as she watched, the hunched form got larger and larger. And now she worried he was trying to shift inside this concrete room on the fortieth floor of a high-rise building.

  That would be really really bad.

  “Listen, don’t shift. Okay. There’s not enough room.” There were innocent people in this building as well as the thieves. She did not want the place brought down by a youngling dragon shifting and destroying half the building in the process.

  The form unhunched completely as a very deep voice said, “I’m not an idiot and neither are they. I can’t shift, even if I was stupid enough to do it.”

  Myra blinked a few times. That voice sounded very…adult for a kid.

  She blinked a few more times as the hunched form tossed off the blanket that had been covering him.

  Uh.

  That was no youngling kid.

  Two

  The fully grown adult man sitting on the concrete floor was a revelation to Myra, having been under the impression she was here to rescue a child. And wasn’t that the last time she took a dragon king’s phrasing at face value.

  “Youngling my ass,” she muttered as she approached the man. “Do not fry me. Your father did send me.”

  “Why you?”

  “Because I’m an excellent thief,” she murmured as she got close enough to inspect the chains.

  And close enough to get a good look at the king’s son.

  He wasn’t what she might call ordinarily handsome. The messy dark hair and blue eyes were pretty conventionally attractive, she supposed. But his features were too broad, and heavy, and maybe a little too sharp. There was a scar across his jaw, under beard scruff. And another across his forehead.

  He looked a little worse for wear, and not just because his button-down shirt and dress pants were rumpled. He looked like he’d been going a few rounds in the shifter fight club.

  No, not conventionally handsome, like his kingly father. Definitely not pretty.

  But all of it together—his broad face and messy hair and scars—really…worked for him. He didn’t need ordinary handsome. He had something more, something compelling that was…

  Frankly, a little distracting.

  She couldn’t afford to be distracted right now. Breaking magic binding chains took a very special sort of concentration. And they only had a small window of time to make this work.

  “I’ve had my fill of thieves over the last few days,” the dragon muttered. There was a rawness to his voice, like he hadn’t had anything to drink recently.

  “You’ll be rid of me soon enough,” she said. She pulled a bottle of water from one of the myriad pockets in her vest and handed it to him.

  He stared at the bottle for a long moment.

  She waved it at him and held his gaze. “Just water. No spells. I’m a thief, not a wizard. My magic doesn’t do poison or anything like that.”

  “What does your magic do?” he asked as he took the bottle.

  She smiled a little as she looked down at the cuffs on his ankles and the one on his wrist. “Makes locks into puzzle toys,” she murmured.

  The cuffs keeping a fully grown dragon shifter captive weren’t things to be taken lightly, of course. These were made from some of the best quality steel she’d ever seen, infused with a copper alloy that held the magic, which raced over the surface of the cuffs in a swirl of purplish-blue light. The cuffs were attached to chains with links as thick as her forearms, and those were bolted to the floor by more thick, fused metal with lines of magic swirling through it.

  So, not easy. But also, not outside her skill set.

  A little rush of adrenaline-fueled excitement moved through her as she pulled out her lockpick case again.

  “Why can’t I smell you?” the man asked.

  “Spell. Lot of shifters around.” She had most of her attention on the cuffs, but his voice sounded less raw so she assumed he was drinking the water she’d given him.

  “But you’re not a wizard?”

  “No wizard magic. Just thief magic.” She grinned at him. “Don’t worry. I’m a good thief.”

  “Is that why my father sent you?”

  She winced inwardly. “Mostly.”

  “What does mostly mean?”

  “Shh. I have to concentrate.” She returned her attention to the cuffs, and her leather lockpick satchel as she selected her tools.

  “No one shushes me.”

  “Maybe they should. You’re not very good at it.” She pulled out two long, thin picks, then set her fingers against the ankle cuff. Shook her head. Replaced the two picks and pulled out another two. Yes, those would do.

  “I’m a king’s son and a dragon shifter. No one shushes me.”

  She let out a deep, impatient breath and met his gaze again. “Listen, do you want out of here or not?”

  “I want out of here.”

  “Then hush. I have to focus. And we only have so much time.”

  His eyes narrowed, but he didn’t speak again.

  “Finally,” she muttered. Then she set to work on the locks.

  Not her best time. The ankle cuffs took a little more finessing than she’d hoped and there was a moment there when she actually worried a little. But still, in under ten minutes she had him completely free and was setting the magic infused cuffs gently aside.

  “Don’t burn anything, and don’t shift,” she said as the man stretched his legs out and gave his body a big shake.

  “I’m not an idiot,” he said, glaring at her.

  “Just have to make sure. Dragons…” She waved her hand in the air and hoped that explained everything.

  From the way his gaze narrowed further, she assumed it hadn’t. Or he was just unhappy with the explanation.

  Either way, they didn’t have time for her to sort through his grumpy facial expression. “Can you stand? Do you need help?”

  She had no idea how long he’d been chained in place, and the chains weren’t long enough to have allowed for a wide range of movement. He’d been taken a week ago. If he’d been chained in this spot for all that time, he would probably be pretty sore and stiff.

  “I can stand,” he said, giving her a condescending look.

  She snorted and shook her head. “Lot of smugness for someone who went and got themselves stolen.”

  She stood back while he climbed to his feet, using the wall behind him to push upward. She collected his empty water bottle from the floor so he wouldn’t have to bend down again, and slid the crumpled plastic into one of her inner pockets for later recycling.

  His full height was something to behold. She wasn’t what one might call tall. In fact, she had to stretch to reach medium. He, on the other hand, was… Well, tall was an understatement.

  And that was going to complicate things.

  She scowled. Glanced back at the door. No one seemed to have noticed them yet, which was good. But her escape plan had just taken a hit.

  “Your dad should have warned me you weren’t a kid,” she muttered under her breath.

  “He implied I was a child?”

  “He called you a youngling.” She faced him again, moving close enough to make sure they could speak quietly. He wasn’t as stinky as she’d have expected after being held captive for a week in a concrete room. Little ripe, but not the sort of pungent sweat and fear stench she’d have expected. “Failed to give me your name, too. Lot of ‘my son’ but not a lot of name usage. What’s your name?”

 

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