“No, I was going to use you as bait.”
“You were going to feed me to a dragon.”
“What? No, I wasn’t. I needed help catching a dragon. For work. I told you this last night.”
Nicole must be seriously messed up in the head if she thinks that’s what happened last night. She said she was going to use me as bait. She said she’d lost her partner.
Unless...
Did I seriously freak out on her and completely misread the situation?
Is there a chance I overreacted to what she said?
It was dark, and I was tired, and there was so much going on. I did freak out at their weird bitchiness, but maybe they weren’t actually trying to murder me. Perhaps Bernie and Nicole’s social skills were pretty fucked up when we met, but were they actually going to hurt me?
Did I panic?
“Why did you need to catch a dragon?” I ask her quietly. “And how was I supposed to help?”
“I’ve never done this before,” Nicole shrugs. “Bernie is the experienced one.”
“You’re new to the organization?”
She’s talking. That’s good. Lawrence might be busy flying, but I know he’s also listening attentively to everything she’s saying. He needs to know as much as he can about Lucky and what Nicole was doing working for them in order to help his clan.
“Brand spanking,” she says. “This is my first week.”
“And they already sent you on an assignment?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Apparently, I super fucked it up. We were supposed to come out into the woods. There are dragons here and a lot of them need help. We were supposed to get one and then contact our team members to help us bring it in.” She shakes her head, and Nicole sounds almost sad.
“What was up with the drinking thing?”
“What do you mean?”
“You guys tried to drug me.”
“That was Bernie. I don’t know what she was doing.”
“Then why did you chase after me?”
“You didn’t really give me a chance to explain...I wanted help. Bernie was obviously going nuts. I had a bad feeling about her before, but the way she acted when you ran off...I had to explain everything to you. I wanted you to help me.”
“Catch a dragon?”
“Yeah.”
“It sounds fake.”
“I didn’t want to hurt you,” Nicole says.
“You kind of seemed like a raging bitch.”
“Yeah, well, I was pretty pissed at Bernie. Sorry I went nuts on you.” She shakes her head. “If I didn’t know the dragons were going to kill me, I’d be bummed about losing my job. I’ve never worked in such a stressful environment before. I guess everything just kind of hit me at once.”
“What do you mean? Losing your job? Why would you lose your job?”
“You really think they’re going to let me keep working for them after this fiasco? Instead of catching a sick dragon who needs help, I managed to get captured by one and his human mate.”