by Zoe Chant
She was staring at Izzie—Isabelle, he corrected himself—who was making her shy, self-conscious debut in the signature all-white of a newly adult dragon first coming into society. Her gown was embroidered from bodice to train with diamonds and seed pearls. Theo knew from awkward first-hand experience that it would be almost impossible for her to move in it, as weighed down as she was: he’d come within an inch of spilling an entire glass of wine on himself when his time had come, given how heavy the sleeve of his doublet had been. He didn’t intend to ever reveal that to anyone except perhaps Jillian—didn’t even intend to ever reveal that he’d worn a doublet at all, as archaic as he now knew they were in the rest of the world.
He couldn’t see anything that might have alarmed Jillian except—
Oh, of course. Drowning in white silk and satin and velvet and crystalline jewels, Izzie looked like a princess... but she also looked like a seventeen year-old someone was shoving up to the altar.
“There’s no surprise wedding, don’t worry,” Theo said in a low, reassuring voice. He didn’t want anyone nearby to overhear and laugh at Jillian’s misconception, especially since he was sure they’d neither know nor care that it was a perfectly reasonable one. “She’s making her debut. Everyone here dresses like that the first time they appear at a social event as an adult. Now everyone will know to pay her special attention.”
But the look on Jillian’s face didn’t change or even fade. She said, “Her earrings.”
Theo examined them as best as he could at this distance. They were the only slight touch of color on Izzie because they were the only piece of jewelry she wore with visible settings, but no one would have objected to these: they were pure silver spirals adorned with their own pearls. They were distinctive and he liked them enough to note that he wouldn’t mind having a pair of them for Jillian. They would look gorgeous against the soft skin of her throat.
Still, he didn’t think Jillian coveted them badly enough to be this upset by them belonging to someone else.
“What about them?”
“They were my mom’s,” Jillian said. She swallowed. She said each word carefully, like she had to make sure she was pronouncing it right. “My dad gave them to her on their honeymoon, and when they got divorced, she left them behind. She said her new husband could buy her something better.”
“It’s just a coincidence,” Theo said. But all the same he was uneasy.
“Theo—they were handcrafted. Dad paid for them to be made from a sketch my mom drew. There’s nothing else like them.”
He thought back, walking through the Marcus house again in his memory, trying to remember what he’d seen when he’d opened the antique jewelry box in the safe and seen the jewels laid out against the gray velvet. Did he remember these?
Yes. Even then, he’d thought about them swinging gently from Jillian’s ears, little galaxies swirling around, brushing the soft skin of her neck. He had wanted them for her until he’d seen the dislike cramp her face when she saw them.
They had been in the Marcus house before the explosion... and now they were here in Riell.
All at once, he knew what had happened, and a kind of sick anger churned in his stomach.
“I’ll handle this.”
“He’s here,” Jillian said. “He came here. It was him.”
“I know.” He took her hand and raised it to his lips and pressed a kiss against her knuckles: for once, he was the knight and not the dragon, the knight pledging himself to his lady before plunging into battle. “I’m sorry.”
“He almost killed me. He almost killed you.” Her hand tightened into a fist around his fingers and he was surprised at the strength of her grip. “All of that... all of that so he could run and hide here? Pay them to overlook a human?”
That made the music stop. The harpist held her hands poised above the still-reverberating strings; the violinist let her instrument fall from below her chin. Everyone was turned towards them, lips curled at the gauche behavior of the intruder in their midst.
Well, Theo felt his own seething contempt for the crowd. All those childhood stories of the importance of remembering the moral weight of the red-and-gold. All that talk of honor and nobility. All those convictions that they were so superior to the brash, unscrupulous humans who gathered up their possessions greedily and violently. All this decorum, when they were no better at following their laws than anyone else. They were only better at pretending.
“Isabelle!” He let the sound carry. He chose her formal name deliberately. She was an adult now, and she’d come into his company with stolen property.
Isabelle lowered her eyes to the floor. Her face was blanched whiter than her dress. She knew, then, what she had done. She knew what she was wearing.
“Where did you get them?”
“You know where I got them, cousin,” Isabelle said quietly. And then she did surprise him by lifting her head and meeting his gaze directly with flinty challenge in her eyes. “And if you think about it for more than a minute before making a scene, you’ll know why I wore them, too.”
That was optimistic of her. He didn’t.
But Jillian did. She said, “It’s your parents?”
Of course. Dragons valued family loyalty as one of the first and most important parts of honor. Isabelle wouldn’t have felt she could come to a distant cousin, no matter how well-liked in her childhood, with a story about her parents. Theo’s closest family had been gone too long for him to remember that. Jillian, of course, had never been allowed to forget that complicated pull.
Izzie had put on the earrings and worn them where Jillian would see them hoping that Jillian would notice and identify them. Brave girl.
He could see Izzie’s parents silhouetted against the far wall. Her mother was crying and her father looked like all he wanted to do was swoop forward and snap Izzie up in his mouth. No wonder she had been afraid to do anything but sneakily wear the earrings. These people were his cousins, too—had been his cousins—and what had they done?
Theo knew the crowd was waiting for his response. He was the center of attention and for once, he didn’t mind.
“Dimitri and Elizabeth Benoit, I formally accuse you of tainting this community and the honor of our kind by giving aid and shelter to a thief in exchange for his money. For you to have enriched your hoard by injustice is inexcusable. Do you deny the charges?”
Izzie had started to cry. Jillian wrapped her arms around her.
“You little brat,” Dimitri said to his daughter, striding forward. His eyes had flared into an ugly, vicious yellow. “After all we’ve done for you.”
“Cousin Theo is hurt!” Izzie said, without lifting her head off Jillian’s shoulder. “He almost died because of what that man did, and his mate might have died too, and you didn’t even care.”
“He is barely a cousin,” Dimitri said dismissively. He looked at Theo and hissed. “You call me a traitor to our honor for taking gold from a human who has done no harm to us, but you can mate with one? His daughter? If he is dishonorable, so is she. The same blood runs in her veins.”
“The same blood runs in mine as runs in yours,” Theo said. “And I sever any connection with you. Gordon Marcus is a thief and a liar who hurt the poor. Do we live up to our own standards for honor, or do sell the worth of dragons to whoever brings us gold?”
He looked at Jillian. She hadn’t let go of Izzie. Right now, she didn’t care about their ruined evening. All she cared about was helping a scared, sobbing girl.
All Jillian cared about was someone’s heart. That was all he cared about as well. It was what these people had brought him up to care about, even if they didn’t know it. He hadn’t come out of nowhere. He had come out of the valley of Riell, and he had to believe that there was good here. That there was honor.
If they turned from him now, he didn’t know what he would do, and then, with a cool certainty, he did. He would walk away from them. He would take Jillian—and Izzie too, if she wanted to go—and he wo
uld go back to his world. His friends. His home.
Then, slowly, Izzie’s mother raised her hand. She looked so nervous, like a girl about to volunteer an answer she thought might be wrong.
Elizabeth Benoit said, “I want to bring him here. You can return him to face justice, can’t you? You do such things now.”
Jillian spoke before Theo could. “Yes. He does that now.”
“I’m sorry,” Elizabeth said, and what shocked Theo was that she said it directly to Jillian and Izzie. “I hurt you, my darling, and I put you in a position where you would have to risk hurting this woman. You chose not to, because your honor outstrips mine. If I still had the right to be proud of you, I would proclaim that pride to this whole room.”
All of Isabelle’s teenaged cool deserted her. “Mother!” she cried out. She ran across the room and tucked herself into Elizabeth’s arms.
“I’m sorry, Miss Marcus,” Elizabeth said over her daughter’s shoulder. “No amount of treasure would have been worth this pain.”
“Thank you,” Jillian said quietly.
It seemed that Elizabeth’s speech had tipped the balance of the room, because Dimitri was seized and held while Elizabeth disappeared. Theo spent the time she was gone wondering if she really would come back. He wanted to believe that she would.
She did. He saw that in Jillian’s face before he saw them in the door. He saw Jillian’s eyes as she saw her father again.
13
Jillian
“Dad?”
He looked older than she remembered, and he was a man who had kept his youth far longer than most. These days, when she looked into the mirror and saw the crow’s feet starting to form at the corners of her eyes, she thought she knew why.
He had never worried, never once. He had never done all the work he’d claimed to do. He had taken the easiest possible way every time, even when it came to facing justice or running. All that had aged him now had been losing... losing, and having to destroy what he had loved. She knew all of that.
But it still hurt her, somehow, to see him with his once thick silver hair turned thin and dingy gray. His muscles, hard from squash and racquetball and swimming, had softened, taking away the strong tone of his body. He had a scruffy beard that she thought was less of a disguise and more of an indication that he, who had always taken so much pride in his appearance, had given up on his daily shave.
All the accusations she had hurled at him over the years had never hit the mark. She had never left a dent. Only now did he look his age.
He was looking at her as if he, too, barely recognized her. “Jillian?”
He had never called her Jilly. Only Tiffani had ever done that.
The room around them was so quiet. Why did all of these people, so serenely comfortable and superior up until now, suddenly care what she had to say? She hadn’t wanted their attention. All she had demanded was enough goodwill to get Theo the help he needed—Dr. Mendoza’s friendship and Isabelle’s wary liking had been wonderful only because they’d been freely given. She didn’t want respect she would have to steal. She didn’t want to be notable to them only because of this.
But here she was. At last, they were listening to her. All at once she understood why Theo had always felt so much pressure out in the real world. When you were the only one of your kind, you knew they wanted you to be perfect.
Or you thought they wanted that. Theo’s friends hadn’t.
Isabelle hadn’t. Dr. Mendoza hadn’t. Maybe Isabelle’s mom felt the same way. Maybe some others in this room did, too.
Any place that Theo loved had to be full of good people. Thinking that let her trust them all enough to speak in front of them, to be more vulnerable than she’d ever been.
“I was in the house,” she said. “I was standing in my bedroom when the bomb went off. If Theo hadn’t been with me—if Theo hadn’t been with me and been a dragon—we’d both be dead. And do you know why we were there in the first place? I came back because I wanted to say goodbye to you.”
His eyes were wet. She hated him a little for staying on the other side of the room. He didn’t want to walk the gauntlet of all these people who disapproved of him. He didn’t want to come closer to her anger and heartbreak. He had always taken the easy way out. She supposed she should be grateful that at least with her he was sorry about it, but she wasn’t. She wasn’t grateful at all.
“I didn’t even think you’d come back in the first place,” her dad said. His voice was as buttery rich as she’d remembered it: the voice of a man who could talk anyone into anything. A born salesman. No amount of shock could break that born-for-radio quality of his. “I threw that brick through the window so you and Tiffani would leave. I didn’t want either one of you to get hurt.”
“Good,” Jillian said. “I’m glad there are at least a couple people in the world you didn’t want to hurt. But you know what? You still did hurt us.”
Theo took her hand. He wasn’t interfering—after all, he was a dragon, not a knight in shining armor. He knew that some battles had to be fought and won alone.
He just wanted to be there for her.
She wanted, absurdly, to ask her dad to go into the mechanics of all of this, their own personal locked-room near-murder mystery. Had he planted the bomb first, using his own key to get into the house, and then come back later to get the nutcracker, breaking in and disarming the security? Or had he done it all in the night?
It did matter to her, on some level. She wanted to know if he’d let her spend the night in a house that had a bomb inside it. But maybe Theo’s office would be able to figure that out—maybe the security company would show whether or not the alarm had ever been triggered at all. And maybe, in the end, she didn’t want to know. Not that.
But there was something she did want to know. She thought she could stand knowing it even if the answer was as bad as she thought it would be.
He would lie if she gave him the chance, so she didn’t lead him in any particular direction. She acted like the perfect lawyer he’d always wanted her to be.
Only to him, of course, she was on the wrong side.
“What did you take? Out of the boxes, what did you take?”
She didn’t trust him but she still, despite everything, loved him. She wanted him to say that he’d come back for the ceramic plate she’d made for him in second grade, the one with her handprints in it. That he’d come back for her graduation photo. Or not even something of hers—she would settle for more proof that he’d ever loved anyone besides himself at all. He could say that he’d taken one of Tiffani’s scarves to have something to remember her by. That he’d taken his first wedding ring, the one he’d kept in a wooden box on the bookshelf. Or, shit, that he’d taken a photo of the only dog they’d ever had.
Anything. Along with all the earrings and whatever other valuables he’d taken to bribe his way into Riell, she wanted to know if he’d taken anything that showed that the life that he’d had with them had meant something to him.
She wanted more proof that he loved her than that he hadn’t wanted her to die.
But her dad just looked confused, like he was in the middle of a pop quiz he wasn’t prepared for.
All Theo had asked of his community was honor. She was asking for love. Was that more to ask or less? And did it matter, since he wouldn’t give her what she wanted anyway? Since he couldn’t give her love or honor?
Her dad said, “Just some things I couldn’t stand to see getting sold. Of course, it had to all be able to fit into a duffel bag.” He said this like that was the hugest injustice of them all. “I could only take one of the nutcrackers—that’s a hell of a thing, Jillian, having to let go of something you’d spent your whole life building up, something that showed your progress. Other than that, just enough to buy my way into here. Dimitri and I did some business together a while back and I always remembered what he told me about this place, how plush it is. I called him and he came and got me. For a price, of course.”
She would give him this, at least: he didn’t say that last part like he resented it. He wasn’t entirely a hypocrite. All he cared about was money and he thought it was fine for that to be all somebody else cared about, too. The whole wedge in their relationship had been that it wasn’t all that she cared about. He had never understood that.
He had never understood her at all. Even now, he didn’t know what she wanted from him.
Well, there it was. She had come back to the house for him, but he hadn’t come back to the house for her. That was all she’d wanted to know, even if she’d already known it. Theo had Riell back on his side—he’d claimed Isabelle and Dr. Mendoza and now maybe Elizabeth too—but she had no one but him.
She was glad, down to her bones, that he was enough. That he could fill up her heart.
But then, to her surprise, Isabelle crossed the room yet again and attached herself to Jillian, hugging her as fiercely as Jillian had hugged her before. She couldn’t believe she had ever thought this girl was an icy, reserved dragon princess.
Isabelle was the one who saw tears and ran towards them instead of away.
“I’m sorry your father is such a scoundrel,” Isabelle said. “I wish I could do something for you. I’m sorry. I thought you would want to know.”
Jillian rubbed her back. “You did the right then, honey. Absolutely.”
“I had to!” Isabelle said. “We’re practically sisters-in-law!”
“Distant cousin?” Jillian mouthed at Theo, who gave her a small smile and an even smaller shrug, as if to say, Kids, go figure. She liked that look on him, the look that suggested the two of them could nonchalantly but lovingly unite against the forces of kids and parents everywhere. He seemed touched that Isabelle had impulsively claimed him as a brother.
For a second, she’d forgotten about her dad. Then, when she looked up and remembered him, she felt, if anything, sorry for him. Who did he have? Tiffani had rightly walked away from him. She doubted she herself would ever be making regular visits to see him in prison. His only allies were the ones he’d bought, and they’d betrayed him the second it was no longer convenient. And he’d only been able to save one of his precious, creepy nutcrackers.