Chapter 26 #2
"Direct. I appreciate that in a commodity." He pulled the chair to the center of the room and sat, crossed his legs, and rested his hands on his knee. "You are alive because dead witnesses have no value, and living ones have a great deal.
As you can tell from the attack on the Vaethari Hold this morning, Prince Dáinn wants the testimony silenced.
I want Prince Dáinn in my debt. You are the currency that accomplishes both.
" He tilted his head. The motion was almost gentle.
"Leverage, Lady Vaethari. You are leverage.
A dead woman in a burned estate is a tragedy.
A living woman in my custody is a conversation. "
"You're a monster."
"I don't mind that word." He smiled. The smile was the worst thing about him — warm, paternal, a smile that made you want to trust it even when you knew what lived behind it.
"Being a monster is useful. Being a monster is powerful.
Being a monster means no one ever makes the mistake of thinking you are something manageable. "
He uncrossed his legs and leaned forward.
"I sold Rhaezon when he was seven years old.
Did he tell you that? The last Vaethari heir.
One of the few remaining full-shifting bloodlines that could rival mine, and the Council placed him in my care like a gift.
They practically wrapped him." The warmth in his voice did not change.
"I gave him to the Crimson Ledger within the year.
They were grateful for the acquisition. Strong Drakonblood, full shifting capacity, a child young enough to be shaped into whatever they needed.
He was very useful to many people for a very long time. "
November's nails cut into her palms.
"And now, here we are. Rhaezon is going to lose his second mate." Varek stood. Straightened his coat. "Drakon-kind bond forever, and so few get to suffer so much in a single lifetime. There is a sort of poetic beauty in it, don't you think?"
He moved to the door. "I expect Prince Dáinn's comm shortly. Once he gives me what I require, your suffering will end quickly. I am not, despite what you might believe, a man who enjoys prolonging these things."
Caeden stepped away from the wall. "Killing her wasn't part of the plan. You said we were keeping her for leverage. To make sure the prince keeps his word."
"Plans change, Caeden."
"You said—"
"I said what I needed to say. You did your part admirably. And when Dáinn's kept his end of our bargain, we'll be rid of her."
"She's a person. She's not—"
"She is a human." Lord Varek's patience evaporated.
"A worthless, breakable, mortal creature that your halfblooded adversary dragged into his bed because he was too damaged to find a proper mate.
Does it disturb you that she resembles Saevra?
It should. He replaced her with a wingless beast, and you cannot muster the stomach to put it down.
" A beat. "You are such a disappointment, Caeden.
I will find someone else up to the task. "
The door slamming behind Caeden as he left the room shook dust from the ceiling. Footsteps retreated down the hall, and then nothing.
Varek watched the door for a long moment after his son had gone.
When he turned back to November, his face had arranged itself again into something almost grandfatherly.
"Forgive him. Our children never understand the burden we carry for them.
" He adjusted his cuff. "One spends a lifetime building something worth inheriting, and they arrive at adulthood imagining themselves the moral authority on how it was built. "
November kept her hands still in her lap.
"Do not trouble yourself with what you've heard, Lady Vaethari.
" His smile returned, warm as a hearth. "I am not a cruel man.
Whatever else you have been told about me today, believe this — your suffering will end quickly.
You have my word on it." The door closed behind him, and the sound of the bolt locking in place echoed in the room.
November sat in the quiet. Varek's voice echoed: Your suffering will end quickly.
She looked at the locked door. She looked at the narrow window. She looked at her bare feet and her cut hands and Rhaezon's shirt and the scale necklace burning warm against her skin.
She thought about Rhaezon.
Not the fear — not the image of him on the ground, not the blood, not the half-formed shift collapsing.
She thought about him at the breakfast table, bringing her a plate before she asked.
She thought about him in the stable, picking up a brush without a word.
She thought about his hands trembling as they hovered near her face in the tavern doorway: Did he hurt you?
She thought about the plateau, the ancient tree, the way he said her name like it was something he was still learning to deserve.
She knew him. She knew him the way she knew horses — by what he did, not only what he said.
By the thousand small choices that built a man more clearly than any declaration.
He was alive. She knew it the way she knew her own pulse.
He was alive and he was coming for her and she just had to stay breathing until he got here.
She would bet everything on that.
Her hand closed around the scale. Warmth flooded her palm. She straightened her spine. She stopped being afraid. She started looking at the door bolt, the window, the distance between the bed and the wall. She started looking for a way out.
The bolt slid back.
Caeden stepped through. He closed the door behind him and stood with his back against it. He looked at her for a long time.
"I'm not a good man," he said. "But I'm not a monster either. I'm not my father." Something in his jaw worked. "Not yet."
He pulled the door open and held it. "I'll get you out of here. We need to hurry."
She was off the bed before he finished speaking. Her bare feet hit cold stone. Caeden moved into the corridor and she followed, staying close.
The estate was enormous. Pale stone corridors branched and intersected with disorienting uniformity. Their footsteps echoed. Caeden moved fast, taking turns without pausing, a man navigating the house he grew up in on muscle memory.
A roar came from somewhere behind them. Deep. Reverberant. The fury of a Drakon discovering that his cage was empty. The sound traveled through the stone floor and into November's bare feet.
"He knows you're missing." Caeden grabbed her wrist and pulled her left at a junction. "He won't fully shift in here — the corridors are too narrow, the ceilings too low. But he's still dangerous. Run."
She ran. The stone bit at her feet. Glass cuts on her hands opened against the wall as she steadied herself around a corner.
They doubled back once — Caeden's arm across her chest, pressing her flat against the wall as a guard's shadow passed the end of the corridor.
She held her breath. The guard moved on. Caeden pulled her forward again.
The exit was ahead — a heavy wooden door at the end of a long corridor, grey light seeping through the seams. Dawn. She could see it.
Lord Aldric Varek stepped into the corridor between them and the door.
He was partially shifted. Scales covered the left side of his face and ran down his neck. His eyes had gone cold and pale — not amber-gold like Rhaezon's warmth but something silver-white and freezing. His claws were fully extended. He looked at his son.
"You fekking traitor." His register had dropped into something that vibrated the stone. "No better than a halvyn."
Varek's hand slapped across Caeden's face. Not a fist — an open strike, his claws raking lines across his son's cheek. Caeden dropped to his knees, and blood sheeted down his jaw.
"Father, wait—"
Varek did not wait. He turned to November. The silver-white eyes fixed on her with the flat attention of a predator.
"I'll do this myself then."
November's hand flew to her throat. She gripped the chain, pulled, and the clasp broke. The scale came free in her hand, warm and golden and humming with a heat that knew her name.
She brought it to her lips. She said his name.
"Rhaezon."
The scale blazed. Light poured between her fingers, golden amber, the color of his shifted eyes, the color of the fire he carried in his blood and had never once let burn her. She stepped forward and thrust her hand against Varek's face.
The sound he made was not a roar. It was a shriek — high, animal, the sound of Drakon flesh meeting Drakonfire that did not belong to it. He reeled backward, clawing at his eye where the burn had seared through scales and into skin. The smell of scorched tissue filled the corridor.
November grabbed Caeden's arm. He was still on his knees, blood running freely, eyes wide with something that might have been shock or might have been the first clear sight he'd had of his father in years.
"Come on."
She hauled him up. He found his feet, and they ran.
The corridor stretched. The door was close.
Varek's shrieking behind them twisted into something lower, something that shook mortar from the ceiling joints.
She hit the door with both palms. It swung outward.
Dawn light flooded her vision — pale gold, the binary stars just cresting the eastern ridge, the sky the color of a wound healing.
Cold air hit her lungs, and the Aeltharian landscape spread before her, vast and open.
"There she is!"
Davn's voice. Coming from her left, somewhere below the ridge line, raw and ragged.
And from straight ahead — Shade at full gallop with Rhaezon on her back.
He rode low, one hand fisted in the halter, his body angled forward, his right wing streaming behind him like a banner.
His whole being was fixed on her with a completeness that made her chest cavity feel too small for what it contained.
The wall behind her exploded outward.
Stone fragments the size of her torso launched into the morning air. Dust and debris engulfed her and she threw herself sideways, dragging Caeden with her, rolling across rough ground as the world behind them came apart.
Lord Aldric Varek in full shift was enormous.
Pale silver-grey scales covered every inch of him, catching the dawn light with a metallic sheen that made him look like a weapon forged from the plateau itself.
His wingspan cleared the ruined wall on both sides.
His neck extended, serpentine and thick, and the head at the end of it swung toward November with the burn she had given him still smoking across his left eye.
He was done being careful. He was done being subtle.
He was done being the statesman and the politician and the careful, smiling monster in the well-cut coat.
The Drakon opened his mouth and the air between his jaws shimmered with heat.