3. Rafe #2
I kept my face still and my hands where they were.
Over the years, without warning, she’d given us fragments: a cup, a harbor, a painted screen, a name that surfaced bright as a coin and gone just as fast. Always something that had been loved, then lost. Something that had been passed down for generations only to be surrendered for survival.
She turned suddenly, peering at me with playful severity. “If you’re going to brood, at least eat a biscuit.”
“I wasn’t aware I was brooding.” I took a biscuit to humor her. She watched until I took a bite, then nodded, appeased.
There were days I left these rooms feeling flayed and furious.
Then there were days when I left feeling so grateful for what remained of her that the gratitude itself was like a wound.
Today, oddly, I felt steadier than usual.
Saddened, yes. But also held inside the strange, shifting architecture of her love.
When I had finished my tea, I set my cup and the biscuit plate back on the tray. My mother kept her cup balanced between both hands, still watching the garden.
She looked up at me. “You’ll tell him.”
“Tell who what?”
Her eyes narrowed slightly, as though I were being dense on purpose. “Your father. About the thing you want.”
I paused. She had no possible way of knowing about the call I was expecting. Or perhaps she did, in the only way that mattered: she’d seen my face and recognized my desire under all the rest of it.
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll tell him.”
“Good.” She leaned back into her chair and closed her eyes, a faint smile on her lips. “He likes when you ask for things.”
I stood there a second longer than necessary, tray in my hands, looking at her.
“Don’t stand there like a portrait,” she said without opening her eyes. “Go on.”
I adjusted the tray. “You’re dismissing me?”
“I’m resting before your father arrives and pretends I haven’t already had better company.”
Laughing, I bent and kissed the top of her head, which smelled faintly like jasmine oil. “Goodbye, Mama.”
Her eyes opened. For one startling instant, they were clear.
“Be happy where you can, Rafe,” she said. “It’s harder work than sorrow, but much better for you.”
As fast as it had come, the moment passed. Her gaze drifted toward the window, and she went back to that place where none of us could follow.
I carried the tray to the door and stepped into the corridor just as my father turned the corner, already loosening his cuffs, a question in his expression and love written all through his hurry.
My father belonged in his own skin in a way I never had.
He was wolf to the bone, easily accepted in the pack, visible to everyone who mattered in that world.
I’d been born with enough from him to feel the shape of it—the healing, the pack instincts—but never the form itself.
When I shifted, I shifted into a dragon, passed down from my mother’s lineage.
That had made me interesting to people when I was young, which was not the same thing as being accepted by them.
Among the pack, I was Rafael Virelli’s son, which had granted me a place before I had earned one and made certain wolves resent my privilege.
I learned the ropes early. I could be useful.
Useful was measurable. Being useful kept people from asking, too plainly, what I was meant to be when I was the successor to a pack I could never run with.
There was no dragon equivalent waiting on the other side of that discomfort.
No clan my mother and I could visit for holidays.
No room full of elders who knew the old ways, no cousins shifting in the sky above some ancestral field, no easy place where my fire made me extraordinary.
What remained of dragons was a family unit here, a widow there, a few bloodlines guarded by money or secrecy or both.
I was too much wolf for those who wanted dragons untouched by other blood. Too much dragon for wolves who thought alpha-ship should arrive on four paws. As a result, I had spent most of my life trying to be impressive for people who had not quite claimed me.
My father took the tray from me and kept it balanced in one hand while he glanced through the open parlor doors.
My mother had turned back toward the window, the light settling along one side of her face, her teacup balanced in her hands as though the whole afternoon had agreed to hold still for her a little longer.
“How is she?” he asked.
“She’s well,” I said. “She’s waiting for you.”
The tension in his face eased.
That, more than anything, was how one knew what sort of man he was.
There were wolves in his world who prized intimidation and obvious dominance.
My father could do all of that if pressed.
He simply preferred not to waste the effort.
With my mother, especially, his love had long since shed any need to posture.
He nodded toward the side office I’d begun using after my mother’s wandering worsened. “You said you wanted to discuss something with me.”
I glanced toward the office door, where I knew the phone might start ringing any minute now. I’d wanted to tell my father about the first real step in a search I’d spent years telling myself I would begin later, once I had more time and better justification than simple longing.
“Yes,” I said.
He waited. That was another of my father’s habits. He never rushed me when I was already resisting myself. He simply stood there, large and self-possessed and patient enough to make evasion feel childish.
We moved only as far as the pair of windows beside the parlor doors, close enough that he could still see my mother’s chair when he glanced back.
“You’ve contacted the law firm?” he asked.
I cocked an eyebrow. “You said your contact recommended a well-known family-law firm.”
“He did.”
I glanced at him. “You sound unconvinced.”
“I’m cautious.” He shifted the tray, getting a firmer grip on it. “I thought you might prefer someone more scholarly.”
“Scholars haven’t had much success getting museums to answer my letters.”
“No.” He looked ahead a moment, his mouth tilting just faintly. “They do tend to enjoy the sound of their own ethics more than the practice of them.”
That nearly made me smile.
Late-afternoon light lay across the small stretch of corridor between us and the parlor. The house was quiet around us except for one of the staff tuning the piano downstairs.
“What is it you’re hoping this firm can do?” my father asked.
I took a breath. It sounded childish every time I tried to articulate it out loud. Not the legal work, of course, that part was straightforward enough. It was the desire beneath it that I’d spent so much time containing that still felt embarrassingly raw.
“I want to recover what was lost,” I said.
He said nothing, which meant he wanted the full answer. I looked toward the window at the far end of the corridor, though there was nothing outside it I needed to see.
“You know my great-grandparents escaped with almost nothing,” I said. “They had already outlived most of the dragons they knew. Then the war did the rest. By the time my grandfather was grown, he had inherited pieces of a life without the world that made sense of them.”
My father listened quietly.
“And I know he passed things and stories on as best he could,” I went on. “Mother has some of them still. Or had them. But so much was traded, sold, scattered, stolen, miscataloged, taken into collections by people who admired the craftsmanship and cared nothing for the family behind it.”
My throat tightened slightly, but I kept my tone even.
“I’m not under any illusion that finding a handful of heirlooms will somehow restore an erased bloodline,” I said.
“But I’m tired of feeling as though my dragon side exists mostly in stories told to me by people who are dead or disappearing.
I would like something of it to be solid.
Something I can hold. Something that says we were here before we were reduced to rarity. ”
I didn’t mention that my cleanest connection to the dragon side was through my mother, and it was slowly slipping in a way that made me feel incredibly alone.
My father was quiet for a long time.
When he finally spoke, there was no surprise on his face. “You should’ve said so sooner.”
I gave him a look. “I’m saying so now.”
“Yes.” He shifted the tray again. “In your famously relaxed, unguarded way.”
I exhaled through my nose, frustration creeping up in me.
He spared me a small smile, then let it fade. “You’ve always done this, Rafe.”
“Done what?”
“Waited until a thing mattered enough to wound you before admitting you wanted it.”
I didn’t answer.