Chapter Twenty-three
DOMINIC
“Is your father away?” Ben asked as we made our way back to the records room from supper, stomachs happily full of Glenys’s chicken casserole and rhubarb crumble.
“He’s off meeting some of the other Welsh families,” I said.
For once, he’d actually told me what he was doing.
When we’d been driving back from Anne’s, he’d mentioned he was taking a week to go and hold talks with three other families.
He was taking Dylan with him, his cousin and effectively his deputy. The role that should have been mine.
I couldn’t remember a time when our family had spoken to anyone except the Gruffs, the Spencers, and the Bowens, my mother’s family.
The dragon wars had left behind a scattering of fragile alliances.
Enough to let dragons find partners outside their own bloodlines, but not much else.
This burst of social activity wasn’t like us at all.
“Are your meetings to do with whatever Abimelech Mortimer’s up to?” I’d asked Rhodri, when he’d told me.
He’d been silent a while, the only sound the swish of tyres on wet road. “Let’s just say we’re considering our responses to anything he might have in mind.”
Somehow, he read my subsequent silence, because he glanced sideways at me. “What?”
I shifted in my seat. “I was just wondering if this is what he wants us to do. If we’re playing into his hands by coordinating with the other Welsh families this way.”
His hands tightened on the wheel. “Go on.”
I paused, because he hadn’t sounded as if he wanted to hear what I was thinking. I’d need to be careful with my phrasing.
“If we form a Welsh-family bloc, that separates us from the English dragons.” The ones who outnumbered us vastly.
“Not having English allies might leave us vulnerable. That’s all,” I added, and hated myself for doing so.
But I didn’t particularly want him to pull the car over and turf me out in the middle of nowhere on a dark rainy night because I’d questioned his decision.
“I’ll read you in on my conversations when I return,” Rhodri said, then switched on the radio. Classical music had filled the car as I’d relaxed—as much as was possible in that damn bucket seat—and tried not to smile at the prospect of being involved. Of being trusted.
Ben was frowning as he opened the door to the records room. An occupational hazard when thinking or talking about Rhodri. “I should go and see him when he returns, I suppose,” he said. “Fill him in on what I’ve found so far.”
He sounded reluctant. I didn’t blame him. “Or you could wait until he asks,” I pointed out.
“Seems as though he’s quite busy at the moment,” Ben agreed, and I thought that was a first, his being willing to put off something he should be doing, just because he didn’t want to do it. I shouldn’t be surprised. Rhodri had that effect on people.
Ben almost instantly lost himself in work again, while I slouched in my chair and idly picked up an occasional piece of paper, pretending to look at it.
But I was really watching Ben. Again. Because, Christ—I couldn’t stop thinking about last night.
About Ben flat on the wet grass beneath me, dragging me down on top of him with none of his usual restraint anywhere in sight.
People had wanted me before, plenty of them. But no one had ever looked at me the way Ben had in the ruins, as though I was the only thing that mattered to him. All that careful self-control had gone, leaving only honesty. It did something to my insides that felt vaguely calamitous.
“Why are you staring at me?” Ben asked suddenly without looking up.
“Who says I’m staring?”
“The fact I can physically feel it happening.”
I grinned despite myself and finally looked down at the records in front of me.
Which turned out to be a mistake. A sodding awful one.
Estate records from the 1870s had somehow become disordered enough to number among their pages a far newer piece of paper.
One with my mother’s details. Her date of birth.
Marriage to my father. My birth. And then her death.
Sepsis, it said, for the cause. I hadn’t even known that, just that she’d been unwell one day, gone to hospital and never came home.
And now her life was reduced to a single entry in an archive. There was nothing about the way she’d laughed, or her singing, or her love of chocolate—all the things that made her who she was. I couldn’t remember much, but even I knew more than this.
I should have thrown it in the bin. Instead, I kept reading.
BEN
The silence was what made me look up.
Dominic had gone completely still, a piece of paper clenched so tightly in his hand that it rustled faintly in the quiet.
“Dominic?”
For a second, I thought he simply hadn’t heard me. Then he lifted his head, and his expression was wrong. It wasn’t Dominic.
“Dominic,” I said again.
His chair scraped violently backwards. And then he was gone.
I shoved my chair back and stood, before hesitating. Everything in me yearned to follow him, to hold him until he no longer looked so lost and stricken, but if he wanted me right now, he wouldn’t have left. So instead I picked up the paper he’d let drop to the floor.
Oh, God. When I read it—when I actually managed to comprehend the words in front of me—I thought I was going to be sick. And Dominic had read this.
The language was clipped and clinical, each sentence brutally short beneath the formal heading.
Dominic Arthur Bedwyr. Issue of Rhodri and Mari Bedwyr. Heir Apparent.
His date of birth, seven years before his mother’s date of death.
And beneath that…
Following the death of his mother, displayed emotional instability and repeated uncontrolled transitions.
No shit, Sherlock. A seven-year-old child who’d just lost his mother? Who the fuck thought this should be recorded?
I read on.
Marked emotional volatility continues. Inability to prevent transitions under distress. Fire damage to east wing drawing room following involuntary transition.
Jesus Christ. There was more. So much more. Each year was marked by another notation, observations and assessments of Dominic’s behaviour written with the detached tone usually reserved for estate inventories or livestock records.
Progress inconsistent.
Episodes decreasing in frequency.
Continued monitoring recommended.
Every moment of grief and fear after his mother’s death had been judged, catalogued and preserved in cold black ink by the adults meant to care for him. By people he had trusted.
My hands tightened hard enough on the paper to crumple it further as I kept reading.
Age eighteen. Returned to Dragon’s Ending.
Returned. I stared at the word. That meant… He’d been somewhere else.
They’d sent him away.
Somehow I kept reading through the horror.
Emotional regulation improved but still not entirely stable. Assessment ongoing.
Assessment ongoing. They’d sent him away as a child, and when he came back as a young man, they still looked on him as some kind of risk to be managed instead of a person. Instead of Dominic.
I wanted to throw up, I wanted to cry, but more than anything, I needed to find Dominic. I didn’t know what to say—I just knew that he couldn’t be alone after reading this. How much of it had he known, I wondered? What had they told him about sending him away?
Even at eighteen, when he’d returned here, he still hadn’t been trusted.
Oh, God, it was all making so much sense now.
The way he was with Rhodri, the effort he put into showing he didn’t care about his father’s opinion.
The way he kept provoking everyone, even the sheer recklessness in the way he flew, plummeting towards earth.
Almost as if he were daring it to take him.
The first thing I did was dump a stack of documents on top of that damned piece of paper. Locking the room behind me, I went in search of Dominic.