Chapter 1

Something detonated inside my skull, as if a hammer had reduced it to rubble.

"What did you just say?" My voice was shaking. No, my entire body was shaking.

Before I could begin to absorb those words, a familiar voice drifted from behind me. It was my husband, Kael King. The White Wolf King.

He was leaning against a stone pillar with his usual languid ease, as though he were remarking on something utterly inconsequential.

"I never lost my Beast King power, either."

I spun around.

The corner of his mouth curved upward. "Every time I said I was going off to the wastelands to train, I was actually going back to the royal palace. I didn't want to be cramped in that dark, damp underground cave with you."

I stared at him, my lips trembling, every word gone.

"We were planning to temper you for a few more years," he added, wrinkling his nose slightly. "But the stench of your rotting scales was getting unbearable. Neither your brother nor I could stand it anymore."

The stench.

Every strip of flesh where a scale had been torn away, every scale I had ripped from my own body to save them, every night I had spent writhing on the ground in agony — biting down on my own wrist so I wouldn't cry out — and in his mouth, it all came down to one word.

Stench.

I knelt on the ground, my fingernails driving into my palms. The pain was the only thing keeping my last thread of lucidity intact.

"The Dragon Breath Essence I collected before," I rasped. "Where did it go?"

"Fed to Sylvie," Lucien answered, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Sylvie Serpentine. The serpent-clan foundling taken in by the dragon clan.

"Her serpent-clan constitution runs cold, she needs dragon breath to warm it, so she can pass as dragon-blooded." There was even a trace of tenderness in his voice. "Every single vial of your Dragon Breath Essence was used exactly where it needed to be."

My heart felt as though a fist had closed around it and was slowly, methodically, wringing it dry.

Six years. Every time the agony of a peeling made me lose consciousness, waking up only to drag myself toward the next client. Every time someone spat at me — "filthy Scale-Stripper, you bring nothing but ill omen" — and poured purification poison onto my open wounds. Every time I nearly died in the plague zones and clawed my way back to the living.

All of it, fed to her.

"Then, what about my child?" I wrenched my head up, my voice tearing into something close to a scream.

After the Dragon Slaughter War, they had told me my baby hadn't survived. A dragon-wolf halfblood whelp, too fragile, they said. Too fragile to survive such devastation.

"Ember didn't die." Kael's voice was light and careless. "He was taken from you the moment he was born. I gave him to Sylvie."

The air was sucked from the room.

A sound tore from my throat.

"A dragon-wolf halfblood is too precious." Kael looked at me, utterly matter-of-fact. "How could I let him grow up with a Scale-Stripper? Sylvie is gentle and refined. The child will thrive with her."

I crumpled onto the altar steps, cold spreading through every part of me until I could no longer stop trembling.

It was then that footsteps sounded from across the chamber.

Two figures stood at a distance, hovering as though I were a plague god they dared not approach.

My parents. Alive.

Not assassinated. Not cut down in the Dragon Slaughter War. Alive and whole — and dressed in finery even more magnificent than before.

My mother's brow was creased, her gaze traveling over my exposed, scale-stripped flesh with undisguised revulsion.

"That was only because you used your gift as a dragon-breath wielder to bully Sylvie at every turn. We simply wanted you to learn some humility." My father's tone was colder still. "If you swear never to mistreat Sylvie again, you remain the dragon clan's firstborn daughter. Otherwise, we sever the bloodline."

I looked down at my hands.

Riddled with wounds — not a single inch of skin left unbroken.

For you. All of it was for you.

I wanted to say it. Those words were there, right at the edge of my throat.

But something had clamped down on my windpipe and would not let go.

At that moment, from the deepest layer of the Dragon Soul Altar, from somewhere ancient and untouchable in the back of my mind, a voice rose — old and full of sorrow. The lingering will of the Ancestral Dragon.

【Dragon Breath Bearer, do you wish to return to the Void and leave this world behind?】

Tears slid from the corners of my eyes, dripping onto the raw, unprotected flesh below, burning where they fell.

"Leave," I said.

I bit down until the inside of my cheek split open, and tasted iron.

【Acknowledged. Countdown: twenty-four hours.】