Chapter 2

Before I could react, Lucien's hand shot out and clamped around the back of my neck.

His grip was savage, the grip of someone hauling a half-dead piece of prey. He dragged me forward, my knees slamming into the ground, and shoved me headfirst into the thing waiting there.

A Scale-Lock Cage.

A narrow prison carved from dragon bone, so cramped you could not even curl into a ball. The walls were inscribed with runes designed to suppress dragon-clan aura; once sealed inside, even breathing became labored.

The moment darkness closed over me, my mind shattered completely.

Memories from four years ago crashed in like a tide.

I had been healing patients near the human border when dragon hunters captured me alive and locked me in an iron cage. For three days and three nights they flooded it with poisoned smoke, and I was crammed face-to-face with the rotting corpse of one of my own kin. Its scales had already crumbled to powder, mixed with the fluid of decomposition and smeared across my face. I could feel the last thread of its dragon breath dissolving against my cheek, scale by scale, like a hand slowly letting go.

From that day on, darkness and confined spaces were a tomb to me.

"Let me out! Please! let me out!"

I clawed at the cage walls in a frenzy, fingernails catching in the crevices of the dragon bone, snapping and bending backward one by one. Blood ran from my fingertips, flooding the carved runes until their grooves ran dark red.

But the cage walls did not move.

My throat tore itself apart screaming, until there was nothing left, only a breathless, keening whimper, like a small animal being crushed underfoot.

"Lucien, I was wrong. Please. I'll die in here."

I had no idea how much time had passed when the cage door finally swung open.

Light stabbed in. Tears and blood had cemented together across my face, and I could barely make out the figure standing before me. On pure animal instinct, I crawled out and seized Lucien's robe with both hands, folding myself into the smallest shape I could, every part of me shaking like a leaf in a storm.

"Don't lock me in there again. Please. I'll die inside. I really will."

Lucien looked down at me.

He had already started to extend his hand, then he pulled it back.

"Can't you calm down?" His voice was laced with irritation, like someone dealing with a child throwing a tantrum. "Stop pretending to be pitiful."

"Every client who came to you for healing was handpicked by me. They were there to grind the edges off you, none of them were actually going to harm you."

I went completely still.

Something in my mind began to fracture.

"You arranged all of them?"

The serpent-clan merchant who made me crawl between his legs and bark like a dog, Lucien arranged that?

The orc warlord who forced me to drink three jugs of potent toxin and promised extra dragon crystals as payment, Lucien arranged that too?

Lucien nodded without hesitation, without so much as a furrow of his brow.

"So what?" he said. "I only wanted you to learn to put yourself in someone else's place. Sylvie grew up among the serpent clan, do you have any idea how much she suffered? You lived in comfort and privilege among the dragon clan, and still you tormented her. Unless you tasted the bottom of the world for yourself, how would you ever truly feel for her?"

His logic was so absurd I almost laughed.

But I couldn't.

Because I remembered those nights, every night I had writhed on the ground in agony, when I had told myself over and over again: bear it a little longer. This is all for Lucien. This is all to save him.

As it turned out, everything I had endured was not consequence and cause. It was a punishment he had designed for me, piece by deliberate piece.

"One more thing." Lucien's tone shifted, the way someone's does when they are moving on to a household errand. "The Five Clans Convocation is tonight. Sylvie is to be formally invested as the dragon clan's Second Daughter. You will attend."

I raised my eyes to look at him slowly.

"Only if you, the Dragon Breath Bearer, acknowledge her standing aloud will the other clans truly accept it. Otherwise, the elders will always find something to whisper about."

He crouched down, looking at me from above, his tone taking on what he clearly imagined was a fatherly gravity. "This is your chance to prove yourself to the entire clan. Cooperate tonight, and everything that came before, I'll let it go."

I said nothing.

Kael's lazy voice drifted over from behind me.

"Haven't you always wanted a proper binding ceremony?"

He was leaning against the stone pillar, toying with a beast-bone tile, the kind carved with the binding runes that should have been ours.

"Once you give Sylvie another dragon-breath whelp, I might consider giving you the queen's crown."

A binding ceremony. That was what he had promised me under the moonlight. He said he would crown me before all five clans, so every soul on the continent would know I was his wife.

Now those words had been refashioned into a baited hook, dangling in front of me to make me fall into line.

They were offering me charity.

Using the things I had once treasured most, to buy my compliance.

A line of text flickered across my vision: 【Countdown: Twelve Hours】

Twelve hours. Twelve hours, and I could leave this place forever.

I lowered my gaze and pressed down, inch by inch, the hatred surging up into my throat. My broken, bleeding fingers curled against the ground.

When I raised my head again, the collapse that had been written across my face was gone.

"All right," I said. "I'll go."

Lucien was evidently satisfied. He stood, and did not look at me again.

Kael straightened himself with the same languor, and as he passed by me, he tilted his head almost imperceptibly, avoiding something in the air around me.

The smell of rotting scales.

After they left, only I remained in the cavern.

I looked down at my broken nails and blood-soaked hands, and felt, strangely, very calm.

Before, every time I was hurt, I would tell myself: bear it a little longer. For Lucien. To go home.

Now there was nothing left to tell myself.