Chapter 3

The Grand Hall of the Five Clans Convocation was packed with clan leaders from every corner of the continent.

The moment I stepped through the doors, every gaze in the room cut toward me like a blade.

Envoys and clan elders sat in their appointed seats, heads tilted together, murmuring. I could not make out their words, but I knew those looks well — the disgust, the morbid curiosity. I had worn them like a second skin for years.

"Is that the Scale-Stripper?"

"Six years without showing her face, and she comes back looking like this?"

I paid them no mind. The raw flesh and few remaining scales across my body were garish under the torchlight, but I no longer cared.

Twelve hours.

Hold out twelve more hours, and it would all be over.

My mother materialized at my side without warning. While no one was watching, she pressed a rolled scroll of blood-red silk into my hand.

"Read it aloud." Her voice dropped to a command, with no room for negotiation.

I unrolled the scroll and looked down.

【I was not taken. As a child, I wandered away on my own. The woman who raised Sylvie sheltered me out of the goodness of her heart, a kindness as great as that of a second mother. Upon returning home, I was consumed by jealousy toward Sylvie and made her life a misery at every turn. Such conduct is unworthy of the dragon clan name. After six years of seclusion and reflection, I now willingly invoke my dragon breath as witness, and pledge my allegiance to Sylvie as my elder sister.】

Every word landed like a slap.

Wandered away on my own. Sheltered out of kindness.

I would never forget that serpent den where I had spent my early childhood, sunless and suffocating. The scalding venom had been dripped one drop at a time onto my small, tender scales until I seized with pain. Every time I wept and called for my mother, the serpent woman who kept me would drive her foot into my ribs and snarl, "Who are you calling mother, you little wretch? My daughter is living in your dragon clan manor, enjoying everything that should have been yours."

"Hurry up," my father urged. "The clan leaders are watching."

I read the scroll to its final line, word by word. My fingers tightened around it, slowly, until my knuckles went white.

Then, standing before every member of the Five Clans, I let dragon breath pour from my palm. A blaze of golden fire swallowed the scroll whole.

The hall fell into dead silence.

"Why would I bow to a serpent-clan foundling? To the daughter of the very person who trafficked me?"

The silence lasted only a second.

I turned and fixed my gaze on Sylvie. She stood on the high dais draped in the dragon clan ceremonial robes that should have been mine, the firstborn daughter's crown upon her head that should have been mine, my parents flanking her from behind along with my Lucien, my husband, and my son.

"Why don't you tell everyone here," I said, grinding the words out between my teeth, "twenty years of occupying my identity as the dragon clan's firstborn daughter was not enough for you. Why did you also have to take my husband and steal my whelp?"

The Grand Hall erupted.

Clan envoys exchanged wide-eyed glances as the sound of voices crashed and roiled like water brought to a boil.

Sylvie's face went pale for exactly one second.

The next second, her eyes filled with tears on perfect cue. Her lips trembled faintly, and she wore the expression I had seen a thousand times before: the face of someone who had swallowed every injustice without complaint.

"Sister, why are you saying these things again?"

Her voice was soft as a needle, weightless, yet it caught in the chest and did not let go.

Then she reached into her sleeve and produced a beast-bone tile. The binding runes carved into it blazed gold in the firelight, every stroke clear and irrefutable, fixed as a stone verdict.

"I am the White Wolf King's lawful wife. You are the one without a name."

The words hit me like a blow to the head.

I lunged forward and snatched the tile from her, turning it over and over in my hands. The runes were genuine.

No wonder.

No wonder every time I asked about the binding ceremony, Kael had put me off with the same excuse: the binding-rune bone was too rare to obtain.

I turned my head stiffly toward him.

Kael was leaning against the stone pillar, perfectly composed, even wearing a trace of relief that read as though he was glad the secret no longer needed keeping.

"Aria, a name means nothing. As long as you know I hold you in my heart, isn't that enough?"

He paused, then added, "Besides, it was you who took Sylvie's birthright as the dragon clan's firstborn daughter. Giving her the title of White Wolf Queen seems only fair, doesn't it?"

Before I could open my mouth, Lucien's voice rang out across the hall from the high gallery above.

"I must apologize. What a scene to subject everyone to."

He swept his gaze around the room and offered a measured nod to the gathered clan leaders.

"My sister's mind has not been stable these past years. There is an old affliction among dragon-kind — Inverse Scale Madness. Those it touches suffer hallucinations and delusions. Please, pay her words no mind."

The moment he said it, every eye in the room shifted.

Pity, revulsion, instinctive recoiling, and the dawning recognition of someone thinking: ah, that explains it.

"So the dragon clan's firstborn daughter became a Scale-Stripper because she lost her mind. Poor Sylvie, to be haunted by a woman like that."

"You are not allowed to hurt my mother!"

A small figure burst from the crowd and slammed straight into me. The force was not great, but it landed precisely on the deepest scar across my abdomen, and the pain turned my vision black. I stumbled and fell.

Ember.

My child.

He stood before me, his small body held rigid, the nubs of his dragon horns barely breaking through above his brow. His eyes were Kael's amber.

Every part of me shook.

Six years. From the very moment of his birth he had been taken from my arms, and I had never once been allowed to look at him. Through countless nights when I lay curled in the corner of a cave, burning with pain, I had wondered what he looked like. Whether he favored me or Kael.

And now he was standing right in front of me.

I reached out instinctively, wanting to touch his face.

Lucien seized my arm and wrenched it back, his fingernails biting into my flesh.

"Sylvie has nothing," he said quietly, each word laced with poison. "I will not let you take her child from her."

My hand hung suspended in midair.

She had nothing? She had my identity, my family, my husband, my child, six years of my Dragon Breath Essence, and even my name as a wife. She had nothing?

Ember retreated behind Sylvie's skirts and peered out from behind her with half a face, the look in his eyes caught between wariness and hostility as he stared at me.

That look.

The look of a child watching a monster break into his home.

"But he is my child," I said. My voice had come apart until it was barely audible. "I nearly died bringing him into the world."

The words were not finished before Lucien's expression had already turned to stone.

He produced a memory stone and spread its images across the air above us. The scene played in silence.

Three years ago. On a narrow path during a healing mission, five orc hunters had dragged me into a cave.

He pressed his lips close to my ear.

"What do you think Kael and Ember would make of this? Would Ember want a mother like this?"

The shifting light of the images made my vision swim.

Those images were false. But what happened that day was real.

I remembered every second of it. Before my clothes were torn, the only thought in my head was: Lucien will come. He will come for me.

He never came.

Because those men had been sent by him.

Something hot and metallic rose in my throat, and I could not hold it back any longer. "Do you know what they actually did to me? I was raped!"

The scream rang through the hall.

Lucien did not so much as blink.

"Enough of that." His voice was cold as a drawn blade. "Those men were hired by me at considerable expense. They would not have dared lay a hand on the dragon clan's firstborn daughter."

"You do this every time. You use these theatrics to make us feel guilty, all so you can drive Sylvie away. I genuinely cannot understand why you are so incapable of tolerating her."

I closed my mouth.

Not because I had nothing left to say.

Because saying it would change nothing.

From beginning to end, they only ever believed what they chose to believe. Every scar I carried, every pain I had endured, every piece of evidence I could have offered — in their eyes it was all performance, all a bid for sympathy.

The countdown flickered silently in front of my eyes.

【Countdown: Five Hours】