Page 113

“And I want it somewhere he can't get to it.”

That earned the faintest trace of approval from Doryu. “Already done.”

I nodded, and for the first time since I'd walked into the suite, I felt as though I could take a full breath.

My mother was still dead.

My father had still stolen more than twenty years from me.

But I hadn't killed her, and he'd always known it.

That knowledge should've destroyed me.

Instead, it finally gave me something I'd never had before.

A reason to stop being afraid of him.

Max

Ash fell asleep almost as soon as we returned to our room.

I hadn't expected that. After what he'd discovered, I'd assumed his mind would keep him awake for hours, but apparently his body had reached its limit. Between the game, his injuries, the confrontation with his father, and everything that followed in Ignatius's suite, exhaustion won before he'd even managed to argue about which bed we were using.

I lay beside him in the dark and listened to his breathing while the image of a seven-year-old boy falling down a fire escape refused to leave my head.

I'd watched Ash's entire understanding of himself change because of a few seconds of missing footage.

His father hadn't needed to invent the whole thing. That was what bothered me most. The most effective lie had contained enough truth to survive. Ash's hands really had struck his mother's back, and she really had fallen immediately afterward, but somebody had removed the seconds that explained why those things happened and allowed a terrified child to build the rest of his life around what remained.

Ash had paid for those missing seconds for years.

Money, certainly, but that seemed almost insignificant compared with everything else. He'd denied himself a home despite being able to afford one, lived as though permanence was dangerous, kept people at a distance, and carried a guilt so deeply embedded that even seeing the truth four times hadn't immediately been enough to dislodge it.

I couldn't stop hearing what he'd told me in the arena corridor.

You don't get to protect me by deciding what I can handle.

At the time, I'd thought about Doryu's investigation and the decision I'd made to let it continue without telling him. Now, lying beside Ash while he slept, I understood why the words had lodged so painfully beneath my ribs.

I was still doing it.

The comparison to his father was grotesque, and I rejected it immediately. I wasn't deliberately deceiving Ash so I could control him, and I hadn't spent years profiting from his fear. I'd hidden my dragon because dragons survived by hiding, and I'd hidden the fact that I was lifebound because everything I'd ever been taught about it told me secrecy and distance kept other people safe.

Those reasons mattered.

They simply didn't give me the right to make Ash's decision for him.

That was the part I had spent weeks avoiding.

I had told myself I needed more information from Ignatius, that I needed to understand the true-mate exception before I frightened Ash with something I couldn't properly explain, and there had been some truth in that. But beneath all those reasonable arguments was a much simpler one I hadn't wanted to examine.

I was terrified.

Ash might hear what being lifebound meant and look back at every moment between us differently. He might question Vegas, this morning, every kiss, and every time he'd looked across the ice and found me already watching him. He might wonder whether wanting me had ever truly been his choice.

Ignatius believed it was.

My dragon knew it was.