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Even in my altered state, with my other nature in control, I saw the problem right away.

It would be hard to step away from the urge. It was hard to remember why I should want to.

I only saw what my father was doing then. He wasn’t drawing me away so he could attack.

He was showing me, tempting me with something I’d never let myself consider before. There was another path when you left the human part of you behind, when you let the draak rule you as my father had and his father before him, and it was one short fork in the road away.

In the end it was taken out of my hands as another dragon shrieked in the distance, a distress call that drew me away from the destruction my father had wreaked and that I had been hypnotized by.

I simply had to see who the other dragon was. If it was a call to victory or defeat.

When I saw that it was my brother whatever had kept me fueled through this mad dash seemed to fade from me all at once, and I went down hard.

Of course it was Dom that found me. Who else?

I was laying on my back, in human form, naked, limp, my stomach an empty pit. I’d never felt more helpless, more hopeless in my entire miserable existence.

It had taken me a long time to see it.

Centuries.

But I saw it now. I was a monster. One good panorama of what I could really do, of how I could truly let my true power loose, and I’d nearly helped my father raze an innocent village to the ground. I’d wanted to do it. I’d craved that power; the dark, twisted power of ruling over a burning ruin. The only way you could truly own something was to break it, to cleanse it with fire.

Destruction ran in my veins, and it was more powerful than any other trait I owned.

I was as sick as any of them. As dangerous.

Dom, in human form now and even clean, covered me with a blanket, his expression very carefully blank as he did it. He lifted me, tucking it completely around my body, trapping my arms.

We were alone in the back of an armored vehicle, driving before I could find the words to speak.

“Dom,” I whispered hoarsely.

“Shh,” he soothed, stroking my brow but never glancing down at me.

“I’ve lost it, Dom. I see it now. I’m just like the rest of them. I need you to do something for me.”

“Shh,” he said again, still without looking down.

“I need you to finish me, Dom. I’m too much of a danger—”

“Stop. You’re weak and delirious. You need to be silent and rest.”

“You don’t understand. I almost didn’t stop. I wanted to keep going, to burn—“

“Silence, I said! We’re not doing this now, and you need to quit talking such nonsense. My temper has been tested enough this day.”

“It will be better if you do it. You and Christian. I’d prefer—”

“I’m only going to tell you this once, Jillian.” His voice was low, but his tone was so sharp that it cut. “Don’t speak these words again. This is out of your hands. If you go behind my back, convince some other poor sucker that they need to kill you, just imagine what will happen to them. Just step back and think about this. Do you honestly believe I could ever kill you? That I would allow you to die?”

“My life is not worth more than an entire city’s worth of people, Dom. I’ve seen into the black void that is my power, and it cannot be allowed loose. I need to die.”

“Never.” He was squeezing me so tight that I could barely breathe. “That is not an option. We will find a way to control this, but you need to quit speaking this way. And I repeat, if you try to go behind my back with this, don’t say I didn’t warn you. If you think I have one fucking qualm about killing Christian, you’re deluding yourself. He’ll be dead before he can lay one pinky on that fucking sword of his.”

I closed my eyes, giving up. His furious speech, as much as I hated to admit it, had comforted me.

This was out of my hands. I had tried my best to do the right thing. I knew this man well enough to understand that he was incapable of budging on a thing like this.