Chapter 174 174

Chapter 174 174
Emma's POV:
His eyes were still gold when I pulled back. Not the blue-green I was used to, not the color I'd been staring at for weeks across Sanders' lecture hall and over coffee and from the other end of Evie's bedroom floor. Gold. Solid, warm, and they were looking at me with this expression that I didn't have a word for yet. I'd find one. I was a writer. Finding words was the one thing I was supposed to be good at and right now I had absolutely nothing.
"We need to go back," I said.
His face changed. The gold flickered, not fading but dimming. "What?"
"The man. On the trail. He's still there."
I watched the reality come back to him, the part where the world wasn't just us in a gap between two oaks with burned leaves and his confession hanging between us. There was a man. Unconscious. Legs bent at the wrong angle. An Order operative who'd come out of the trees with a needle aimed at his neck and called him a monster and meant every syllable.
"Shit," he said. Then louder: "Shit." He pulled his phone from his back pocket and his hands were still red at the knuckles, the veins visible under his skin, and the phone looked tiny and kind of ridiculous in his grip. He tapped the screen three times, wrong, wrong, wrong, fingers too big or too shaky or both. "I can't, the screen won't—"
"Give it here."
He handed it over. The case was warm. Not phone-warm. Body-warm, the kind of heat that didn't make sense for a piece of plastic that had been in a denim pocket for two hours. I unlocked it. His passcode was 0000, which I was gonna have a conversation with him about later, and I found Kaelen in his contacts.
"Call or text?"
"Call."
I hit the button and gave it back. He held it to his ear and I could hear the ring, once, twice, and then Kaelen's voice, although I didn’t understand what he said.
"Kael." Lucian's voice came out too flat, the way you sound when you're working very hard not to sound like anything at all. "I need you at the trail. Behind campus. The one that goes into the woods." Pause. "Yeah. Now. And call Marcus."
He hung up. Looked at me. The gold was pulling back from his eyes, blue-green bleeding in from the edges, and his jaw was tight and his shirt was still inside out and there was a leaf stuck in his hair.
"You have a leaf," I said.
He just stared at me.
"In your hair. Right side."
He reached up and pulled it out. Looked at it. Brown, curled, singed at the edges. He dropped it.
"Your passcode is four zeros," I said.
"Emma."
"I'm just saying. My grandma has better phone security."
"We're in a forest. There's an unconscious man on the trail who was trying to kill me. I just told you I'm a dragon. And you're talking about my phone security."
"It's a valid concern."
Something happened on his face. This twitch at the corner of his mouth, small, and for one second he looked like himself, the Lucian from before, the one who dropped things and made terrible jokes and grinned at me across the classroom like he had a secret nobody else was in on. Except now I was in on it too.
We walked back. The burned footprints were easier to follow in this direction because I'd already been through once and remembered the landmarks: the split in the trail where a root crossed the path, the clearing with the old wooden bench. The smell was still there, burned leaves, and the branches overhead still had black marks where the fire had caught and died.
The operative was where we'd left him. Base of the tree, jacket charred on one side, face blank, breathing shallow enough that I had to watch his chest for a few seconds to be sure. His legs were wrong, the left one bent in a way knees don't bend, and I thought about calling 911 and then didn't because what exactly would I tell them? A man attacked my still-to-become boyfriend with a needle and he shot gold energy from his hands and threw him into a tree? Sure. They'd send an ambulance and a psych consult.
Lucian positioned himself between me and the man. Not making a thing of it, just there, so that if the guy woke up he'd have to get through Lucian first. His hands were at his sides and the red in his veins was fading but not gone.
We waited. I counted by watching the seconds on my phone because standing in a forest next to an unconscious enemy and the dragon boy you loved required some form of distraction and counting was all I had.
Seven minutes. Maybe eight. I heard them before I saw them, the quick, heavy footsteps, the sound of someone running, and then Kaelen appeared among the trees, coming from the direction of the campus. He was tall, blond, and moved like someone who had been doing this his entire life. He looked a lot like Lucian, only he appeared a few years older and more serious. Behind him, five or six paces back, came a dark-haired man with the build of someone you wouldn't want to cross, and a red glint in his eyes. An intense red, not gold. That had to be Marcus.
Kaelen saw the operative first. His jaw went tight, this tightening that started at the hinge and went down his neck. Then he clocked the burned branches. The scorched ground. Lucian. Then me.
He stopped. Three feet away. Breathing hard. He looked at me and I looked at him and I watched the question form and the answer arrive at the same time, this whole calculation running behind his blue-green eyes.
"She knows," Lucian said. Quiet. Not apologizing. Just the fact.
Kaelen looked at his brother for what felt like a long time. Two seconds, three. Then back at me and something in his expression shifted, loosened, like he'd been bracing for this for weeks and now that it was here the bracing could stop.
He nodded. That was it. One nod.
Marcus went straight to the operative. Crouched. Checked his pulse with two fingers on the neck, efficient, the kind of move that said he'd done this before and was bored by it. He looked at the charred jacket, the bent leg, the sedative canisters on the ground in the leaves.
"Was he alone?" Marcus said without looking up.
"I think so," Lucian said. "He came from the left. I didn't hear anyone else."
"You didn't hear him either until he was fifteen feet away."
Lucian didn't answer that. Marcus stood up. Turned. And looked at me.
He was, I don't know, the kind of person who made a room feel smaller just by being in it. His eyes had red in them, deep, darker than Lucian's gold, and when they landed on me I felt like I was being read all at once, every page, no skipping.
I didn't step back.
"You shouldn't be here," he said.
"I'm aware."
"This isn't something you can un-know."
"I don't want to un-know it."
He studied me. Four seconds. Five. Then he looked at Lucian, back at me, and something crossed his face.
"Take her home," he said to Lucian. "Kaelen, help me with this."
Kaelen was already by the operative, pulling out his phone, texting someone. Marcus was going through the man's jacket pockets, checking for more of those needle things, and I wanted to stay and watch and understand all of it but Lucian's hand was on my elbow and he was steering me back toward campus.
We walked. Through the trees, past the clearing with the bench, toward the sounds that were creeping back in: cars, a voice somewhere, an AC unit humming in a building. His hand moved from my elbow to mine and our fingers locked and his palm was warm, too warm, warmer than any human palm should be, and now I knew why and it didn't matter.
We came out at the back edge of campus. He walked me across the quad and past the science building and down the streets toward town. Past the closed shops, the Denny's, the houses that all looked the same, and we didn't talk because the silence wasn't uncomfortable anymore. It had things in it now. Everything he'd said. Everything I'd seen.
At my porch he stopped. I didn't let go of his hand.
"Come back tomorrow," I said.
"Okay."
"Or tonight. You could—"
"Your parents would have questions."
"I know. Tomorrow then."
He looked at me. Blue-green, back to normal, and his stupid inside-out shirt and the dirt on his knees and his hand in mine. He leaned forward and pressed his forehead against mine, just a second, and his breath was warm on my mouth and I closed my eyes.
"Thank you," he said. Low. "For following me."
"Don't ever run from me again."
"I won't."
"You will."
"Probably." And there it was, the grin, small, barely there but there. "But you'll come after me, right?"
"Every time."
He pulled back. Dropped my hand. Did that two-finger wave he always did, the casual thing, like we were just saying bye after another boring day and not standing on my porch having survived an assassination attempt and a supernatural confession.
He walked backward a few steps, like turning around was the hard part, and then he did, and then he was gone.
Okay... I had like a LOT to process now.