Chapter 186 186

Chapter 186 186
Lucian's POV:

The man with the gun moved. Not toward me. Toward Evie. He crouched next to her and took her arm and she screamed and tried to pull away and his fingers were on her wrist, right over the zip tie marks, and she was looking at me with those eyes.

"LUCIAN!"

And the man with the sedative said "Last chance" and the man holding Evie stood up and his other hand was pulling out his own cylinder and he held it near her neck, an inch from her skin, and he said, quiet, professional, "This dosage is designed for dragons. For a five-year-old human, it would be a conversation none of us wants to have..."

The sedative in my blood burned away. Not slowly, not a fight. Just gone. The gold ate it, consumed it, turned it to nothing, because whatever that drug was it was not stronger than what I was feeling right now, which was beyond rage, beyond fear, beyond anything I had a word for.

And it all just happened so fast.

The transformation didn't ask permission. The pain hit first, bones cracking and expanding, and my shirt tore across my back as the muscles swelled and the scales came through in rippling waves. My spine extended and the tail came fast, heavy, slamming into the concrete floor and cracking it. Wings ripped through my shoulder blades, wet and hot, and when they spread they hit the steel beams on either side and the whole building shuddered.

The leader ran. Smart, fast, toward the door. I opened my mouth and the fire came out, golden, a wall of heat that caught him in the back and threw him into the metal door and the frame melted and the concrete around it cracked and he went down and didn't move.

The one with the tablet fired the gun. I heard the shots, felt the bullets hit my chest and bounce off scales that were harder than anything he'd ever seen. He kept firing. Six shots, seven, and each one pinged off and fell to the floor and his face changed from professional to raw horror. He ran. The tail caught him across the legs and launched him into the work bench on the far wall.

The third man, the one next to Evie. He'd dropped the sedative when the transformation started and was backing away, hands up, and his eyes were on me, on the dragon filling the room, wings folded against the ceiling. Evie was curled on the floor with her zip-tied hands over her head, screaming. He was between me and her, and I could see his eyes doing the calculation, and his hand reached for Evie's arm.

I killed him.

Not with fire: with my hand, which wasn't a hand anymore. I hit him and he went sideways into the wall and the brick cracked and the sound he made when he hit was final, the kind of sound a body makes when it stops being a person. He slid to the floor.

The room was full of smoke and the smell of burned metal and blood. Three men on the floor. Evie was curled up in the corner, hands over her head, still screaming.

I had to change back. I had to be Lucian again, had to have hands that could hold her instead of claws that could kill, and I focused the way Kaelen had taught me at the facility three years ago: think about being human, think about your room, your bed, something that grounds you.

I thought about Evie's rabbit with the chewed ear. I thought about the pillow where she always put it. I thought about Emma's smile, about her lips, about her arms hugging me, the human me.

The transformation reversed. Slower than the shift in. Bones cracking back, scales receding, wings folding and disappearing and the pain was enormous but I didn't make a sound because Evie was right there. When it was done I was on the concrete floor, naked, shaking, and my hands were covered in blood and ash.

I looked at my hands.

The same hands that had healed Evie's skull on the stars carpet. The same hands that had written Emma a poem. The same hands that had held Emma's face in the forest, in the bed, that had touched her without burning her. These hands had just killed three men.

I found the canvas drop cloth from the corner. Pulled it around my waist. My hands were shaking and the cloth was stiff and dirty and it was all there was.

A sound. I looked toward the blown-out windows on the east wall.

Emma was climbing through. She had Evie, already, pressed against her chest with one hand on the back of her head, and Evie's face was buried in her neck and I didn't know when she'd gotten here or how she'd gotten to Evie but she had.

She looked at me. Standing in the wreckage with a canvas tarp around my waist and blood on my arms and my chest and the marks of golden fire on the walls.

"We need to go," I said. My voice came out wrong. Raw, too low, not mine.

"Lucian—"

"We need to go, Emma."

I walked past her. Past Evie, who lifted her face from Emma's neck and said "Lucian" in this small, wrecked voice, and I didn't stop. I couldn't. Because if I stopped, if I touched her, my hands would be on her skin and my hands had blood on them and I was not going to put these hands on a five-year-old.

I walked out through the broken window frame into the parking lot and the air was cold and I was barefoot and the canvas was rough against my legs and there was blood drying on my arms and I didn't know where I was going.

I just walked. Alone. I just couldn’t be near them, not anymore. The man in the forest had been right about something: I was a fucking monster.