Chapter 94 A Perfect Lie
Damien
The illusion hesitates, and that is the moment I know it can be broken. The garden still gleams around me, banners floating in the wind, grass flawless beneath my boots, but the people have gone very still, smiles faltering, eyes darting as though they’ve sensed something shift beneath the surface of their perfect little world. The bride stands a few paces away, confusion finally bleeding into her expression. This is a version of life where these people have never seen me angry. They never learnt why they should fear me.
The dragon coils tight beneath my skin, heat building fast and furious, no longer restrained, no longer contained. Enough pretending, he growls.
I bare my teeth in a smile that has never belonged in a palace built for comfort.
“This may have once been the life I wanted,” I say softly, spreading my hands just enough for the movement to ripple through the watching crowd. “But this was never the life I was meant to have…”
The bride takes a hesitant step forward. “Damien, please—”
I let the dragon rise. The shift detonates through the space like a bomb. Bone snaps and reforms. Heat explodes outward. The ground cracks beneath the sudden weight of my true form as scales tear through skin and wings unfurl with a thunderous crack that sends people screaming backward in blind panic. The banners ignite instantly, white and gold going up in flames as the temperature surges. The bride screams, and the sound is exquisite. People scatter, nobles trip over their finery. Guards drop weapons they were never meant to use against something like me. Children cry, advisors cower as terror blooms across every face, raw and unfiltered and honest.
The dragon lifts his head, breathing deep, basking shamelessly in it. There it is, he rumbles in satisfaction. Truth.
I feel it too—the way fear grounds me, sharpens me, reminds me exactly what I am and what I’m not willing to become. This is the version of me they wish they had—the monster they wanted to tame into something harmless and polite. That is something I had once longed for, but it is something I was never meant to be. Something Bella would never have been drawn to.
The dragon lifts his head in a violent roar, and the sky trembles. Hairline cracks begin to spiderweb across the blue, light bleeding through in jagged streaks like reality itself can no longer hold the shape they’ve forced it into.
The dragon laughs, a deep, rumbling sound that shakes the very foundations of the illusion. The sky is breaking, he observes calmly.
“Good,” I answer.
I launch upward in a rush of fire and wings, bursting through the cracking clouds in a shower of fire and light. The air tears apart around me as I climb, heat pouring from my throat in a furious roar of flame that splits the false sky clean down the middle. And then the world shatters. Colour fractures into shards. Sound collapses inward. The screaming cuts off abruptly as everything implodes, folding in on itself like glass pulled into a singular point. I slam back into reality with a jolt, and the dragon skids to a halt, claws scraping against brick as we find ourselves standing exactly where I left—on the red-brick path beneath the canopy of too-quiet trees, a single door standing before us. The door that lied. The dragon exhales smoke, eyes narrowing and then comes the frost. Ice blooms across the surface of the door in a violent, creeping wave, crystalline patterns racing over the wood faster than any natural cold should allow. The handle freezes solid. The frame cracks. The entire thing groans, shuddering under the sudden, absolute pressure of glacial magic.
The dragon stills. Bella.
The door, now a solid block of ice, explodes. It shatters, splintering outward in a spray of ice and wood fragments that scatter across the brick path...And there she stands. Furious. Breathing hard. Eyes blazing with frost and fire alike. My Bella.
She is upright and unbroken, magic still crackling faintly around her hands, jaw set with the kind of determination that promises annihilation for anything foolish enough to stand in her way. For a heartbeat, neither of us moves.
Then the dragon lowers his head, satisfaction thrumming through every scale.
There she is, my Snowflake, he purrs. Unbroken. Unfooled.
I shift back without thinking, skin and bone reforming as I cross the distance between us in three strides and pull her into my arms hard enough to feel her solid and real against my chest. She grips me just as tightly, fingers digging into my coat, forehead pressed to my collarbone as if daring the world to try and take me again.
“I froze it,” she says fiercely. “The whole thing.”
A laugh rips out of me, rough and disbelieving and full of relief. “Good.”
I cup her face, forcing her to look at me, searching for any sign that the woods left something behind.
“You alright?” I ask.
Her lips curve into a sharp, dangerous smile. “Oh, I’m fantastic. Turns out I really hate perfection.”
The dragon hums approvingly. Gilfred comes skittering up her shoulder from whatever place he was forced into, or out of. Poor guy must have been so confused...I shiver against Bella's cool skin for a moment before I take her hands in my own and begin to thaw the frost on her fingertips. Then I press my forehead to hers, grounding myself in the truth of her presence, the weight of her choice clearly mirroring my own. If she saw what I saw, or something like it, she would have had every reason to stay, to choose that path. She didn't, though. She didn't choose the illusion, the fantasy, the fairytale. She fought her way back here to me. The woods fall silent around us as I hold her against me. Whatever test this place was meant to be, it failed because it forgot one crucial thing. We do not choose safety. We choose each other. And that is something no illusion survives.