Chapter 172 172

Chapter 172 172
Lucian's POV:

She stood there. Ten feet away, dirt on her knees and her hands and her jacket still zipped to the chin, and she said "I'm not going anywhere" and I wanted to believe her so badly that it hurt worse than the gold.

"Emma, you don't know what I am."

"Then tell me."

Three words. Then tell me. Like it was simple, like it was just information, like I could open my mouth and say it the way you'd say I'm left-handed or I'm allergic to shellfish. Like the answer wouldn't change everything she thought she knew about me, about her sister, about the world she lived in.

The bark was warm behind my shoulders. The heat was still coming off me in waves, slower now, fading, but still there, still leaking, and the leaves closest to my legs were brown and curled. She could see it. She had to be able to see it, the air doing that thing near my skin, the distortion, and she was still standing there.

"I'm a dragon," I said.

It came out flat. Not dramatic, not emotional, just the words, too fast. I'm a dragon. Three words. Eighteen years of hiding, of lying, of running and packing bags and sleeping with one eye open and memorizing exits and redirecting gold and pretending my skin temperature was circulation, and it came down to three words said to a girl in the woods with burned leaves between us.

She didn't move. Her face didn't change. She was looking at me the way she looked at her laptop screen when a sentence wasn't working, this focused, processing thing, her brain turning the words over and over.

"My family. We're all... that. My parents, my brother, my sister. Golden dragons. We look human because we learned to, not because we are. The heat, my eyes, the strength, breaking things, all of it, it's because what I actually am is something else and the human part is the disguise."

Nothing. She said nothing. She just stood there with her brown eyes on my face and I kept talking because stopping meant silence and silence meant waiting for the verdict and I couldn't wait.

"That man on the trail, he was from the Order. They hunt us. They've always hunted us. They captured my parents when I was twelve and held them for five years in a facility where they, I don't know, experimented on them, drained their blood, because dragon blood does things, has properties that—" I stopped. Swallowed. "My brother got them out. Him and his girlfriend and her father. They destroyed the facility. We thought it was over. But it wasn't. We are not dangerous, Emma, I swear... We are just... different from you humans..."

She was listening. That was all she was doing. Standing still and listening with her dirty hands at her sides and her face doing this thing I couldn't read.

"Evie," I said, and my voice broke on her name. "That night. She fell off the bed. She hit the nightstand and she... it was bad, Emma. It was really bad. There was blood everywhere, her eyes were going glassy, and she was dying. On the floor of her room, on the stars carpet, with the rabbit next to her, she was dying. And I put my hands on her head and I healed her. I just did it without stopping to think about it. The gold came out and her skull closed and her eyes came back and she looked at me and she called me magic. And then I heard you coming up the stairs and I grabbed the glass and I cut myself to explain the blood because I couldn't tell you what I'd done... I couldn't tell you what I was."

Silence. A bird somewhere. The faint crackle of a branch still smoldering.

"The poem," I said. Quieter now. "The thing I wrote. About carrying something nobody could see, about hands that gave away what the mouth wouldn't say. That wasn't fiction, Emma. None of it was fiction. It was what it felt like to be me, near you, every day, wanting you to see me and being terrified that you would."

She still hadn't spoken. She hadn't moved, hadn't backed away, hadn't done any of the things I'd imagined in a hundred sleepless nights. She was just standing there, and the silence was getting long, and I could feel the interpretation forming in my chest even though I didn't want it: she wasn't reacting because she didn't know how to leave. She was processing, the way she processed her novel, her dragons, her research, and I was data now. Source material.

I was the clumsy boy who turned out to be an actual monster and wasn't that fascinating from a narrative perspective.