Chapter 185 185

Chapter 185 185
Lucian's POV:

I found the building by the coordinates on my phone. Old maintenance building, single story, concrete walls, no windows on the south side, two on the east, a metal door with the lock busted. Two cars in the lot. A van, white, no plates.

I could hear Evie. Even from outside, fifty feet away, through concrete walls. The dragon hearing, which I'd spent eighteen years trying to ignore, was the only part of me that was useful right now. She was crying. Small, hiccupping sounds, the kind Evie made when she'd been crying hard and had run out of steam but couldn't stop yet.

I opened the door.

Three men. The building was one big room, concrete floor, steel beams, work benches along one wall with old tools and rust and a canvas drop cloth wadded in the corner. Evie was at the far end, sitting on the floor with her back against the wall, hands zip-tied in front of her.

A man was standing next to her with a black cylinder in his hand, the needle kind, the sedative Nathaniel had described. The other two were between me and her, spread out, ten feet apart. One had the same cylinder. The other had a gun holstered at his hip and a tablet, which he looked at when I came in and then back at me, checking something. Confirming.

Evie saw me.

"LUCIAN!"

The man next to her grabbed her shoulder and she flinched and the gold in my chest lurched so hard I tasted metal.

"The golden one," said the man closest to me. Tall, forties, jaw like a shelf, and eyes that were calm the way a surgeon's eyes are calm. He looked at me the way the man in the forest had looked at me. Like a job. And he was their leader, apparently. "Younger than I expected. But most of you are young too when we acquire you. It's better for the business if you’re still strong and healthy."

The word hit me in the ribs. Acquired.

"Let her go," I said, flat.

"That's not how this works." He was relaxed. Not scared, not nervous, not anything. These weren't amateurs. The guy in the forest had been one man with a needle. These were different. "Do you know what golden dragon blood is worth, Ellsworth? Not on some black market: on a real market. Pharmaceutical research, regenerative medicine, cellular repair. Your parents gave us five years of source material before you destroyed our central labs. But the compounds we synthesized from their blood are in clinical trials right now anyway, so your efforts were in vain. Do you understand what that means? People are getting better because of what came out of your mother's veins."

He said it like he was proud. Like he expected me to be grateful.

"We don't want to kill you. That's not the objective. You're more valuable alive and producing than dead on a floor. You come with us, willingly, we take samples on a regular schedule, controlled, civilized. The child goes home. Your family goes on with their lives. Everyone benefits."

"If I come with you," I said. "Just me. You leave Evie, you leave Emma, you leave my family alone. All of them. Forever."

"That's a generous offer."

"That's my condition."

He looked at me. Long, measuring. Then he shook his head. "I appreciate the sacrifice, I do. But one source isn't enough. The potency varies between individuals. We'd need access to the other golden ones. Your sister, your brother. And the red ones, the Thorne girl and her father. Full cooperation, regular access. A partnership."

My whole family. He wanted my whole family. He wanted Mom and Dad back in extraction chairs and Marlen and Kaelen giving blood on a schedule and Annabeth and Marcus too, all of them, turned into livestock for some pharmaceutical operation wearing a lab coat.

"No."

"Think about it."

"No."

"Then we have a problem." He nodded at the man with the tablet, who put it down and picked up a second sedative cylinder from the bench. "This is modified. Faster acting than the originals, designed for younger dragons. Twenty seconds to sedation in a full-grown male. Twelve in someone your age."

He threw it.

I dodged, but barely, because the second man threw his at the same time and it hit my neck. The needle went in below my ear and the drug was cold, instant, flooding my bloodstream, and my legs buckled. Not completely, not down, but my vision blurred and the gold in my chest stuttered like an engine losing fuel. I grabbed the cylinder, pulled it out, but the drug was already spreading, and the room tilted and my hands hit the concrete wall for balance.

"Twelve seconds," Jaw said. "Sit down, Ellsworth. Let's be civilized about this."

The gold was fighting the sedative. I could feel it, this war inside my blood, the dragon burning through the chemical and the chemical slowing the dragon, and the room was going in and out of focus and my legs were wrong and one of the men was walking toward me with a zip tie and I thought: this is how it ends. On a concrete floor with a needle in my neck while a five-year-old watches.

It was over for me...