Arianna laughed as a Dragon would, tipping her head back and pouring forth her amusement without reservation. “We prefer what we prefer.”
“But loving one you cannot have a child with is futile. You can’t continue the family…”
His words trailed off as he saw the look she gave him. She wanted him to figure it out. She would wait as long as he needed, but she would judge him past a certain point if he couldn’t come to the right conclusion.
“… and that’s not a concern of the Fenthri.”
Arianna tapped the stone next to her like it was a bell. “Ding-ding.” Her sarcasm was too weak to stand against the weight of their conversation. “The Dragons, this notion of family… For over a thousand years we would head to the grounds of Ter.0 and induce fertility, breed as we needed, the best of the best, raise the children in the guilds.”
“It sounds cold and sterile.”
“Families sound limiting and suffocating.”
He huffed in a tired amusement. “Fair enough.” Cvareh looked back to the stars, as though they would give him strength to ask the question he’d been awkwardly shifting around. “Why did you kill her?”
Arianna wished she hadn’t resolved to tell him everything. She pressed her mouth into a thin line, as if she could smother the words, extinguish them like a flame. But the truth remained.
“I didn’t just kill her. I killed them all.” She let out the bleakness of her heart’s truth. “Your people should thank me. I was the hand that crushed the last rebellion against your King.”
“I don’t understand.”
“When we discovered we’d been betrayed, that the Dragon we’d trusted was not a double-agent for us, was not an ally against the King, but a man under the King’s own thumb, we destroyed it all—or tried to.” The smell of burning flesh and reagents gone sour singed her nose anew. Her hands were caked in invisible blood that would never wash away, black and red alike. “I was the only one who could do it. The rest of them had been poisoned. My stomach saved me.”
“So the schematics I carried...” Realization was beginning to take over.
“Shouldn’t have even existed. They were stolen at the onset of our betrayal.”
“Why didn’t you kill yourself?” It was a fair question, based on what he knew of her, what she was.
“You know how hard it is for a Dragon to kill themselves. It’s no easier for me.”
“You really are, then?”
“I’m a Perfect Chimera.” Arianna finally brought her eyes to meet his. She wanted him to feel the weight of the truth. She wanted him to cower in fear or see her purely as a tool. But he did something far more dangerous: He didn’t change the way he looked at her at all. “More important than overcoming the logistical challenge of killing myself, Eva and Master Oliver asked me to live. She died knowing all our research, everything we’d worked for, was being destroyed. I don’t expect you to understand, but for a Fenthri, there is nothing more horrible.”
“You fled, detaching from everything, and became the White Wraith. You worked against Dragons,” he finished, painfully simple.
“In the hopes that I would someday find my way to the man who betrayed all I loved. In the hopes that it would bring me vengeance.” She felt a sudden wave of guilt. He now knew everything, and she had never even told Florence the beginning of her story. When she returned to Loom, the girl would know the truth, Arianna vowed. The girl—no, woman—had more than earned it.
“The boon?”
“Was an opportunity to find that man.”
“Why haven’t you demanded it of me yet?” Cvareh’s confusion mirrored her own.
She stared at her hands. The moment she’d inhaled their scent—a scent etched on her memory by pure hatred—she knew she was close to finding the Dragon who’d called himself Rafansi. But she had yet to speak on it. She had yet to utter those words, “Take me to the man whose hands these are.” If she did, she would kill Rafansi on sight. Only she now knew he was a Xin, and an ally of Cvareh. It tore at her gut on so many levels.
“I can only ask once,” she whispered. “I want to make sure what I am asking for is what I really want.”
“Boon or not.” Cvareh sat and took her hand. “I will give you whatever you ask, Arianna.”
“Don’t offer me that.”
“Why?”
“Because you know who I am.”
“And that is precisely why I offered.”
