“Colombe. Chance Colombe.” Her voice tightens around the syllables. “August fifteenth. Five years ago.”
I run through memory, sorting through dates and locations and operations filed away in mental archives built over decades of service. August fifteenth. Five years ago. The details surface slowly but completely.
“Supply route,” I say, piecing it together. “Wolf team encountered Syndicate agents. Six targets. Three casualties.”
“Three casualties.” She laughs, but it’s brittle, ugly. “That’s what you call them. Casualties. Numbers in a report.”
“Yes.”
“He wasn’t a number.” She turns now, and her eyes are bright with something that might be tears or rage or both. “He was my mate. My soul mate. We bonded when we were teenagers. Grew up together. Planned our lives together.”
The words start slowly but gain momentum, like something breaking. “We were supposed to be safe. It was a routine run. Just gathering intel, getting out clean. No one was supposed to die.” Her voice cracks slightly. “But you ambushed them. Your team. Your orders.”
“Yes.”
“And he died.” The words come out ragged now. “The bond just—it snapped. I felt it. I was in my mother’s kitchen making dinner, and I felt him die. Felt it tear through me like something physical. Like being ripped in half.”
She stops, wrapping her arms around herself in an unconscious gesture of self-protection. “They called to confirm what happened. But I already knew. The bond was gone. Just… gone. Like someone had cut a rope I’d been holding my whole life, and suddenly I was falling with nothing to catch me.”
I watch this woman who dragged me into a shelter to execute me, who’s spent years building rage into purpose, and she’s shaking. Not from cold or injury but from the weight of finally speaking this truth aloud to the person responsible.
“Five years,” she says, quieter now. “I’ve been planning this. Imagining exactly how I’d kill you. What I’d say. How it would feel.”
“And now?” I ask.
“Now I don’t know.” She looks at me with something like confusion. “You’re not what I expected.”
“What did you expect?”
“A monster. Someone obviously evil. Someone easy to hate.”
“I’m not?”
“I don’t know what you are.”
I could tell her the truth: I am exactly what she expected. A man who’s signed orders that killed dozens, who’s broken families and destroyed lives in service to a cause I believed was righteous. But she’s looking at me like she wants to understand, so I offer her what I can.
“I believed in what the Syndicate claimed to stand for,” I say, the words measured. “Protecting dragonkind. Preserving our culture. Dragons were hunted for centuries, nearly driven to extinction. The Syndicate said they were our salvation, our path to survival.”
“But?”
“But they lied. Or maybe I was too useful to see the truth clearly.” I lean back against the wall, searching for words that don’t sound like excuses. “It’s not about protecting dragons. It’s about power. The Syndicate’s leadership—the Ivory League—uses fear to control, kills anyone who doesn’t fit their vision of purity. Hybrids. Families of mixed descent. Anyone different gets eliminated.”
“And you participated in that.”
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“Decades.”
She’s quiet, processing this information with visible effort. “So why stop? Why defect now?”
“I saw what we were becoming. What I was helping to build.” I meet her eyes directly. “I believed one thing but kept doinganother. Eventually, I couldn’t live with the gap between them anymore.”
“That doesn’t change what you did.”
“No,” I agree without hesitation. “It doesn’t.”
