Francine stared. And then something seemed to break in her eyes, and she wasn’t staring at him anymore, she was staringthrough him. “You knew the whole time. I told you I was bringing you here to save your family, but you knew they—they were already gone.”
She sank to the bed slowly, still staring at nothing.
A thousand years of enchantment spelled the fortress into existence, but now, watching Francine, Julian felt the walls crumble around him.
Slowly, he sat down next to her.
“I should not have lied to you,” he said.
She shook her head. “That doesn’t matter. Julian—” She stared up at him, her eyes huge. “You’ve known they were dead all this time, and you’ve dealt with that alone.”
“Not alone. MacInnis knows. His entire organization does, I suspect.” He slipped his hand into hers before she could flinch. “You would have known, if you’d spoken to him.”
“If I hadn’t lied about being part of his team?” Her voice was wry. “You knew from the start.”
“I suspected.”
“But you came anyway, because saving your family was never your true goal.” She swallowed. “Yoursister.I almost destroyed so many lives because I thought Mathis was hurt—how can you stand it?”
How had he managed it? All those years with Harper. The gray eternity in the safe house. “I had a duty to keep the Soul-Eater imprisoned. And—if I had done anything to Harper, he would have hurt the eggs. Her eggs. Even though I thought they could never hatch, they were all I had left of her.”
“I’m so sorry.” Her mouth twisted. “It isn’t enough, saying that.”
“It is.” He reached under his shirt and pulled out the chain with its empty pendant link. “My sister—” He winced. “Her name was Adria. And her mate, Hamish.”
He hadn’t said their names out loud in years.
“She gave me one of her scales before I left home. Something to remind me to come home, no matter how exciting the outside world was compared to our life here. And then one day, before I even knew who Harper truly was, it vanished. When a shadow dragon dies, every part of us and every piece of our magic disappears with us, so I didn’t need to hear him gloat about what he had done. By the time he came to tell me, I already knew.”
Francine held him close, and he found the strength to keep talking.
“Our parents had Adria and me late in life. A small clutch. Only the two of us. And by then, our clan was … only our family.” He stared down at his hands. He hadn’t meant to give a history lesson, but the more he spoke, the more he wondered why he had never questioned this particular lesson. “When we came to Antarctica, hundreds of years ago, there were seven dragon families. Hundreds of shadow dragons, pledging themselves to the protection of the world. But by the time Adria and I were born, it was only our parents and us.”
“What happened to the others?”
“I … don’t know. My parents had difficulty having us. My mother theorized that the effort of maintaining the fortress took too much from our magic and left nothing for continuing our line. Dragons have specific requirements to hatch. Which is why I thought—her eggs…”
“You thought you were the last. All this time.” She reached out, almost took his hand—then pulled her hand back into her own lap. “You said that shadow dragons disappear when they die. So there won’t be anything—anything left of your sister. But her mate…”
“Hamish was a leopard seal shifter. They met while he was doing research out of McMurdo.”
“Then he—”
“Shadow dragons’ bonded mates gain our abilities. He didn’t need my sister’s help to live within the shadows here in the fortress, and when he died—” His throat tightened. Hamish had been Adria’s fated mate—but he was Julian’s friend. His first friend. “He’s gone, too.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be. It was a long—” Grief stabbed beneath his chest. “It wasn’t. It wasn’t long ago, at all.”
“Oh god.” Francine shuddered. “All this time—every time I said we were going to rescue them…”
“You couldn’t have known.” He shook his head. “Harper was careful to make sure I knew they were dead, but I don’t—I don’t know how far he let that information travel. Your intel said someone was attacking Antarctica, so it made sense…” Something pricked at his thoughts. This wasn’t adding up. “If you didn’t know about my family, then when Lance heard about Eloise’s plans, he—”
But Lancehadknown. His memories of those first hours, days, weeks away from Harper’s island were foggy, but … He’d told Chloe and Mathis how Harper kept him under control. Hadn’t he?
The puzzle pieces had been there the whole time. He just hadn’t wanted to look at them. Francine’s determination to save his already-dead family had been too painful, and along with the knowledge that he was lying to her…
They’d both been lying.
