Next to him, Francine put her head in her hands.
“It was a trap. It was all a trap,” she said hollowly.
He steeled himself. “That doesn’t matter.” If he said it heartlessly enough, maybe it would come true.
“Doesn’t it?” One of her eyebrows lifted, a tired echo of her expression as she teased him only a few minutes before. “Elly laid out the bait and a trail of breadcrumbs perfectly calculatedto lure me in. I—” Her expression cracked, and she covered her face with her hands. “I couldn’t save Mathis. Of course I would want to save your family. A second chance. She thought of everything.”
Julian stilled. “Mathis? Did something happen to your brother?”
“Didn’t you know?” She was still holding her face in her hands, her voice muffled. “A friend of ours killed him. His inner panther ran wild and murdered Mathis, and he tried to cover it up.”
Horror writhed beneath Julian’s skin. “No. I only saw him a few weeks ago, that can’t—” His dragon thrashed, unwilling to believe what it was hearing. Mathis was free. He and his mate had saved everyone from Harper. They’d even escaped fromhim, when his dragon had run mad and almost destroyed everything he had left in the world. “And—he called you. Back in Ushuaia. How could—”
Francine’s voice cut over his. “Oh, he died much longer ago than that.”
“What?”
He stared at her. Slowly, she raised her head. She looked gray and exhausted. And as she told him everything, his heart broke again.
“My brother liked to disappear. Do his own thing, solo, away from the responsibility of being heir to our pride. He always came back, until the one time he didn’t. I couldn’t find him anywhere.”
“Harper took him.”
She nodded. “And then, when I went looking for Mathis, Harper found me, too. At the same time as he was keeping my twin captive, he fed me enough lies that I blamed one of our friends for his disappearance. Harper convinced me that Grant Diaz had killed Mathis. And I— I wantedrevenge.I wanted tomake himhurtbefore he died. I kidnapped his mate. I almost killed her. Iwouldhave killed her, I would have killed both of them, and Lance too, except they stopped me in time. And even after all that, I didn’t save my twin. He and his mate saved themselves.” Her voice shook. “Harper used me like a blunt weapon. And I was so easy to use. Where do you think Eloise got the idea?” She met his eyes, her voice a knife she was turning on herself. “I was never here to save you. I stole you from that safe house because you were my key to this place.”
“But you did save me.”
“I used you. The same way Gerald Harper and Elly used me.”
“And I let you, because by the time you warned me the safe house was about to explode, I needed to use you as much as you needed to use me.” He leaned closer—carefully, as though she were a stray cat he might frighten away—and pressed a kiss against her hair. “And now we’re both here. Alive.”
“We’re both here.” Her eyes glinted, but there was no mockery or bitterness in it. Only defeat. “With everyone we left on board the ship and who knows how many other people on their way. And there’s nobody coming to rescue us.”
31
Francine
Julian hadn’t been lying about the hundreds of years of dragon shifter couture. She recognized styles from the last hundred years or so, and some of the fabrics—those she didn’t recognize—he explained for her. Sealskin. Fish leather. Textiles that could be made from what lived in this icy continent, and those brought in by the shadow dragons’ fated mates when they left the outside world behind.
“They never returned to the outside world?” she asked, pulling on a shirt over loose woven pants.
Julian held out a sealskin coat. “Some. Long ago. There are records—Adria used to read them to me.” Grief passed behind his eyes like a cloud over the sun, but at least he wasn’t hiding it anymore. “Not for a long time, though.”
“Quite a distance to travel for a shopping trip.” She stroked the fabric of her shirt. It was good quality linen, hand-stitched and embroidered with a pattern like waves. And old. Worn softer than butter.
Not the sort of thing she would ever have worn in her old life.
“I don’t need the coat,” she said. “It’s warm enough in here.”
“It isn’t where we’re going next.”
“And where’s that?”
The corners of his mouth pinched down. “I thought you should see what it is I’ve been hiding all this time.”
He led her deeper into the fortress. Francine stared wide-eyed, not bothering to hide her curiosity. The bedroom and bathroom she’d seen so far were built to a human scale, but the door to the hallways outside and the hallway itself were built to house dragons.
Julian’s people must have spent as much time in dragon form as in human form. But the shadow dragons had welcomed outsiders, too—their fated mates, who might have been other animal shifters, or not shifters at all.
