The other figure—Scar, my memory supplies, vampire and vice president, the one who told me about the years blurring and holding onto moments—lets out a low whistle. “Memory’s coming back. The witch’s magic is weakening.”
Raze moves toward me with a predatory stillness that characterized our early interactions, when I was his prisoner, he was my captor, and neither of us understood yet that captivity would transform into something that defied every law governing his world. His eyes blaze with cold fire as he gestures toward the spare bedroom, toward evidence of my premeditation and deception spread across the walls.
“Y-you weren’t supposed to find m-me,” I whisper, and the admission tastes like grit on my tongue because it’s true.
I came to the mountains on purpose.
I researched dragons and supernatural creatures for years before that night on the road, before the hunter, the crash, and stumbling into the clubhouse with no idea that I was walking into exactly the situation I’d been seeking while simultaneously ensuring my own imprisonment.
BecauseIam the witch’s daughter.
And I was supposed to observe, report back, maybe help break the curse that kept Raze caged in ice and aggression, thendisappear before attachment became something that violated the fundamental laws separating the human world from the supernatural one hiding in plain sight.
But I made the catastrophic mistake of falling for the dragon I came to save.
And when my mother arrived to enforce the laws I’d broken simply by existing in his world for too long, the sentence was supposed to be death. Raze had been given one chance to control the fire she had returned to him, and when he couldn’t, the price became mine to pay.
She should have killed me.
That was the law.
Instead, she chose something colder.
Something crueler in its mercy.
She stripped my memories away and tore me out of his world, not to punish him, but to save me from loving a dragon she believed would only burn me in the end.
The memories cascade faster now, overwhelming in their intensity. His hands in my hair. Ice spreading across my skin in patterns that felt like claiming. The way he looked at me in Church when I corrected Flux’s legal analysis and proved myself useful instead of just a liability waiting to be eliminated. The taste of him, frost, fire, and possession so absolute, it rewrote every understanding I had about what desire could be.
The night we had together before my mother arrived.
The way the flame in the dome burned golden for the first time in three centuries.
Everything I lost when my mother’s magic unmade me to protect the laws that kept their world hidden.
“Roxy.” Raze’s voice cuts through the memory storm, sharp with an edge I recognize as barely contained violence. “Why do you have a photograph of me in dragon form? Why does your research go back months… fuck,years?”His eyes narrow, icecracking through the blue. “How long have you been hunting us?”
“I wasn’t—” I start, then stop, because half-truths will only make this worse. I swallow hard and force myself to meet his gaze. “I didn’t hunt you the way hunters do. I wasn’t looking for trophies or proof.” Silence presses in. “I’mnothuman,” I say, and the words feel heavier spoken aloud than they ever did in my head. “Not completely.”
Every head in the room turns.
“I’m a witch,” I continue, before anyone else can fill the gap with assumptions. “Barely. Whatever magic I was born with is thin, diluted, more potential than power. I can’t cast the way she can. I can’t bend the world or rewrite laws or curse entire bloodlines.” My voice tightens. “So, I live human. Work human jobs. Stay out of supernatural circles because there’s nothing for me there excepthershadow.”
Raze doesn’t interrupt, and that feels much worse.
“My mother…” I say quietly, “… isn’t like me.”
Understanding flickers across Scar’s face before he masks it.
“She’s old,” I go on. “Older than most of the creatures she judges. And she’s obsessed with balance. With containment. With punishing anything she decides is a threat to the ordershebelieves in.” I gesture helplessly. “Which is why she put a curse on dragons who burned too hot. Why she exiled whole clans into the mountains and told herself it was mercy.”
Raze’s jaw tightens.
“I grew up hearing about you,” I admit. “About this place. About the ice curse. About how dragons were meant to burn wild and free and instead were locked into cages made of their own rage.” My breath shudders. “I didn’t believe it at first. Not really. So, I started researching, mapping sightings, tracking disappearances. Trying to figure out if the stories were real… and if they were, whether the curse could be broken.”
The room is deathly still now.
“That’s why the wall,” I say softly. “The research, the notes… I wasn’t spying for her. I was trying to understand what she’d done. And whether she was wrong.”
