My feet walked forward and stopped in front of the piano. Sitting down, I lifted the keyboard cover. I laid my fingertips on the gold keys, felt the dust on the smooth surfaces.
I didn’t intend to play. But my fingers pressed down on the high E, then D-sharp, then back to E, and again and again until it rolled into B and I was playing “Für Elise” from memory, the way I used to do for Mom, to prove that I did practice sometimes. She used to say it was the whiniest song that Beethoven ever wrote—the melody sings “Why oh why oh why…” and it felt perfect right now. Leaning into the piano, I let my fingers fly through the insistent runs. The melody demanded, driving forward. I heard footsteps inthe foyer, but I didn’t stop, and then more footsteps on the stairs. Closing my eyes, I played from memory, crescendoing the “Why oh why oh why,” drilling my fingers into the keys, until Dad barked, “Enough!”
I lifted my fingers and raised my foot off the pedal. Reflected in the gold piano, I saw my father and three brothers, distorted in the sheen.
“You won’t play that again,” Dad said.
I didn’t answer.
“We thought she was back,” Tuck said, his voice quiet.
“She’s not coming back,” Dad said. “She made her choices.”
What choices?I wanted to scream at him, but I knew he wouldn’t answer. Thanks to Ryan, I had enough of my own answer: she’d tried and failed to steal a jewel. “And what about our choices? What are we choosing? Yes, she left, but we’re still here.” Standing, I turned to face my family, what was left of it. “We’re still Hawkinses, no matter how many sapphire necklaces we sell or doors we seal shut.”
Dad exhaled so hard that bits of smoke swirled out of his nose. I automatically took a step backward—Dad’s flame can hit a target nearly a football field away—and thumped against the piano keys. They clanged discordantly. “Of course. But now isn’t the time—”
“Yes, it is! It’s exactly the time to reclaim who we are!” Seeing my brothers’ expressions, I realized I was shouting. At Dad. When he was already angry. I clamped my mouth shut.
Charles spoke. “Sky, you don’t understand—”
I cut Charles off. “It’s not so complicated to understand. Dad, you always told us that a dragon without a hoard is nothing. If we want to restore our rank at the next Reckoning, we need a new hoard.” It was so supremely logical that I was amazed no one had said it before.
To Dad, Liam said, “This is my fault. I should have had her wait outside while I bargained with Maximus. She was upset about the jewelry—”
“Yes, of course, I was upset!” I was shouting again. But it wasn’t just about Mom’s jewelry. “We have a wrong to right. A mission to complete! And instead, we’ve just been moping around here, licking our wounds.”
Liam and Tuck exchanged glances—the kind of glances that only twins can exchange, with layers of meaning embedded in each twitch of the eyebrow. I was fairly certain that this glance meant they thought I was being irrational. But I wasn’t irrational. I was right. I’d never been more right about anything in my entire life.
I fixed my gaze on each of them. “Admit it: if we finish what Mom started, the invitations would start coming again, the press would worship us, and the other wyverns wouldn’t treat us like we’re scum on the bottoms of their shoes.” All of them looked uncomfortable. Tuck was eyeing the window as if he wanted to jump out of it and run away across the lawn. “Steal something significant, and we can start acting like a family again.”
Dad sighed again, this time without smoke, and he seemed to deflate. His shoulders sagged forward, and thelines in his face seemed to deepen with more shadows. He looked surprisingly old, which wasn’t a word I ever associated with my father. “Sky, we can’t. You don’t understand what’s at stake. What your mother tried…If we failed, we’d risk losing what we have left. I’m not willing to risk that.”
“But if we don’t fail, we gain back all we lost.”And maybe even Mom,I thought, but I didn’t say it out loud. It was such a fragile, beautiful hope that I didn’t dare put it into words. But maybe, maybe, if we retraced her steps, we’d find answers. Maybe we’d even find her. If I had that jewel, I could at least bargain for news of her.
“Stop it, Sky,” Charles said. “The answer is no.”
My fingers itched to play “Für Elise” again. Why oh why oh why?
“We will fail,” Dad said.
“Not if we work together,” I said. “All five of us. We’d be a formidable team.”
He shook his head. “You don’t even know what she was attempting—”
“She was trying to steal from Ryan’s family,” I interrupted. “Some kind of jewel, from the Keene family vault.”
He paled, noticeably, from the tips of his ears down his neck. “No, Sky. Absolutely not. You forget about this.”
“If we planned carefully—”
“No, Sky.”
I fixed my eyes on my brother Charles. He was the reasonable one, or claimed to be. If I could convince him…“Don’t you see—”
Charles shook his head, not letting me even explain my very rational, very necessary, very satisfying idea. “Aren’t you listening? It’s too much of a risk.”
“Liam?” I turned to him.
