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No. Jagaros shifted. Not into his brother’s form, but into that of the same young man he had just touched by talon.

I stumbled backward on the frozen fire of his memories, sudden, violent understanding slamming into my ribs. Because it was not Fabian who landed on light feet and hurried toward that abandoned classroom where a sudden sneeze revealed my mother’s hiding place.

It was Jagaros. Jagaros with wild, curly blonde hair, jade-green eyes, and a splatter of freckles just like mine.

Jagaros who closed the classroom door behind him before Fabian could uncurl from his position and see.

Jagaros who saw my mother standing wide-eyed in the shadows beneath the vampire bats, crescent knife raised menacingly.

Jagaros who asked the questions she’d demanded of him so long ago: “Who are you? Why are you here? Are you okay?”

Jagaros who opened his arms and embraced Chrysanthia when she dropped her knife and ran to him through a peal of sobs.

Jagaros who was…

I wrenched myself out of his mind, my entire world collapsing around me as the dark prison cell returned and the eyes of a massive white tiger stared at me in mourning, begging me to understand.

Jagaros who was my father.

CHAPTER

52

RAYNA

“No.” Jagaros shook his head. I hadn’t even realized I’d gasped that last part out loud. “I would never try to take that title away from the two men who raised you, Rayna Drey.” A too-heavy pause. “But I did love your mother more than anything else in this world. And it is me who sired you.”

“You…”

I could hardly exhale the word out, choking on my fury strangled with such a deep-rooted hurt that I knew I’d never be able to unravel it.

“You took Fabian’s form. You dumped me on him. I’ve looked into his mind—he really thinks he’s my biological father. He thinks he did something horrible by kidnapping me from my mother, but it was you.” A shout broke free of my chest. “What did you DO to her? What did you do to HIM?”

I launched myself at Jagaros without thinking, intent on wringing any part of his feline neck I could reach. He might have let me if the strings of Dyonisia’s antipower hadn’t strummed against me and ripped a scream from my lungs, forcing me to slump back against the wall between heavy pants.

Dyonisia herself laughed from the front of the cell.

“Oh, what a fun little family reunion this is! Me, my sister’s secret lover, and their forbidden daughter all in the same room. The only one still missing is Chrysanthia herself.”

And just like that, Dyonisia’s apparent joy pitched sideways, her smile twisting into the deadly face she wore beneath it.

As if she still blamed Jagaros for whatever had become of my mother after she’d swelled with me in her womb and given birth to me.

I spit my glare at him again. A sound rumbled in his throat, but I’d pushed him out of my mist-less space and couldn’t understand him.

Jagaros took a hesitant, shaking step toward me and tried again. “Please, Rayna. Just look at the rest of the memories, and then loathe me for the rest of your life if you must. But you need the rest of the memories to understand completely.”

As much as I wanted to protest, to beat my fists against the prison-like stripes stamped on his fur coat, to shove him out again, my subconscious was nudging the back of my mind. Reminding me of the story the vampire bats had told me during my first year at the Esholian Institute.

For a month, they raised the baby together, Lord Arad had said. And then she told the boy she had to go back. She’d take the baby, she said, and raise it on the ships, and train it to fight in an upcoming war. It would be an honor, the lady said, to provide her people with such a thing.

It didn’t add up. The Chrysanthia from Jagaros’s memories would never have wanted to train me to fight for Mydusia’s army. Not when she’d been on the run from Mydusia for centuries, in hiding, missing in the eyes of her people. Both Sorronians and Ranuqians alike.

Jagaros was right. I needed the rest of the memories to understand completely. Teeth grinding together to clamp down on another scream, I nodded.

And plummeted back into his fire-and-ice mind.

The mist swirled into the same scene I’d left.