Page 42

“Tell me all of it.”

“His name is Lucien Tarek.” The muscle in his jaw ticked once, the only crack in an otherwise flawless composure. “Rival dragon, unregistered with any claw, three properties competing directly with mine. Two years of surveillance on you specifically, predating the commission by a wide margin. Victor’s been building the picture piece by piece since the day I first read your file, and every piece points the same direction. I’m giving it to you exactly as Victor gave it to me, without softening a single detail for either of our comforts.”

“Two years.” Her voice came out flatter than she meant it to. “I’ve been watched for two years and never noticed.”

“You weren’t meant to notice. That was the entire design.”

“That’s not comforting, not even slightly, not by any reasonable measure.”

“It wasn’t meant to be comforting. It was meant to be true.” He didn’t take his eyes off the road, but his voice held hers regardless, steady, refusing to sugarcoat a single word of it for her benefit. “You deserve true more than you deserve comfortable. I should have given you both a week ago instead of deciding for you which one you got first.”

“Two years is a long time to be somebody’s project without knowing it, without a single clue, without so much as a hint.”

“It is. I’m aware of exactly how long two years is, in more contexts than you’d probably guess.”

“That muscle in your jaw is still going, by the way. Has been since you said his name. Should I be worried about your jaw, or just him?”

“My jaw will survive.” He didn’t loosen it even slightly, and didn’t pretend the observation was wrong. “I make no promises about him.”

“How long have you known. The full picture. Not the pieces.”

“Since the alley confirmed the shape of it. Suspicions before that. Certainty since.”

“So less than a day.”

“Less than a day of certainty. Two weeks of suspicion I said nothing about, which I recognize doesn’t make you any less furious about the timeline.” He didn’t dodge that either. “I’m telling you now because you deserve it, not because the timing became convenient. Ask me anything else you want answered. I’m done managing what you get to know.”

“That’s a big promise for a man with your track record.”

“It’s the only one currently on offer. I’d take it if I were you.”

“I might. Eventually. Once I’ve finished being furious about the timeline, which, for the record, is going to take a while, possibly the rest of the week, possibly longer depending on my mood.”

“I’ve budgeted for that.”

“Have you? How generous of you.”

“Very generously. I’ve cleared the rest of my week, in fact, on the theory that I’d need it.”

None of it was a shock in the broad strokes. She’d signed up through a paranormal matchmaking agency; “entirely human” had never been on the table. What she hadn’t known was the scale of it — an operation large enough to have people, budgets, contingencies, running two full years before she’d ever heard his name. What she hadn’t known was that her own hands had apparently been doing extraordinary work behind her back for years, without asking her permission first.

She wasn’t panicking. She noticed that, distantly, with the same detached interest she gave most inconvenient facts about herself. She was calculating — visibly enough that she caught him glancing over at a stoplight, already learning to read the stillness that meant she was working a problem rather than falling apart over it.

She looked down at her own hands like they’d personally betrayed her.

“What exactly can my glass do?”

It was the right question, delivered in a tone that already suspected she wasn’t going to love the answer and wanted it anyway, because not knowing had never cost less than knowing, no matter how the knowing turned out.

“It’s dragon-compatible. Energy-adjacent is the closest anyone’s gotten to a real mechanism — it stabilizes environments where dragon presence is heavy, and it does something to sensory experience no other material replicates. Nobody fully understands why. Victor’s best theory involves the heat you work it at, a property that survives the cooling. It’s the reason the atrium panels do what they do. It’s the reason Tarek wants you, and not merely the commission.”

“So my art is a weapon, apparently.”

“Your art is a resource, to men like him. To me, it’s the reason a sterile building started breathing the day you walked into it,” he said without softening it, without dressing it up as comfort, and that landed better than comfort would have. “Both things can be true. I’d prefer you hear the second one as often as the first.”

She let the silence sit, watching the city slide by outside the window, working through the new architecture of her own life the way she’d work through a structural problem — find the load points, find what was holding weight, find what could be reinforced.

“Every piece I’ve ever made. The wedding gift for my cousin. The thing I made for Lila’s gallery opening. All of it⁠—”