Page 18

V anya

The drive home feels endless. Every red light stretches into eternity. Every familiar street corner mocks me with its false normalcy.

Everything feels like it’s weighing down on me. Vex’s enhanced protocols breathing down our necks. Hargen’s face when I revealed the truth about my staged execution. The countdown until they discover what Ember really is.

I pull into the driveway of our little home and cut the engine. The Shadowhand mask sits in my passenger seat, its silver surface catching streetlight. I can feel its weight even without touching it—decades of deception made manifest. Tonight, for the first time in years, I’m leaving it behind.

The house ahead looks smaller somehow. More fragile. The Tudor-style architecture that once seemed so solid now feels like a theater set, all facade and empty spaces. Warm light spills from the living room windows where Ember waits, unaware that her entire world is about to shift.

I force my breathing to steady. Practice at emotional compartmentalization. The ability to be multiple people simultaneously.

I can do this.

I have to do this.

The front door unlocks with its familiar soft click. Inside, the house smells like the lavender and the Earl Grey tea Ember favors and the faint ozone trace of magic carefully contained.

“Mom?” Her voice carries from the living room before I’ve even hung up my coat. “You’re back early. Is something wrong?”

Something wrong. Of course she can sense it. The careful mask I’ve worn for decades is cracking, and Ember has always been sensitive to the emotions I try to hide.

I pause in the entryway, suddenly aware of how heavy my coat feels. How the familiar space seems to pulse with unspoken truths.

“I’m fine,” I say, although I’m really not.

She appears in the doorway, laptop balanced against her hip, those deep brown eyes studying my face with unsettling intensity. “Really? You look like something fundamental just shifted. Like the world changed while you were gone.”

It did.

“We need to talk.” The words come out steady, though my pulse races. “About your father.”

Ember goes completely still. The laptop slides from her hip, and she catches it automatically, never breaking eye contact. “Now? Not on my birthday? You said after my birthday—”

“I can’t wait anymore.” I move into the living room, our familiar space suddenly feeling like a stage set for the most important performance of my life. “What I’m about to tell you changes everything.”

She sinks onto the couch, setting the laptop aside with shaking hands. Her face cycles through emotions—hope, fear, anger, confusion. “You’re serious.”

“More serious than I’ve ever been about anything.” I take the chair across from her, the same one where I’ve deflected her questions about heritage and bloodlines and the father she believes died a hero. “Your father isn’t dead, Ember.”

“What?” The question barely qualifies as sound.

“He never died. The story I told you—about him sacrificing himself for our bloodline—it was a lie.” I feel like the words are torn from me. “I lied to you about everything.”

She stares at me for heartbeats that stretch into forever. When she speaks again, her voice carries a tremor that makes my chest ache. “He abandoned us?”

“No!” The denial explodes from me because it couldn’t be further from the truth. “He never abandoned you.” I pull in a breath. “He never knew you existed.”

“I don’t understand.”

I close my eyes, gathering the courage for confessions I’ve never allowed myself to voice. When I open them again, Ember’s face reflects such a desperate hunger for truth that it breaks my heart.

“Your father’s name is Hargen Cole,” I begin, each word measured and deliberate. “He works for the Aurora Collective—an organization advocating for peaceful integration of dragons into human society. Our relationship was forbidden by every law of Ivory League society.”

“Because he’s not an Arrowvane?” Her voice carries careful understanding.

“Because he’s not dragon at all.” The distinction matters in ways she doesn’t understand yet. “He’s witch.”

She rocks back against the couch cushions, eyes wide with shock.

“Witch?” The question comes out strangled. “But you said—you told me I was pure dragon. That my bloodline was ancient, powerful—”

“Your dragon bloodline is ancient and powerful.” I lean forward, desperate to make her understand. “The Arrowvane family has maintained genetic purity for millennia. But you’re not just dragon, Ember. You’re half witch.”

“That’s impossible.” She stands abruptly, striding to the window with sharp, restless movements. “My magic—it’s dragon magic. Fire and transformation and—”

“And healing that shouldn’t exist in dragon bloodlines.” The truth cuts through her denial. “And empathic sensing that’s purely witch-born. And it’s why your fire sometimes burns cold instead of hot.”

She freezes at the window, her reflection ghostlike in the dark glass.

“You’re hybrid,” I continue gently. “The living proof that two magical bloodlines can create something new. Something unprecedented.”

“Something forbidden.” Her voice sounds hollow.

“Something magnificent.” The words carry every ounce of maternal pride I’ve held back since she was born. “You’re brilliant and powerful and beautiful, and you exist because love can create miracles even in the darkest circumstances.”

She turns back to face me. “But why? Why didn’t he know about me?”

“Because I never told him.” I shake my head.

“When my clan found out about us, they sentenced me to death.” I don’t go into all the details of how I chose execution over betraying him.

It seems unnecessary now. “Except I didn’t die.

Cassia saved me.” Cassia… who Ember has only ever known as a fond relative who visits occasionally.

Ember looks like her world just turned upside down. Because it did. And it’s about to get worse.

“So…” There’s steel in her voice now. “So you let him think you were dead. For my whole life.”

“To protect you.” The justification sounds hollow even to me. “If he’d known about you, he would have tried to contact us. Tried to find you. And that attention would have gotten you killed.”

“So instead, you decided to lie to both of us.” She moves closer, and her magic flares automatically—defensive fury given form. The air around her shimmers with heat that smells of copper and ozone. “You decided what was best for everyone without asking what we wanted.”

“I was trying to—”

“To control everything.” She cuts me off with a gesture that scatters sparks across the carpet. “You decided he couldn’t handle the truth. You decided I was better off without him. You decided isolation was safer than honesty.”

“It was safer!” The words explode from me with accumulated fear. “Do you have any idea what they do to hybrid children, Ember? What the enhanced protocols are designed to find and eliminate?”

She goes very still. “What enhanced protocols?”

I’ve said too much. Revealed the current danger when I meant to focus on the historical justification. But there’s no taking it back now.

“New genetic verification techniques.” I force my voice to remain steady. “The extremist factions have developed scanners that can identify mixed heritage in our oldest clan lines, seven generations removed. They’re implementing them systematically, starting with young adults under twenty-five.”

“Young adults like me.”

“Yes.”

“And when they find mixed heritage?”

I can’t bring myself to say it directly. Can’t voice the protocols that turn discovery into elimination. “For the ancient clans like ours… There are consequences.”

“What kind of consequences?”

“The permanent kind.”

She sinks back onto the couch as understanding crashes over her. All the careful isolation. The homeschooling. The lack of friends her age. The constant deflections about our family history.

“I’m a target,” she says quietly.

“You’re the target.” The admission feels like confessing to murder. “Your mixed heritage makes you exactly what they’re hunting for. And if they discover that the Shadowhand herself has been hiding a hybrid daughter…”

“The Shadowhand?” Her eyes narrow. “ You’re the Shadowhand?”

Another secret exposed. Another wall crumbling.

“I am.”

The silence stretches between us, heavy with revelations and accumulated lies. When Ember speaks again, her voice carries a calm that’s somehow more terrifying than fury.

“You’re the Shadowhand. The most vocal purist in the Ivory League. The one advocating for the elimination of mixed bloodlines.”

“Yes.”

“While hiding your own mixed-blood daughter.”

“Yes.”

“And my father doesn’t know any of this.”

“Not until today.” I swallow hard, hating the taste of my own fear. “I reached out to him. Told him about you. About the danger.”

“Why now?” The question carries an edge that could cut glass. “After all the years of silence, why reach out now?”

“Because I can’t protect you anymore.” The confession breaks something inside me. “The protocols are too sophisticated. The investigation too thorough. I’ve run out of ways to keep you hidden.”

“So you contacted him because you need something.”

The accusation stings because it’s true. And it’s so much like Hargen’s reaction that I almost wonder if it’s written in her DNA.

“I contacted him because you need him. His Aurora connections, his resources—everything I can’t provide anymore.”

“Which is?”

“A way out.” My voice cracks on the words. “A chance at freedom. At a life where you don’t have to hide what you are.”

She stares at me for a long moment, processing everything I’ve told her. When she speaks again, her voice is deadly quiet.

“Where is he now?”

The question I’ve been dreading. The one that will require me to trust—really trust—another person for the first time in decades.

“Waiting to meet you.”

“Okay,” she says. “I want to see him.” Ember’s voice carries quiet determination. “I want to meet my father.”

“Are you sure?” The question sounds ridiculous even as I ask it. There really is no alternative right now. “Once we take this step, there’s no going back. Everything changes.”

“Good.” She stands, moving with the same unconscious grace that marks her heritage. “I’m tired of living in a cage, even a beautiful one. I’m tired of half-truths and careful deflections and being treated like I’m too fragile to know my own story.”

She pauses at the doorway, looking back at me with eyes that carry too much understanding for someone her age.

“I forgive you,” she says quietly. “For the lies. For the isolation. For keeping us apart all these years. I understand why you did it.”

Relief floods through me like physical pain.

“But I won’t forgive you if you don’t trust me now.” Her gaze locks with mine, unflinching. “No more secrets. No more half-truths. No more deciding what’s best for everyone else.”

“No more secrets,” I agree, though the promise terrifies me.

“Then let’s go meet my father.” She’s gone before I can respond to her.