Page 21 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

His hand stays under my elbow after I’m steady enough to stand on my own, face close enough that I can see the pale gray of his eyes clearly for once. Stubble along his jaw, catching the light from the trees. Vault dust is still in his hair. His thumb moves once against the inside of my elbow, small enough that it might not be on purpose.

Neither of us moves to close the rest of the distance. Neither of us moves away either. Some part of me wants to close it, wants to know what his mouth would feel like. I don’t let myself. There’s just the two of us standing closer than a landing requires, breathing the same warm afternoon air, his gaze steady on mine.

Valen checks the treeline.

I brush the dirt from my knees, grass stains dark against the fabric. We turn toward Ash Hollow together, the treeline thick enough ahead of us that the compound is still hidden somewhere on the other side.

We start walking, close enough that our shoulders nearly brush the whole way in.

Chapter 14

Valen

The last stretch into Ash Hollow’s clearing runs uphill through cut grass. The light goes gold over the ridge behind the barn most evenings this time of year. I still stop and look at it every time. The horses are already in.

Nyxiana keeps pace beside me, spine straight, chin level as if she hadn’t just pulled me off a portal platform that was about to put us wherever Faelan wanted us. She phased us both out blind rather than ride it, and now she’s walking exactly the way she did as she got onto the platform in the first place. Nothing in her stride says what it actually took to get us here.

A piece of her hair has come loose and hangs against her jaw. My hand is halfway to her face. I’m not sure when it got there. I put it back down. I’ve spent years learning not to reach for things I want. It hasn’t made this any easier.

Dane is already coming out of the Lodge before we clear the treeline at the edge of the yard. Nova a step behind him.

“We found something,” I say, before he can ask. “It’s secured.”

He looks at Nyxiana, then back at me. “Inside. All of it, once.”

Dane calls the leadership in before the last of the light goes off the ridge. Nova takes the chair beside him. Callum stands at the window with his arms crossed. Ben and Harper sit close, her knee against his. Rafe and Kari take the bench across from them. Evren stays on his feet, leaning against the chimney stone, already braced for whatever this is. Lyanna comes in last, her healer’s bag still over one shoulder, and takes the chair nearest the door out of habit.

Chairs scrape into place. Somebody flips the lights on against the coming dark. The room smells like cedar.

“Did you see them?” Evren says, before anyone’s settled. “My family?”

“We saw them,” Nyxiana says. “Everyone was well when we left.”

He nods once. His arms stay crossed.

I give it to them in order.

“Niko opened the family vaults to us,” I say. “Nyxiana went through them by hand, case by case. What came out of it was a broken piece of gray stone at the back of the last one. It carries the account of the dragon line. Every generation of it, all the way down to Niko and to Auriella.”

“She read it back as far as it goes,” I say. “It runs and runs, then it quits. When the account picks up again, the first dragons of Drakoria are already alive and already ruling. Where they came from isn’t in it.”

“Not in it because it never was, or not in it because something’s gone?” Kari asks.

“Gone,” I say. “There’s a hole where the beginning should sit. Something used to be there. Someone took it out and set a later name in its place, a dragon born generations after the fact, and left him standing there looking like the first.”

The gold in Evren’s eyes stops moving.

“So, nobody smashed anything,” Rafe says. “Somebody who knew exactly what a founding record is supposed to read like sat down and built a better one.”

Nyxiana takes a half step in from the wall. “I kept my hand on that missing place well past when I needed to. The work sitting over the hole is as old as the founding itself. It went in that way from the start. Whoever kept that account kept it around the missing part and never wrote down that anything was gone.”

Kari turns her head. “Meaning what?”

“Meaning we’ve spent every generation tracing ourselves back to a beginning that was never ours.” Evren’s voice comes out rough at the edges. “Meaning nobody in my family has ever known where dragons come from. My father doesn’t know. His father didn’t.”

“There’s one more piece,” I say. “The line that account follows is the royal line. It runs through Auriella. It runs to Nyxiana.”

Every face in the room turns toward her before I finish her name.