28. Corin

28

Corin

The Montfort woman was still on the other side of the magical barrier, but she didn’t need to physically attack to do harm.

Maya stopped breathing. Her face was gray with shock. And everything Seline Montfort’s outraged declaration suggested came together to reveal a horrible truth.

He had told Maya he would discover the identity of the man who’d fathered her son. But he hadn’t looked close enough to home.

He drew a slow, controlled breath. This was his fault. He had known the pool of potential male dragon shifters was small, and he had avoided the most obvious answer.

He turned to Maya, bracing himself. She looked up at him, her lips thin, her eyes huge.

“Don’t worry,” he said quickly. “This won’t affect—”

“Stop.” She swallowed. Emotions raged behind her eyes. “Just stop. All of you.”

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. When she opened them again and looked up at him, she was … smiling?

“How dare you,” she said gently. “As though the best assistant you ever had wouldn’t recognize a relative of your greatest enemy. Our visitor is Seline Montfort. Her brother is Robert Bonlieu, born Robert Montfort. And there is no way in hell my beer goggles were so tight that night I wouldn’t recognize Robert freaking Montfort.”

He swallowed. “I thought—”

“You thought, oh, that sounds like the worst possible thing that could be true, so it probably is?” Her expression gentled. “Sorry, Corin. This particular investigation is still open. And, honestly, if you’re worried about an inappropriate connection with the Montforts…”

Her eyes slid over to Seline, and then down the hill to where his cousins had fled. She raised an eyebrow.

“I ought to look a little closer to home?” he suggested weakly.

“So let’s all calm down for one minute. And during that one minute,” she added in a grumbling undertone, “if there are any more relatives of any more feuding dragons hiding in the woodwork who would like to make themselves known without causing a fuss, it would be highly appreciated. ”

Behind them, Gabriela cleared her throat.

“Perhaps now would be a good time to—” she began, and sneezed.

Shimmering flames flowed around her, and she transformed into a dragon.

Corin stared. Gabriela’s dragon form was sleek and compact, no bigger than a large horse. Her coloring was like a sunset, gold-bellied, with her scales shading through bronze and copper to a deep red on the very tips of her wings. Unlike any other dragon he’d seen, she had feathers on her wings and the crest of her skull.

Her coloring was exactly the same as Tomás’s, only darker. And Tomás’s spiky growths finally made sense. Not spines. Pin feathers.

Tomás himself was still tucked into Gabriela’s front leg, held up cozily against her chest. He stared up at her in open-mouthed awe. Then, as though to illustrate the similarities, he giggled and shifted.

Two Flores dragons, not the faded red of Montforts, but burnished and shining.

“Mom?” Maya whispered weakly.

Gabriela opened her mouth. Nothing came out but a thin wisp of smoke and she closed it, her draconic expression sheepish. When she shrugged, the sunlight caught her gleaming feathers and made them look like they were on fire.

Tomás crowed with delight. He leaped into the air and flew around his grandmother, showing off whirling spins and almost crash-landing directly on the necklace Seline had tossed to the ground. He picked it up and trotted forward with it clutched triumphantly in his jaw. “Chree?”

“I can’t believe…” Maya breathed. Corin put his arm around her and she sagged against him. “It was me ,” she whispered, as though she barely dared say the words aloud. “Tomás’s magic … came from me. ”