“I’m not questioning the strength of your magic,” he said, trying a different angle. “But I still don’t think this conquest plan is going to accomplish what you want. Heartstriker is a big, stubborn clan. Even if you go completely hands off and let us rule ourselves, we’re going to be a lot more trouble than you give us credit for. Why put yourself through that if Chelsie’s the only one you really care about? If you’d just talk to her—”
“Absolutely not,” the emperor said, glaring down at him. “Were you not listening? I must remain calm if the magic that protects my clan is to work. Talking to Chelsie isn’t part of that.”
“I get that,” Julius said. “But that’s no reason to drag us all into—”
“Your sister betrayed me!” he cried. “Just because I don’t want her to die like a dog to Algonquin doesn’t mean I’m willing to let her near me so she can do it again! Bringing Heartstriker into my empire lets me protect her without exposing myself to her treachery. It’s the only way everyone stays safe. Why can’t you see that?”
“Because I don’t think you’re right!” Julius said angrily. “You’re making all these plans based on the assumption that Chelsie used you and then dumped you when things got too hot, but that’s not the Chelsie I know.”
The Qilin looked away. “Then she’s deceived you, too.”
“I don’t think so,” Julius said, stepping back into his line of view to make the golden dragon look at him. “I don’t claim to know her as well as you did, but Chelsie’s still my sister, and she’s put her life on the line for me more times than I can count. That’s not the sort of thing you can fake.”
“Of course she saved you,” he said dismissively. “You’re her clan head.”
“Not back then,” Julius said. “I’m at the top now, but a month ago, I was the runt of J-clutch, the lowest of the low. Chelsie had no reason to even know my name, and yet she was always there. When I got myself in life-or-death trouble, she fought hard to get me out. She always comes to our rescue and never asks for anything in return. That’s why I can’t believe your story is as cut-and-dried as you say. I mean, you’re claiming she worked with Bethesda to betray you, but the Chelsie I know hates our mother. The only way she’d ever ask for Bethesda’s help was if she was absolutely back-to-the-wall desperate, which she must have been, because Bethesda’s been holding whatever happened in China over her head for the last six hundred years.”
“What are you talking about?” the Qilin sneered. “I might live on the other side of the world, but I’m not ignorant. I know Chelsie is Bethesda’s Shade. They work together all the time.”
“Not willingly!” Julius cried. “Chelsie only obeyed Bethesda because she was trapped in a life debt. They did a lot of awful things together, yes, but Chelsie was there as her slave, not her partner.”
The emperor stared at him for a long time. “I never heard any of this,” he said at last.
Julius shrugged. “Not many outside our clan have, but ask any of my siblings, and they’ll tell you the same. Ask Fredrick. He’s F-clutch, and you already know how Bethesda treated them. Now take the worst of those rumors and double them, and you might have something close to what my mother did to Chelsie. If you need more proof, I can show you the edict we signed to set Chelsie and F-clutch free when we formed the Council. Or you can just go out into the throne room. The Fang of the Heartstriker Chelsie threw down when she quit being Bethesda’s Shade is still right where she dropped it. Go touch it yourself if you don’t believe me.”
“I did try, actually,” the Qilin said, looking down at his hand as if it hurt him. “I knew it was hers from the scent, but…” He sighed. “This is very different from what I’ve always thought.”
“I know,” Julius said. “That’s why I’m saying you shouldn’t be so quick to jump to conclusions. I have no doubt that whatever Chelsie said to you back then was awful, but things in my family are rarely what they seem. You should know this. You loved her once. Would the Chelsie in that painting betray you?”
“I never thought so,” he said. “But that’s why it worked so well. Seduction for power isn’t much use if your target doesn’t believe you’d never sell them out.”
“Or,” Julius countered, “that could have been the real Chelsie, and the part where she betrayed you was the lie. You tell me which makes more sense. That she faked being in love with you for an entire year only to give up and confess everything the moment she got caught, or that she always loved you, but then something happened, and she had to lie.”
“To what end?” the Qilin cried. “I offered to save her! What possible benefit could she have from throwing that back in my face?”
“I don’t know,” Julius admitted. “Which is why this doesn’t make sense yet. But if you’re right, and she really was playing you the whole time, then why did she run? You said your mother already suspected Chelsie, but could she actually have stopped you from marrying her if you’d really wanted to?”
The emperor shook his head. “She’d have fought me every step of the way. Was fighting me, actually, but she couldn’t have stopped me if I’d been determined.”
“There you go,” Julius said, spreading his hands. “You’re assuming she ran because she found out her jig was about to be up, but if she actually was the sort of dragon who’d seduce an emperor for power, then suspicion from your family would have only made her dig into you harder. Your opinion was the only one that actually mattered, so if you believed her, why would she care what anyone else said? Under those circumstances, running was actually the worst choice she could have made because it made her look guilty. So either Chelsie was both good enough to fool you for a year and bad enough to screw it up at the end, or she wasn’t fooling you at all. She really was what she appeared, and something else happened to make her flee.”
“But what could that be?” the Qilin demanded. “What would she be running from if not me?”
“I’m afraid only Chelsie knows that,” Julius said. “But that story would definitely fit her better. My sister would never betray anyone, but she has a bad habit of running from her problems. Particularly the emotional ones, which definitely includes you. That’s how I knew what you were telling me couldn’t be the whole truth. You claimed Chelsie didn’t care, but I know for a fact that she did. She still does.”
The Qilin flinched. “That’s not true.”
“It is,” Julius said stubbornly. “And I can prove it.” He pointed at the painting between them. “She still has the watercolor you painted of her when she was asleep hanging on the door of her bedroom.”
The emperor’s golden eyes went wide. “She kept it?”
“Treasures it,” Julius said with a smile. “She wouldn’t tell me who painted it, but you don’t keep paintings like that hidden in your room where you can stare at them from dragons you’ve betrayed.”
For a moment, the Qilin stood in spellbound wonder. Then, like a door closing, the amazed expression vanished. “It’s probably a trophy,” he said bitterly. “My paintings are highly prized. Her hoarding one is not proof of lingering feelings.”
“No,” Julius said stubbornly. “I got that from her face. I saw the way she looked at your picture, and I’d have had to have been blind not to notice how much she still cared. She looked just as miserable as you do right now when I dragged her side of the China story out of her. That’s what makes all of this so intolerable. Everything you’ve said since you got here has been based on the assumption that Chelsie betrayed you, but the sister I know? The one who treasures your painting in secret and threatens to bite the head off of anyone who so much as mentions China? That’s not a dragon who’s gotten away with something. That’s a dragon who’s been suffering for a long, long time, and if you really did love her once, you owe it to both of you to find out why.”
The Qilin closed his eyes with a long sigh. “You make a good argument,” he said at last. “But I can’t accept what you’re saying.”
“Why not?”
r /> “Because I can’t,” he said, turning his back to Julius. “You should go now.”
“No,” Julius said, darting around the painting so that he was standing in front of the emperor again. “If you’d just talk to my sister, I’m sure we could get to the bottom of—”
“This audience is over, Heartstriker,” the emperor said firmly, pressing a tired hand over his eyes. “I’ve already made my decision. Our conquest of your clan will proceed as planned. I suggest you go back downstairs and make the most of your final day.”
“But this is ridiculous!” Julius cried. “Don’t you at least want to hear Chelsie’s explanation? She’s free of Bethesda now. If she was ever going to tell you the truth, this would be the—”
“Why do you think I’m telling you to go?” the Qilin cried, yanking his hand back down. It wasn’t until his eyes came into view, though, that Julius realized how angry the emperor was.
“Do you know how badly I want you to be right?” he said, voice cracking. “I’ve clung to the fact that Chelsie betrayed me for centuries because it hurt less than knowing she just didn’t care. Now here you come, saying they’re both wrong. That she still loves me, and this could all be a misunderstanding, and I want to believe you so badly it hurts.”
“Then do it,” Julius said. “Chelsie’s here in the mountain right now. We can go talk to her and resolve all of this.”
“I can’t,” the Qilin said. “Don’t you see? I—”
His words cut off as the mountain began to shake. All around them, the stacked paintings tumbled from their piles. Rather than simply falling on the ground, though, each one seemed to go out of its way to fall directly into the others, the wooden frames slamming into the canvases at the perfect angle to leave huge, ugly scratch marks all across the painted images. One large oil painting of a tree actually slid all the way across the floor to the easel holding the painting of Chelsie. It was barely moving by the time it got there, but just the tap of its corner against the easel’s wooden leg was enough to tip the whole thing over.
Julius tried to catch it but overshot his grab, missing completely as the painting crashed down on the art table beside it, scattering the Qilin’s neatly stacked brushes and splattering the cup of rinse water in every direction. A few drops actually flew straight into Julius’s eyes, but most of the diluted paint water ended up on the Qilin’s golden robes, leaving ugly gray-green splatters across the meticulously embroidered dragons that covered his chest.
It was all just coincidence. Pure bad luck. But by the time Julius had rubbed the paint out of his eyes, the Qilin’s face was as pale as someone who’d just witnessed a murder.
“And now you see why,” he said, his voice weak and shaking as he leaned down to rescue the fallen painting. “I’ve been down this path before. When I lost Chelsie the first time, I did unspeakable damage to my empire. Even if you’re right, and this was all a misunderstanding, I can’t risk putting my subjects through that ever again.”
“But you also can’t keep pushing it down,” Julius argued. “I’m not saying it won’t hurt, but if you haven’t stopped loving her in six centuries, it’s not going to happen. Putting all of Heartstriker under your luck might save Chelsie from Algonquin, but it solves nothing. All you’re doing is kicking the can down the road. You’ll have no real peace until you deal with this.”
“I know,” the emperor said. “But I can’t right now.” He covered his face with his hands again. “Just go.”
“But—”
“Go,” he snarled as Lao burst through the doors.
“Xian!”
That must have been the emperor’s name. Julius had never heard any of the Chinese dragons use it before, but Lao was clearly calling to his cousin as he charged into the room. He took one look at the Qilin’s paint-splattered robe, and then he whirled on Julius. “What did you do?”
“Nothing,” the emperor said, dropping his hands with a deep, calming breath. “It’s nothing. The young Heartstriker was just leaving.”
That was clearly meant to be Julius’s out, but he couldn’t take it. Not yet. Not like this.
“You can’t keep pretending nothing’s wrong forever,” he told the emperor. “When you’re ready to know the truth, come and find me. I’ll take you to Chelsie, no questions asked.”
Lao bared his teeth. “Do not speak that name!”
“If you can’t talk about the problem, that’s a problem,” Julius said stubbornly. “If you really cared about him, you wouldn’t be enabling this.”
“That’s enough,” the emperor snarled, hands curling into fists as the mountain shook again. “You are dismissed, Heartstriker!”
That was a final warning if Julius had ever heard one. This time, though, he took it, hurrying out the door as fast as his feet would carry him.
Fredrick pounced on him the moment he got into the hall. “What happened?”
“Tell you later,” Julius promised, grabbing his arm. “Right now, we need to go.”
He started to run, but Fredrick didn’t follow. No matter how hard Julius yanked on him, he remained frozen in the doorway, staring at the unveiled Qilin’s face as though he’d never seen a dragon before. It wasn’t until Lao starting marching toward them that the F finally snapped out of it, letting Julius pull him back into the hall seconds before Lao slammed the door in their faces.
“What was that about?” Julius yelled at his brother.
Fredrick raised a shaking hand to his face. “I—”
He cut off, his head snapping up. Julius jumped, too, hand going instinctively for his missing sword as he looked around to see what had alarmed his brother.
It wasn’t a long search. At the end of the hall, one of the twin red dragons who served the Empress was standing at the door to Bethesda’s treasury. Since they tended to come in pairs, Julius looked immediately for the other one. Sure enough, the second red dragon was behind them, blocking the doorway that led back to the throne room. This meant Julius and Fredrick were now trapped in the hallway between them. A trap that was rapidly closing now that the Qilin had kicked them out.
“Looks like the empress hasn’t forgotten about killing us,” Fredrick whispered as the red dragons began to move, stalking down the hallway toward their pincered prey in deadly, silent strides.
Julius had been thinking the same thing. “Is there another way out?”
“Not without going through them.”
Fat chance of that. Fredrick might be old and bigger than expected, but Julius was still just a J. A fast one, perhaps, but definitely not Justin. He didn’t even have his Fang thanks to Lao’s requirement that he disarm.
He could actually see his sword from where they were standing, leaning against the wall right where he’d left it by the door to his mother’s sitting room. It was barely twenty feet away, but it might as well have been with Ian in Siberia for all the chance Julius had of getting to it before the red dragons caught him. Unless he was hiding something under his fitted jacket, Fredrick didn’t have a weapon either, which meant not only were they facing superior opponents in tight quarters, they were doing it completely unarmed. Julius was still processing how epically screwed that made them when a hand grabbed his shoulder.
It was a tribute to the insanity of his optimism that Julius’s first thought was that Justin had somehow known he was in trouble and come back to do his knightly duty. The biggest J did have a sixth sense for violence, and it wouldn’t be the most unlikely stunt Julius had seen his brother pull off. When he snapped his head back to look, though, it wasn’t Justin who was standing behind him.
It was Chelsie.
Both red dragons froze. For several heartbeats, no one moved, and then one of the dragons said something in Chinese. Chelsie answered in the same language, speaking the unknown words in the low, terrifying voice she normally saved for siblings who’d particularly pissed her off. Even not knowing what was being said, the sound was enough to send chills up Julius’s spine, and he wasn’t the only one
. Both of the approaching dragons were now backing off, putting up their hands in the universal gesture of surrender. When they’d shuffled all the way back to their respective ends of the hall, Chelsie’s hold on Julius’s shoulder turned into a shove.
“Move.”
“But my sword’s still—”
“We’ll get it later,” she growled, leading the way into Bethesda’s human bedroom, the one she used on the rare occasions she didn’t feel like sleeping on a pile of gold. “The fearsome twosome learned not to try me in close quarters a long time ago, but they won’t stay cowed for long. They’re probably already getting help, which means we need to go.”
That explanation raised more questions than it answered, but Julius didn’t have time to ask any of them. Chelsie had already shut the door, locking them inside their mother’s bedchamber, which was apparently the only room the Qilin’s kamikaze cleaning squad hadn’t touched yet. Julius was still wondering why Chelsie had sealed them inside an apparent dead end when she herded them both into the sprawling maze that was Bethesda’s walk-in closet. Once there, Chelsie went straight to the back, shoving aside a curtain of million-dollar dresses and hauling up the crimson carpet beneath them to reveal a wooden door the size of a porthole set flush into the stone beneath.
“Get in,” she ordered, yanking the wooden door up to reveal a narrow hole going straight down.
Fredrick obeyed first, jumping down the dark chute feet first without hesitation. Julius wasn’t quite as brave, sitting on the floor as he eased himself into the bolt-hole. “Where does this go?”
Chelsie looked nervously over her shoulder. “Somewhere safe.”
“Good,” Julius said. “Because we need to talk.”
Chelsie didn’t look happy with that announcement, but she didn’t waste time arguing. She just shoved him down the escape and hopped in after him, catching her fall on the edge one-handed before reaching up with the other to close the secret door, plunging them all into the dark.