Free Breath of Desire by Ophelia Bell Page B

something she’d promised herself she would do while she was there.
    Aurik accepted the glass she poured for him and sat at the edge of her bed, resting his elbows on his knees. His gaze traveled over her slowly, seeming to take her in with as much thirst as he showed his drink. He swallowed the wine in three long gulps and held out the glass for her to refill it with chilled golden liquid.
    “You’re still leaving, aren’t you,” she whispered, and her heart seemed to clench at the realization. “Please tell me why?”
    He glanced away, focusing on her stacks of notes. His eyes fixed on the image of the illuminated manuscript that was still displayed on her screen. “Who’s Rosenkrantz?” he asked, suddenly seeming to forget why he was there.
    “Nobody, just stay focused here. You were saying something about leaving, and I want you to come out with it already. Tell me the truth. Tell me why you think you have to go!”
    Aurik tore his eyes away from her screen and seemed to struggle for a moment to focus. “Thea, I’m not human. I’m a dragon,” he began, and took a deep breath. She stared at him blankly for a moment, waiting for the punch line. What he shared after that caused the world to slide out from beneath her.
    Her hand shook as she poured another glassful of wine and drank it down quickly, willing the alcohol to hurry and obliterate what she’d just heard. But her body wouldn’t cooperate. Her mind raced over all the research she’d done that week, and all the out of place details suddenly fit. The oddly anachronistic names of some of the linked families made sense. Not the families in direct lineage to the one she was searching for, but employers. Until about five centuries before when the last line of names of an employer that had seemingly gone back for generations was eventually severed.
    She hurried to her desk and began rifling through her notes, hunting for that name.
    “Did you hear me, Thea? I need your answer.”
    “Not a fucking chance,” she said, still irritated at his proposal but too distracted by what she’d learned to give him the courtesy of a full response. “Why the fuck didn’t you guys tell me this to begin with?” She shot a glare at him and went back to flipping through her piles of notes. Third century, come on, come on. Yes!
    She snatched the dog-eared piece of paper out of the stack and peeled off the small Post-It note with her question on it. “ Saint George?” the note asked. She’d dismissed it as unrelated considering most accounts of the historical figure were likely fabricated. Turning to her laptop, she clicked her mouse on the image files one at a time, going back several centuries from the date on the paper until she found it.
    “Does this image mean anything to you?” she asked.
    Aurik stared at her, mouth agape. Thea tapped the screen impatiently. He nodded. “Yeah, that’s a dragon named Sutylutha. He was killed long before my time, though. He was one of the reasons we have such strict laws in the first place, and why the Verdanith was dismantled. He was a brutal killer.”
    “Yet he had a mate and offspring. Do you know what happened to them?”
    “It was his son who killed him. I believe the son attained Court status at the beginning of his generation’s hibernation as a result. Sutylutha supposedly murdered the son’s mate, so he retaliated. Suty’s mate had her magic bound and lived in servitude to the Council after that. That would have been the first Hibernation, actually.”
    “Has something like this happened since? A dragon execution, I mean. More like third century.” Her mind spun with the understanding. The structure of the research she had been sent had the sense that it paralleled human history, only intertwining with it in key spots, though there were many names that seemed to correspond precisely with ancient legends and mythology.
    “It’s happened a few times,” he said, looking put on the spot as though he were being