“I was in the house,” she said. “I was standing in my bedroom when the bomb went off. If Theo hadn’t been with me—if Theo hadn’t been with me and been a dragon—we’d both be dead. And do you know why we were there in the first place? I came back because I wanted to say goodbye to you.”
His eyes were wet. She hated him a little for staying on the other side of the room. He didn’t want to walk the gauntlet of all these people who disapproved of him. He didn’t want to come closer to her anger and heartbreak. He had always taken the easy way out. She supposed she should be grateful that at least with her he was sorry about it, but she wasn’t. She wasn’t grateful at all.
“I didn’t even think you’d come back in the first place,” her dad said. His voice was as buttery rich as she’d remembered it: the voice of a man who could talk anyone into anything. A born salesman. No amount of shock could break that born-for-radio quality of his. “I threw that brick through the window so you and Tiffani would leave. I didn’t want either one of you to get hurt.”
“Good,” Jillian said. “I’m glad there are at least a couple people in the world you didn’t want to hurt. But you know what? You still did hurt us.”
Theo took her hand. He wasn’t interfering—after all, he was a dragon, not a knight in shining armor. He knew that some battles had to be fought and won alone.
He just wanted to be there for her.
She wanted, absurdly, to ask her dad to go into the mechanics of all of this, their own personal locked-room near-murder mystery. Had he planted the bomb first, using his own key to get into the house, and then come back later to get the nutcracker, breaking in and disarming the security? Or had he done it all in the night?
It did matter to her, on some level. She wanted to know if he’d let her spend the night in a house that had a bomb inside it. But maybe Theo’s office would be able to figure that out—maybe the security company would show whether or not the alarm had ever been triggered at all. And maybe, in the end, she didn’t want to know. Not that.
But there was something she did want to know. She thought she could stand knowing it even if the answer was as bad as she thought it would be.
He would lie if she gave him the chance, so she didn’t lead him in any particular direction. She acted like the perfect lawyer he’d always wanted her to be.
Only to him, of course, she was on the wrong side.
“What did you take? Out of the boxes, what did you take?”
She didn’t trust him but she still, despite everything, loved him. She wanted him to say that he’d come back for the ceramic plate she’d made for him in second grade, the one with her handprints in it. That he’d come back for her graduation photo. Or not even something of hers—she would settle for more proof that he’d ever loved anyone besides himself at all. He could say that he’d taken one of Tiffani’s scarves to have something to remember her by. That he’d taken his first wedding ring, the one he’d kept in a wooden box on the bookshelf. Or, shit, that he’d taken a photo of the only dog they’d ever had.
Anything. Along with all the earrings and whatever other valuables he’d taken to bribe his way into Riell, she wanted to know if he’d taken anything that showed that the life that he’d had with them had meant something to him.
She wanted more proof that he loved her than that he hadn’t wanted her to die.
But her dad just looked confused, like he was in the middle of a pop quiz he wasn’t prepared for.
All Theo had asked of his community was honor. She was asking for love. Was that more to ask or less? And did it matter, since he wouldn’t give her what she wanted anyway? Since he couldn’t give her love or honor?
Her dad said, “Just some things I couldn’t stand to see getting sold. Of course, it had to all be able to fit into a duffel bag.” He said this like that was the hugest injustice of them all. “I could only take one of the nutcrackers—that’s a hell of a thing, Jillian, having to let go of something you’d spent your whole life building up, something that showed your progress. Other than that, just enough to buy my way into here. Dimitri and I did some business together a while back and I always remembered what he told me about this place, how plush it is. I called him and he came and got me. For a price, of course.”
She would give him this, at least: he didn’t say that last part like he resented it. He wasn’t entirely a hypocrite. All he cared about was money and he thought it was fine for that to be all somebody else cared about, too. The whole wedge in their relationship had been that it wasn’t all that she cared about. He had never understood that.
He had never understood her at all. Even now, he didn’t know what she wanted from him.
Well, there it was. She had come back to the house for him, but he hadn’t come back to the house for her. That was all she’d wanted to know, even if she’d already known it. Theo had Riell back on his side—he’d claimed Isabelle and Dr. Mendoza and now maybe Elizabeth too—but she had no one but him.
She was glad, down to her bones, that he was enough. That he could fill up her heart.
But then, to her surprise, Isabelle crossed the room yet again and attached herself to Jillian, hugging her as fiercely as Jillian had hugged her before. She couldn’t believe she had ever thought this girl was an icy, reserved dragon princess.
Isabelle was the one who saw tears and ran towards them instead of away.
“I’m sorry your father is such a scoundrel,” Isabelle said. “I wish I could do something for you. I’m sorry. I thought you would want to know.”
Jillian rubbed her back. “You did the right then, honey. Absolutely.”
“I had to!” Isabelle said. “We’re practically sisters-in-law!”
“Distant cousin?” Jillian mouthed at Theo, who gave her a small smile and an even smaller shrug, as if to say, Kids, go figure. She liked that look on him, the look that suggested the two of them could nonchalantly but lovingly unite against the forces of kids and parents everywhere. He seemed touched that Isabelle had impulsively claimed him as a brother.
For a second, she’d forgotten about her dad. Then, when she looked up and remembered him, she felt, if anything, sorry for him. Who did he have? Tiffani had rightly walked away from him. She doubted she herself would ever be making regular visits to see him in prison. His only allies were the ones he’d bought, and they’d betrayed him the second it was no longer convenient. And he’d only been able to save one of his precious, creepy nutcrackers.
He’d had so much money and he’d never even spent it on anything of substance. The thing Theo had been most impressed by—the handmade lace—her dad hadn’t even known enough to take good care of. The house had been a tacky McMansion. She’d seen that before the end, and she didn’t know if he ever had.