THE DRAGON BLOOD SON-IN-LAW

CHAPTER 7

A child's voice echoed through the darkness

"Mother..."

Adrian halted mid-step.

"If you love me…" A pause. "Make me forget."

Pain knotted tight in his chest.

Seraphine was watching the empty corridor. "That was you."

"I knew the fear, not the voice."

The elevator lights dimmed and brightened, revealing a small figure just past the doors that vanished the moment Adrian's vision cleared.

Seraphine's fingers curled around his arm. "Don't follow."

"I want to know what happened to me."

"And what you're seeing now isn't real?"

"It could not have revealed itself to me if that were the case."

The woman shook her head. "That is how traps work."

She should not have been correct, but Adrian was reacting on instinct rather than reason and the voice in his head had cracked open a memory not his own but still his. Without looking back, he stepped into the corridor and the world shifted around him.

A woman's arms wrapped around a small child, her tangled hair streaked with sweat, her eyes puffy with tears. The child in her grasp could not have been more than three years of age.

Adrian

Seraphine hovered beside him, an unreachable specter. "Your mother."

He could not look away.

Elysra's gaze settled on a man standing in the shadows, his height impossibly stretched, his face hidden by darkness. This man Adrian knew.

Vaelric. The man who had raised him and called him father.

Vaelric placed an object on the table and Elysra pulled away from him in revulsion.

"No."

"We don't have time."

"You promised me he would have a choice."

"He will."

"When? After you turn him into your weapon?"

A pregnant silence stretched between them.

Elysra pressed her palms against the boy's head and sigils bloomed to life, but Adrian tore his Dragon Sight into the memory and what burned beneath the surface

Light, silver and brilliant, was not flowing into the child but out, siphoned from his blood, from his mind, from something deeper than either. "They took something from me," Adrian breathed, and no one answered because the memory did not care what he knew.

Something deeper than thought hissed in his ear. "Erase his name."

"Adrian Vale?"No. Adrian must remain." A pause, colder than the first. "Erase everything that leads back to him."

The world shattered around him

Adrian stumbled backward and Seraphine caught his shoulder before he could fall. The System wheeled past his eyes.

[MEMORY FRAGMENT RESTORED – COMPLETION: 3.7% – WARNING: FRAGMENT INCOMPLETE.]

"Three point seven percent," Adrian muttered.

"Does that concern you?"

"Almost none of my childhood is mine yet."

The floor panel behind them blinked to life, displaying numbers that had nothing to do with elevators

B2, then B3, B4 – Seraphine's expression tightened.

"That doesn't exist. Sterling Tower does not have a B4."

B5. B6

Adrian's Dragon Sight traced silver veins lacing the concrete and steel. It was not wiring or cables but a construction, a configuration, an assembly.

"This is not an elevator," he said. "This is a lock."

On B7 the doors slid open on a field of white

There were no cameras, no doors, only a corridor that seemed designed to devour any trace of entry. "You've lived in this tower your entire life," Adrian said.

"I know."

"And yet you were not aware of this place."

"You are not either, are you?"

Ahead the passage opened to a wall of cabinets made of reinforced metal, their labels scorched with names VEYNE, VELMORA ORION. And on the last shelf, the STERLING BLOODLINE.

Seraphine's lips thinned. "My grandfather was aware of all of this."

"He was more than aware," Adrian said, nodding toward the cabinets. "He was following their progress."

A speaker crackled to life just beyond the archive, its occupant's voice rough but steady, and Seraphine went pale.

"Grandfather?"

"If you have accessed the seventh floor, the first defenses have failed." A pause, longer than it needed to be. "Seraphine – your father did not select Adrian for marriage. Neither did your mother. I did."

She did not respond. "You arranged my marriage?"

"I chose Adrian because the other bloodlines were already looking for him."

"Looking for him for what?" Adrian asked.

"For what they sought in him," said the recording, and for the first time its tone faltered. "Not in his person, but in that which he carries."

A burst of static drowned out the final words, then the speaker went silent. Seraphine stared at the empty outlet. "That's it? That is where he stops?"

"That's where he wanted to stop," Adrian said. A wave of crimson lights bled across the ceiling and walls. Metal shutters were already sliding into place along the archive.

"Someone triggered a purge," Adrian said, already moving. Seraphine wedged the device belonging to Seraphine's grandfather into the console, but it did not respond. She tried again and failed. Adrian's eyes caught the second scanner beside hers. "Try with both of ours."

She hesitated only briefly before understanding. Seraphine pressed her palm against the console and he did the same

STERLING BLOODLINE DETECTED.

DRAVARYN BLOODLINE DETECTED.

DUAL KEY ACCEPTED.

The shutters froze partway through their descent. Seraphine stared at their conjoined hands as if they belonged to strangers. "Why would our families create something so dependent on the other of us?"

"That is a question we are about to answer." The cabinets on the far side of the room stood mostly open, emptied by unseen hands, but one folder lay discarded on the floor, stamped with DRAVARYN PROTECTION AGREEMENT and signed by Orren Sterling and Aleric Sterling. Seraphine's grandfather.

Adrian scanned the pages, his gaze catching on a single line in blood-red ink

THE HEIR MUST REMAIN WITH THE STERLING FAMILY UNTIL AWAKENING.

"Until awakening," Seraphine murmured, reading over his shoulder. "That is why you were kept here."

"Three years I assumed I was your unwelcome in-law," Adrian said quietly. "It appears I was inventory."

She had no response for that, not until he reached the second note, scrawled beside the protective agreement

STABILIZER COMPATIBILITY: CONFIRMED.

Seraphine's skin drained of color. "What does that mean?"

"I don't know," he said, and he did not. "Seraphine, I'm not lying to you."

"You always were quite the storyteller," she said, though the accusation wavered in her voice. They were not arguing. Seraphine was realizing the same truth Adrian had just moments earlier

They were finding something far greater than what either of them had been searching for.

The lights in the archive went dark,

An emergency light flickered on, casting long shadows, and the sound of footfalls echoed from the opposite end of the corridor. "We're not alone," Seraphine whispered.

Something silver and writhing coiled up from the floor, piercing Seraphine's chest.

"Don't move," Adrian said.

"What do you see?"

"A thread going through you," Adrian said, and he did not have the time or the energy to explain. It pulled taut and Seraphine gasped as if something had been ripped from her lungs. He pressed his hand against her wrist and forced his Dragon Blood into the line, driving it back.

[WARNING – UNKNOWN BLOODLINE CONNECTION DETECTED – SYSTEM INTERFERENCE.]

A shudder ran through him but he forced his fingers to stay on the thread

[BLOODLINE STABILTY: 12%]

11%.

As his vision tunneled Adrian drove his Dragon Sight deeper and deeper until he could see what the fiber extended to on the other end. Not Seraphine but past her, impossibly far away, into a face framed by silver hair whose name Adrian had already hated. Vaelric's smile stretched across the invisible distance and then the silver thread was gone.

Adrian collapsed to his knees and Seraphine steadied him before he could fall farther. "That was my family's doing," she said.

"No," he said, though the words were already leaving him. "Seraphine, that connection did not originate with the Sterlings."

"Then whose?"

"I don't know," he said. A phone rang somewhere in the dark. The sound was old, out-of-place, and wrong. Once. Twice. Seraphine's fingers found the object beneath a stack of cabinets, tightening around it as if it might bite her.

"Answer it," Adrian said.

Seraphine lifted the receiver to her ear. "Hello?"

There was nothing on the other end for a long moment before a woman's voice, hushed and fragile, filtered through the line. "Seraphine."

She went rigid.

"Who is this?" Adrian demanded.

The voice ignored him. "Don't trust him."

"What are you talking about?" Seraphine's knuckles whiten against the phone. "Trust who?"

"Your husband," the woman said, a pause stretched between them, almost gentle. "You have no idea what they put inside him." The line went dead.

"Who was that?" Adrian asked, even as something inside him told him he already knew.

"My mother," Seraphine said, her voice frayed. "She died. She's been dead for eleven years."

Once more his own System flared to life for the final time that night.

[UNKNOWN ENTITY DETECTED – MEMORY INTERFERENCE IDENTIFIED – DO NOT TRUST THE MEMORY.]

[NEXT MEMORY FRAGMENT AVAILABLE – ACCESS CONDITION: SERAPHINE MUST REMAIN ALIVE.]

Adrian met her gaze and for the first time since arriving in the tower, the look in Seraphine's eyes was not for herself but for him. Something deep in the building groaned as metal gave way on the far side of the archive.