A year after Dad disappeared, I'd woken up burning, but ice-cold. Not fever. Not illness. Something ancient and furious clawing its way out from under my ribs.
I'd stumbled out of bed, gasping, my skin too tight, my bones aching like they wanted to reshape themselves. The room spun. The walls pressed in. And then—
Wings.
They'd burst from my shoulders without warning, tearing through skin and pajamas, spreading wide enough to knock over my dresser. My hands weren't hands anymore—they were talons, silver-white and gleaming. My spine elongated, tail whipping out and shattering my bedroom window.
I'd screamed until it became something else. Not human. It was a roar that shook the house, that sent frost racing across every surface, that cracked every single window in every single room.
Ma had come running.
She'd stood in my doorway, staring at what I'd become, and I'd seen it—the exact moment whatever fragile thread of tolerance she'd had for me snapped completely.
"Monster," she'd whispered.
I'd tried to shift back. Tried to make myself small again. But I didn't know how. I was ten years old and terrified and trapped in a body that didn't fit, and all I could do was try to curl into the corner and shake while ice spread across the walls.
"He left because of you," she'd said, louder now. "You murdered those boys, not him. And now you're going to murder me too, aren't you?"
I whimpered, words unable to form in the monster’s throat. She'd backed away, hands raised like I was something dangerous she needed to ward off. "You're not my son. You're a curse. A punishment. I should have left you in the snow the day you were born."
Ma had grabbed the phone with shaking hands and dialed a number. "Come get it," she'd said to whoever answered. "I don't care what you do with it. Just get it out of my house."
She'd called me "it."
I'd still been a dragon when the Council arrived—two of them, calm and competent in a way that should have been reassuring but just made everything worse. They'd sedated me somehow, and the last thing I remembered before everything went dark was Ma's face in the doorway.
She hadn't looked sad.
She'd looked relieved. I’d never seen her again.
Emile and Alice had done their best. They were “trusted” but couldn’t shift, and their isolated farm meant I learned my dragon. Learned to live with it. Emile had been hockey crazy and he taught me to play. We didn’t really talk much about my dragon. It was something I buried, and I’d go for months pretending I wasn’t the monster she’d called me.
I pressed my palms against the cold porcelain sink, watching my breath fog the mirror despite the steam pouring from the shower.
The cold had spread deeper now, settling into my marrow. My dragon coiled tight in my chest, protective and terrified in equal measure. It remembered what happened when control slipped. It remembered three boys who never got up. A father who walked into the snow.
I couldn't let that happen again.
Especially not around Cinder. God, especially not around him.
The thought of losing control near him—of that ice spreading like it had with my dad, of frost racing across his skin, of watching the horror dawn in his eyes the same way it had in Ma's—made something in me want to claw its way out and run until there was nothing left but distance and safety.
He'd saved a man's life tonight. Used his hands to restart a heart, his voice to cut through panic, his competence to anchor everyone in that ballroom. And I'd stood there wanting to touch him, wanting to help, wanting things I had no right to want when I was a loaded weapon that could go off at any moment.
The photographers had been too close. The threat had felt too real. And my dragon had reacted the only way it knew how—by preparing to protect.
By preparing to destroy.
I hadn’t even felt it happening. The cold creeping in. The ice building under my skin. If Max hadn't pulled me away, if I'd stayed in that ballroom one more minute, if someone had pushed—
I didn't want to finish that thought.
My hands were shaking now, trembling so hard I had to grip the sink to keep them still. The steam from the shower did nothing. The heat couldn't touch the cold that lived inside me, the cold that was my dragon's first and last defense.
I needed to stay away from him.
It was the only way to keep him safe.