Too Late for My Shifters' Regret novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: The Reach

"Your sister's," I said.

"Her name doesn't matter now. She's dead." He kept his hand on the shell. "She'd have liked you. She picked things up too."

I sat up and pulled the blanket around my shoulders.

"Tell me."

He told me.

He told it to the egg, mostly, not to me.

The Northern Reach was cliffs over a gray sea, and a keep cut into the rock, and under the keep a hatchery where the eggs of the clan slept in warm sand.

"Clan Vire," he said. "Dragons. There were never many of us. There are fewer now."

Five years ago, in the middle of a winter storm, men came up the cliff path with lamps and axes.

They knew exactly where to go.

They knew which passages, which doors.

"Someone sold them a map," he said. "Someone inside."

His sister was in the hatchery that night.

She was barely grown.

She stood in the doorway in her beast form and held it alone until her heart gave out.

"I was away," he said. "Two days' flight south, at a council I didn't even want to attend. I came home to a hatchery with eight empty hollows in the sand. And her, in the doorway."

I didn't say anything.

There's nothing you can say to that.

"Eight eggs," he said. "I spent three years following rumors. A buyer in a port city. A broker in the capital. A man who sold shell powder to apothecaries for love potions. Every trail went cold. Then I heard about a black market under the river, where a man bought anything that came from the north. Furs. Ivory. Dragon shell."

"So you went."

"I went in my serpent form, with an iron collar on, and let them sell me."

I stared at him.

"You let them collar you."

"A dragon unascended looks like a big snake. Nobody looks twice at a snake. The collar keeps the dragon down. I knew that when I put my neck in it." He finally looked at me. "I needed to get inside the buyer's house. The man who bought me was the man who bought my clan's eggs."

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