“Dad?”

He looked older than she remembered, and he was a man who had kept his youth far longer than most.  These days, when she looked into the mirror and saw the crow’s feet starting to form at the corners of her eyes, she thought she knew why.

He had never worried, never once.  He had never done all the work he’d claimed to do.  He had taken the easiest possible way every time, even when it came to facing justice or running.  All that had aged him now had been losing... losing, and having to destroy what he had loved.  She knew all of that.

But it still hurt her, somehow, to see him with his once thick silver hair turned thin and dingy gray.  His muscles, hard from squash and racquetball and swimming, had softened, taking away the strong tone of his body.  He had a scruffy beard that she thought was less of a disguise and more of an indication that he, who had always taken so much pride in his appearance, had given up on his daily shave.

All the accusations she had hurled at him over the years had never hit the mark.  She had never left a dent.  Only now did he look his age.

He was looking at her as if he, too, barely recognized her.  “Jillian?”

He had never called her Jilly.  Only Tiffani had ever done that.

The room around them was so quiet.  Why did all of these people, so serenely comfortable and superior up until now, suddenly care what she had to say?  She hadn’t wanted their attention.  All she had demanded was enough goodwill to get Theo the help he needed—Dr. Mendoza’s friendship and Isabelle’s wary liking had been wonderful only because they’d been freely given.  She didn’t want respect she would have to steal.  She didn’t want to be notable to them only because of this.

But here she was.  At last, they were listening to her.  All at once she understood why Theo had always felt so much pressure out in the real world.  When you were the only one of your kind, you knew they wanted you to be perfect.

Or you thought they wanted that.  Theo’s friends hadn’t.

Isabelle hadn’t.  Dr. Mendoza hadn’t.  Maybe Isabelle’s mom felt the same way.  Maybe some others in this room did, too.

Any place that Theo loved had to be full of good people.  Thinking that let her trust them all enough to speak in front of them, to be more vulnerable than she’d ever been.

“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.

At least she lived in a building with character to spare.  At least there were people in her life—Theo, Tiffani, Isabelle, the kids at the center—who would grieve if she were gone.  She did have a family.  She had more of a family than the man who should have given her one had.

She had more treasure.

If he’d really belonged in Riell, she thought, he would have understood that.  Sure enough, she could see people around them looking at her dad with disapproval.  Looking at her with sympathy.

And looking at Isabelle’s father with judgment.

So there it was.  Justice served.

She didn’t have anything to say to her father.  Not right now.  Maybe not ever.

She said to Theo, “You should call Martin.  Will they let him in?”

“Yes,” Theo said with complete certainty.

No one in the room protested when Theo called the US Marshals and told Martin to come to Riell to pick up Gordon Marcus.  “You’ll be able to see everything,” Theo said, ignoring the slight intake of breath from everyone as he gave directions.  He cupped his hand over the phone and said, “Pegasus shifter,” and everyone nodded like this made sense, even if they weren’t particularly pleased with it.

Some of the burlier dragons in the room were restraining both Dimitri and her dad.  Neither one of them bothered calling out to their daughters.  Maybe they had just enough shame not to do that.

Jillian had had enough.  She didn’t want to be at this party anymore—she resented, in the foolish way of someone focusing on the wrong problem, that her only likely chance to wear this elaborate gown had been ruined.  She resented that Isabelle’s only debut had been ruined.

She went to a far table and sat down.  Theo and Isabelle joined her.  In their formal clothing, and with their silence, they looked like wallflowers at the prom.  Isabelle was quiet.  She only had eyes for her mother, who was also stuck waiting patiently for justice to take its course.

At least the room had stirred into conversation again, though no one had gone back to playing any music.  But every word they said wouldn’t be overheard now.

Izzie took off the delicate earrings and laid them down on the spotless white tablecloth, right in front of Jillian’s hand.  Her face was grave in a funny kind of way.

“Jillian Marcus, on behalf of my father, Dimitri, I present to you treasure obtained through dishonor.  It is rightfully yours.”

The bad prom vibe had gone.  All Jillian felt now was that she was at the end of a very long wedding that she’d somehow been shanghaied into organizing.  Her feet hurt, she was exhausted, and she was a little drunk but not nearly drunk enough.

But none of that was Isabelle’s fault.  The kid was just doing her best to act like a grownup.

“Thank you, Isabelle,” Jillian said.  “I appreciate it, but to be honest, I never want to see these again.”

Izzie looked crestfallen.  Her grand gesture had gone awry.  It put her into a gratifyingly teenaged snit.  “Well, I don’t know what you want me to do with them, then.”

Theo, less accustomed to having to remain unruffled around teenagers, laughed.  He picked up Jillian’s hand and kissed it.

“This is not,” he said, “how I wanted this night to go.”

“I’ve been vacillating between ‘bad prom’ and ‘bad wedding,’” Jillian admitted.  “Not fairy tale ball.”

“I did tell you that we weren’t that fond of fairy tales.”

“You did.  I was warned.”  She slid her shoes off under the table.  “Do you know what makes me angriest?  He blew up the house so no one would have it, and now no one will have it.  All the money that was supposed to go to the people he hurt... now we’re just left with whatever he brought here.  Isabelle, I guess I do have a use for those earrings after all.”

Isabelle gave her a small, unreadable smile and stood.  “I,” she said in her best princess manner, “am going to go get a glass of champagne and stand with my mother.  Perhaps if I look sad and orphanlike, everyone will agree she’ll face no punishment.”

“You don’t have any objection, I hope?” Theo said to Jillian, watching Izzie walk off.

“To Elizabeth not being punished?  No, I don’t think so.  I just want everything to be over.”

Theo’s thumb moved to her ring finger, reminding her that not all of her thoughts of weddings were bad ones.  “I’ll support you on that, then, and I think they’ll listen.  Izzie deserves that as much as she deserves the champagne.”

“I think so too.  It was brave of her to go up against her parents.”

“It isn’t just that,” Theo said.  “She sided with a human.  And she gave me her father’s hoard, which she would have inherited eventually.”

Jillian frowned.  “Walk that one back for me?”

“You can’t inherit,” Theo said.  “Draconian law says only dragons can inherit from dragons, except in cases of a clear will.  But if one dragon wrongs another one, the wronged dragon can seize their hoard.  Izzie knows I’ll take her father’s to compensate your dad’s victims.”

“But Dimitri didn’t wrong you,” Jillian said.

“I’m very charming,” Theo said.  “By the time I get through talking to the council, they’ll be persuaded that he did.  He sheltered a criminal it was my job to track down and he caused my mate distress.”  He rubbed at his face.  “Of course, once Dimitri’s hoard comes into my possession... honestly, it’s for the best if you take it and get rid of it before I have the chance to get attached.  My intentions are good, but I’m still a dragon.”

Jillian’s head was spinning.  She couldn’t imagine that Dimitri’s wealth would compare to her dad’s—she had to be realistic.  One unemployed old money dragon in a reclusive community could hardly have more on-hand than a thriving white collar criminal.  But at least it would be something.

“How much do you think it will come to?”

Theo told her.

Jillian’s jaw dropped.  “And Elizabeth and Izzie still have their own hoards, right?  We’re taking away money they would have gotten, but not anything they depended on to live, right?”

“Of course,” Theo said.  “Elizabeth is much wealthier than Dimitri, anyway, her hoard is far more substantial.  That may have been why he took in your father, to increase his worth in the eyes of his mate.”

“I don’t think it worked,” Jillian said dryly.

“No, it would appear not.”  He smiled.  “She’s like you.”

“At the moment, I’m feeling very fond of my mate’s treasure.  We could really do this?”

Theo nodded.

“You would give up the chance to have all of that... for me?”

“I would give up anything for you,” Theo said, and then she loved him all the more because he added, “but I would do this regardless.  It’s the right thing to do.”

A dragon, Jillian decided, made the best Prince Charming.