"Thank you, by the way."

"For what?"

"Not asking."

Atticus glanced up from his work to look at the young woman. Rhia was sorting through supplies, but her usually sharp green eyes had an unfocussed, thousand-yard stare. She'd barely spoken to anyone since he'd picked her up from Gyaros. Though Atticus had fully expected and prepared for Nekros to come too, she had stepped into the helicopter alone. There had been tears in her eyes, one cheek was burning red, and her hands were shaking from more than her usual fear of flying. She had offered no explanation, and Atticus didn't press for one.

"Dragon drama is way above my paygrade," he grunted and went back to his own supplies. "If I don't need to know, I don't want to know. I don't want to know half the time I do need to know."

"Yeah, I get that," she chuckled. "Makes you miss the days we all thought there weren't so many, doesn't it?"

It was a rhetorical question. She didn't really expect an answer. But that didn't stop the team's medic from speaking up. "Didn't you ever suspect there were more?" he asked. "It wasn't exactly an uncommon theory."

"It wasn't really something I paid attention to. I mean, how often do you think about the dragons and kin?"

The medic barked out a laugh. "Hey, Johnson!" he called to the only other woman on the team. "How often do you think about the Roman Empire?"

"Go fuck yourself, Diaz," she snapped back while the rest of the team laughed and turned her attention to Rhia. "The answer is way more often than we, as in women, would assume. Dragons, the Roman Empire... men think about shit like that at least once a week."

"Really?" Rhia looked back between each of the men. "Why?"

"Because they have the time and the headspace not taken up by trying to break glass ceilings."

That shut them up, and even Atticus had the decency to look ashamed. "Didn't take you as someone running a misogynistic regime," Rhia raised a critical eyebrow at the shifter.

"I am not blind to the failings of our system." He responded but didn't look happy with his own answer. "Progress is slow, and I am trying. It helps to have people like Johnson and Foster ready to kick my ass if I ever slip up."

"I'm happy to kick your ass all day, sir," Johnson said cheerily.

The entire team laughed again and went back to work. Atticus stood up straight to stretch, only to be struck by a sudden wave of dizziness. At the same moment he grabbed a tree to steady himself, Rhia was at his side, wordlessly offering him help if he needed it. The feeling faded quickly, and he nodded his thanks. Even with his years of training and the advantage of magic, the high elevation was still taking a toll on him. A part of it was simply biology. Polar bears were not built for trekking around the Himalayas.

Because that was where the notebook that Rhia had found led them.

Not directly. Instead of coordinates, the numbers were references to the Entity Project database. Once reconnected to the partially purged system in the Tahoe facility, most of the reference links didn't work because the files had been deleted. But one of them was only partially corrupted and the IT team was able to recover some of the information.

As it turns out, the Organization never truly lost Delta after he'd gone postal on his guardians. Over the years he had vanished from their radar for a few days or weeks, but always popped up again in a different part of the world.

Even as a child, Alexander, the name he'd been given before the designated of Delta, had proven to be surprisingly resourceful. From the ages of ten to seventeen, he'd traveled from Cincinnati to Houston and then to Guadalajara. He'd eventually turned west to Hawaii and the Philippines, before working his way back north through South Asia and finally settling in Nepal where he had been for the last decade. The Organization didn't know the exact location of his den but had narrowed it down to a small area.

None of them had any way of knowing if the Organization had already swooped in since deciding to purge the program. But as long as there was a possibility that Delta was still there, they were going to act as if he was.

So, Rhia, Atticus, and his elite special operations team had been hiking for five nights straight, taking cover and sleeping through the day. All with the hopes of finding Delta and his hideout before he realized they were coming and disappearing again.

Rhia had proven herself surprisingly helpful. She'd broken her silence a few times to offer insightful feedback during the briefings and had stepped up with the preparations without getting in the way or creating more work for the shifters. Her dragon abilities did come in handy when she voluntarily packed an extra thirty pounds of supplies in her bag. Not once did she utter a complaint about the weight, the pace, or how long they walked, and she immediately took up the rear with the team's medic without being told.

Even so, the rest of the team had their personal misgivings about Rhia tagging along. Some were uncomfortable with a dragon amongst them, and most of them hated the mere concept of bringing a civilian of any breed. Even worse, a few of them saw her as a victim with a personal connection to the target and therefore no place in the field. She was an unknown factor that the operatives had never trained with. An extra body for them to keep an eye on. A liability. Every single one of them was silently questioning Atticus her along.

They would never be so obvious, but Atticus was well aware of their feelings. Rhia was no less ignorant. Yet she still never complained or got snippy with the soldiers. She just took it in stride.

It was a stark reminder to Atticus that, before she had been a dragon, Rhia was a paramedic. She may not have had the harsh training of the shifter military, but she was still a professional. She knew how to work with a team like this and slid easily back into that role as if a day hadn't gone by since the last time she'd prepped an ambulance. In fact, it was the most relaxed he'd ever seen her.

"You never even talked about it with your friends?" He asked quietly, his own curiosity getting the better of him. "Or your coworkers at the bar after a shift?"

Rhia's eyes snapped up to meet his, giving him a disgusted glare. "Given what you know about my situation at the time, exactly how often do you think I was allowed to go out with friends or coworkers?" she spat.

Atticus's stomach twisted with guilt. Nova had repeatedly reported Rhia's emotional and physical abuse at the hands of Christian "Church" Churchill over the years she'd been undercover. Each one had come with increasingly urgent requests for someone to put a stop to it or for permission to do it herself. Each time, she had been denied. Her target was Richard Kincaid, and she was to do nothing that could compromise her position.

Rhia had told him that she understood why he did what he did. She also made it extremely clear that she was not ready nor willing to forgive him. It would have been one thing if he had done nothing. People do nothing all the time.

But he hadn't done "nothing". He had taken deliberate action to stop Nova from getting Rhia help. Church could have killed her, and she was never going to let Atticus forget that a lot of her pain was his fault.

"I never had a reason to doubt the official record," she continued. "Sure, my colleagues brought it up from time to time, but first responders are always talking out of their asses on their downtimes. You know, I went through my handbook front to back after the accident where I met Etienne. The company I worked for didn't even have a protocol for treating the dragonkin. I bet legal was shitting themselves once my and Ian's reports came through."

"And after everything that's happened and everything you've learned... do you really want to go back to not knowing what you are?"

Atticus already knew he was crossing the line, and the way Rhia went rigid confirmed it. The tension was thick and awkward for a few minutes before she dropped her bag next to a tree and turned in a random direction. "I'm going for a walk," she told him.

"We're not on a fun-filled family camping trip, Kincaid," he growled, making her wonder how many times he used that tone with her brother during his very brief training regimen with his special ops. "You don't know these woods. You don't know this country."

"Oh please," she rolled her eyes. "I could track you and your mouth-breathing jarheads from a mile away."

"You don't get to tell me you want to turn back the clock and then demand special treatment in the same breath. Either embrace the entitlement of your breed or follow your orders and shut the hell up. I'm not putting up with any of your flip-flopping horseshit when it's my people's lives on the line."

Rhia blinked at him before an unintentional laugh bubbled up from her throat, and she slapped a hand over her mouth. "Sorry," she said through stifled giggles, but she couldn't stop and doubled over laughing.

The members of the special operations team were exchanging looks of utter bewilderment and awe. None of them really expected there to be a confrontation between their leader and the dragon. But if there was, they also hadn't expected the dragon to apologize.

"Sorry," she said again, managing to pull herself together and straighten up while Atticus stared at her like she was insane. "Thank you. I needed to hear that."

"You needed to hear me scold you like a child?" he raised a questioning eyebrow.

"Yeah. Well, no. I needed to be called out on my bullshit. The occasional privilege check is good for the soul."

She let out a heavy sigh, leaned against a tree and slid down to sit among the roots. Slowly, Atticus sat down against another tree facing her, and the team went back to setting up camp. Neither of them said anything until Atticus had ripped open one of the MRE packs, dropped a meal pouch into the flameless ration heater, and handed it to her.

"If I'm being entirely honest, I don't know what I want," she said quietly, staring at the bag and weighing it between her hands, not noticing how hot it was getting. "Saying that being a dragon doesn't come with perks would be an outright lie. I'm just not sure if what I've gained outweighs everything I've lost."

"Like what?" he asked, leaving his own heating pouch on the ground so he wouldn't burn himself.

"My job for one. Anonymity, for another. Sure, I was pretty well known to the regular ER nurses or other emergency responders in my area, but they recognized me as a paramedic. Now... everywhere I go—Los Angeles, Paris, Athens—everyone recognizes me as a dragon. That I'm the dragon. The tenth dragon. I never thought I'd miss being just another face in the crowd."

To her surprise, Atticus actually chuckled and nodded in agreement. "I was thirty-six when I took my place on the counsel. One of the youngest counsellors in centuries, and the youngest to ever hold one of the shifter seats. I thank God every day there are no recordings of my first press conference. You'd think I'd never spoken publicly in my life."

"Why you," Rhia chuckled. "No offense, but I would never peg you for a politician. Even the cyclops looks more comfortable in a suit than you do."

"To be fair, I've never seen Counsellor Mullins wear anything but a suit. I think he is single-handedly putting his tailor's kids through college. Anyway, making me a counsellor wasn't a decision they made lightly. There was an outcry from the coalition back then for there to be younger blood among the centuries-old shifters who were out of touch. I was the best candidate from a PR perspective. I come from a small sub-species of shifter that usually goes overlooked, I have a military background with a good education, am well-mannered and well-spoken, and I'm pretty hard to ignore when the press shows up."

"And yet you're the master of spies."

"That I am. And I owe that and all the success I've had on the Counsel to Nolan."

Rhia looked up again, the familiar pain in her heart flaring up the second she heard his name. She'd known he and Atticus had been close over the years and that Nolan had been some kind of mentor. But giving a vampire the credit for his achievements on the shifter panel seemed extreme.

"Nothing can really prepare you for your first full assembly," Atticus continued. "I was overwhelmed right from the beginning. I don't know how long I stayed after it was over, pouring over the minutes and trying to make sense of it all, and who knows how much longer I would have stayed if Nolan hadn't come back. He was the only counsellor who ever made time in the moment. Everyone else, even the other shifters, couldn't or wouldn't fit me into their schedules for at least two weeks. And Nolan never had a problem shelling out for a good meal or drink if he knew we were going to be at it for a while."

"So, he's always been generous like that?"

"Yeah. You should have seen his face when I told him I didn't drink outside of communion. He was very apologetic until I made a joke that he would be a better judge of the vintage of Christ's blood anyway."

Rhia snorted. "How did the vampire jokes go over with him back then?"

"As well as they did when you first met him."

"So, he thought it was hilarious?"

Atticus laughed again and nodded. He looked over at his team again, some of whom had already tucked into their sleeping bags. Each and every one of them were at the top of their game, and the only reason he had the honor of knowing them was because of his position in the Ancient government.

"The single best piece of advice Nolan ever gave me," he said quietly. "Was that politics is a game that should never be played on someone else's terms. We are all players with different strengths and skills, and if we don't use them for the benefit of our people, then all we're doing is wasting time and tax dollars.

"Take Nolan himself, for example. He comes from true nobility. Taking out the dragonkin side of his family, he is descendent of the first kings of humanity. When he talks, people listen. He knows how to charm and convince an audience into doing what he wants. If that doesn't work, he has enough money or favors or both to get the results he wants. The elves couldn't dream of mastering double speak on his level. But when it comes to military matters, he's merely on par with almost everyone else.

"Don't get me wrong, Nolan does have a tactical mind. But he will never understand how hard it is to follow an order you disagree with. And I know you think that Constantine was a thorn in Nolan's side who bossed him around, but it's not the same. Constantine respected Nolan enough to treat him as an equal and allow him to make his case if something was truly wrong. Half the decisions Constantine ever made involved days or weeks of them going back and forth before presenting it to vampiric advisors.

"But a military is not a democracy, and you should know how it feels to be given orders by someone who never had to start at the bottom.

"My experience in the military is what I brought to the table. I started as a ground-pounding grunt, tripped into the special forces by accident, and worked my way up to being a major before I was put on the political path. I've taken orders from my fair share of FOBBITs, but I had never seen them in such high concentrations. I knew in my first three months how screwed we would be if war ever reached our doorsteps."

"What's a FOBBIT?"

"Theatre rank. Someone who gets to sit on their ass barking orders and taking the credit while real soldiers put their lives on the line. They're unavoidable, especially when there's money and privilege involved, and the vampiric military is particularly rife with them. So was the shifter military advisory board when I first joined the Counsel. I won't lie, some of them have earned the praise they receive. But it doesn't matter how high their success rate is or how often you work with them, knowing that they have never put their boots on the ground themselves will always make you question if they're really capable of thinking about things from every angle.

"I've been there. I know what it takes. So when I give orders, even if they're on a need-to-know basis or if they don't understand how I came to the decision, my people trust that I am considering their lives as a part of mission success. And because I do that, I was able to build my teams and weave my web until I became the master of spies."

"Wow," Rhia breathed. "All that because of Nolan's advice?"

"He is an incredible man. It's hard not to admire him. But the point I'm trying to make, while trying not to sound like every other condescending asshole trying to give you advice, is that you're focusing so much on what you think you've lost. Maybe you don't need to change what you do, just how you do it."

"I don't understand."

"Becoming a counsellor didn't erase my years in special operations. It gave me resources that I would have killed for as a major. You lost your job, but the company you worked for wasn't what made you a paramedic. You have access to creatures with some of the most powerful healing magic in the world. Why not learn from them? Take what you learn and build on it. Create something and show the world that you are more than your breed. Give them a reason to remember Rhia."

The corner of the mouth ticked up in a small smile. The smile faded quickly, and she pulled her knees up to her chin. "I don't think the dragons would be too happy with that. They're pretty good about shutting down anything that doesn't follow the status quo."

"Yeah, well, the other dragons aren't exactly winning any popularity contests right now. But you'll always have Nekros on your side, right?"

Instead of cheering her up, Rhia deflated even further. "A month ago, I might have agreed with you," she murmured. "Now, I'm not so sure."

Once again, the air grew thick with tension, and Atticus struggled with what he was supposed to say. This was why he didn't ask in the first place. He was terrible at knowing what he was supposed to do or say. It was a downright miracle that he hadn't said something dumb to Zesstra yet, but it was only a matter of time.

Rhia didn't get the chance to notice Atticus's awkwardness. The hairs on her arms and the back of her neck suddenly stood on end, and a sharp tingle of awareness shot through her skull. "Did you feel that?" she asked quietly, looking around for the source.

"Feel what?"

"I... I don't know." She stood up, tensing the muscles in her legs to ease the urge to run until she knew in what direction. "There's something out there. I can feel it. I just can't... I don't know what or where it is."

"That's alright," Atticus shifted to crouch on the balls of his feet. "Focus on the feel right now. According to the database, Delta is a type of shifter. You know what our magical signatures feel like. Is it anything like that?"

Rhia closed her eyes and took a breath, expanding her senses the way Nolan, Nekros, Atticus, and so many others had taught her. One thing at a time. The more information they had about the presence, the better they could plan their next move.

"Sort of," she finally answered. "It feels like a shifter, but different. Not quite a mixed breed, either. There's just something... off about it."

"Could be him. You and Priya have weird auras too. Can you tell where it's coming from?"

"Uh... north, I think. North and bit east. What do you mean I have a weird aura?"

Instead of answering, Atticus told her to wait and made his way back through the soldiers to speak to his second-in-command. The two talked in low voices for a few minutes before Atticus came back to Rhia and their supplies. "The team is going to be on standby. If you're right, they'll follow up. If not, then we meet back here and go back to the original plan. Here." He withdrew an M17 pistol and holster from his pack and held it out for Rhia to take, when she hesitated, he scowled. "You agreed to this. It's fine not to carry when we're all together and you're at the back, but it's just us now, and you're taking the lead."

"I know," she said, taking the gun and weighing it in her hands. "I've just never been comfortable with... sorry. I know you have protocols for a reason."

"Protocols that might need to be revised. I never imagined I would the literal definition of firepower on my side."

Rhia rolled her eyes. "If that was a joke, you're a terrible comedian."

"But I already quit my day job," he smirked while drawing his M7 rifle from its case. Slinging it over his neck and shoulder, he double and triple checked the safety before sliding a magazine into the feed clip. "Keep yours away while we walk. I don't want you tripping and accidentally setting it off. If you see someone, get into cover, then draw. Got it?"

She resisted the urge to do a mocking salute the way she used to tease Maddox and just nodded and started walking.

The gun felt heavy on her hip. Way heavier than it had any right to be. She had learned to shoot at Richard's insistence after she turned thirteen. She never liked it, but there was simply no saying no to him until he was satisfied that it became muscle memory. Nolan had been the same, though had been much kinder about it, and Atticus had her shoot a couple of rounds at base camp to make sure she still knew how to use it.

Both times, she was unnerved by how easily it all came back to her. It scared her how steady her hands were whenever she raised it to shoot. It reminded her that, if Richard had been successful, she would have been as much a weapon as the pistol.

Following Delta's presence wasn't easy. The harder she concentrated, the harder it was to know which direction to go. It was much easier to just let her feet guide her, even if they had to stop a few times so she could get her bearings.

It didn't help that she could feel Atticus following close behind. Polar bears were ambush hunters, not stalkers, so it surprised her how he barely made a sound as they walked. But nothing could hide his physical presence. The guy was fucking massive.

A breeze washed over them. Atticus turned sharply into the wind and the new scents that came with it, raising his rifle cautiously. Rhia, however, turned her back against it, searching through the thin trees for any sign of life. They were close. She could feel it. But it wasn't just Delta, assuming it was Delta at all. There was something familiar about the second presence. And there was more than one of them.

"Kincaid," Atticus called in a quiet but direct tone. "Where are we going?"

The wind shifted again, and Rhia's senses instantly homed in on the source. "Up!"

~

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