Page 59 of Dragon’s Ending

I should have thrown it in the bin. Instead, I kept reading.

BEN

The silence was what made me look up.

Dominic had gone completely still, a piece of paper clenched so tightly in his hand that it rustled faintly in the quiet.

“Dominic?”

For a second, I thought he simply hadn’t heard me. Then he lifted his head, and his expression was wrong. It wasn’t Dominic.

“Dominic,” I said again.

His chair scraped violently backwards. And then he was gone.

I shoved my chair back and stood, before hesitating. Everything in me yearned to follow him, to hold him until he no longer looked so lost and stricken, but if he wanted me right now, he wouldn’t have left. So instead I picked up the paper he’d let drop to the floor.

Oh, God. When I read it—when I actually managed to comprehend the words in front of me—I thought I was going to be sick. And Dominic had read this.

The language was clipped and clinical, each sentence brutally short beneath the formal heading.

Dominic Arthur Bedwyr. Issue of Rhodri and Mari Bedwyr. Heir Apparent.

His date of birth, seven years before his mother’s date of death.

And beneath that…

Following the death of his mother, displayed emotional instability and repeated uncontrolled transitions.

No shit, Sherlock. A seven-year-old child who’d just lost his mother? Who the fuck thought this should be recorded?

I read on.

Marked emotional volatility continues. Inability to prevent transitions under distress. Fire damage to east wing drawing room following involuntary transition.

Jesus Christ. There was more. So much more. Each year was marked by another notation, observations and assessments of Dominic’s behaviour written with the detached tone usually reserved for estate inventories or livestock records.

Progress inconsistent.

Episodes decreasing in frequency.

Continued monitoring recommended.

Every moment of grief and fear after his mother’s death had been judged, catalogued and preserved in cold black ink by the adults meant to care for him. By people he had trusted.

My hands tightened hard enough on the paper to crumple it further as I kept reading.

Age eighteen. Returned to Dragon’s Ending.

Returned. I stared at the word. That meant… He’d been somewhere else.

They’d sent him away.

Somehow I kept reading through the horror.

Emotional regulation improved but still not entirely stable. Assessment ongoing.

Assessment ongoing. They’d sent him away as a child, and when he came back as a young man, they still looked on him as some kind of risk to be managed instead of a person. Instead of Dominic.