The numbers on Marcus's desk clock glowed 11:47 PM when I finally found the damn contract.
I'd been digging through his filing cabinets for twenty minutes, and my feet were killing me in these heels. Tomorrow's board meeting was going to be brutal enough without showing up unprepared, but Marcus had specifically asked me to grab the Riverside Development papers from his office before I went to bed.
"They're in the safe, Princess," he'd said over dinner, not looking up from his phone. "You know the combination."
Of course I knew it. My birthday: 10-15-99. Marcus had used the same code for everything since I turned sixteen—his laptop, his car, even the wine cellar. It used to make me feel special. Now it just felt... predictable.
The office was darker than usual with the Seattle rain hammering against the floor-to-ceiling windows. I could see the city lights bleeding through the water streaks, all blurry and distorted like an impressionist painting. The Blackthorne Tower's forty-second floor offered the best view in downtown, but tonight it just made everything feel cold and distant.
I kicked off my pumps and padded across the Persian rug in stockings. The safe sat behind Marcus's desk, hidden behind a false panel that looked like part of the mahogany wall. I'd watched him open it dozens of times over the years, usually to store important documents or retrieve cash for my shopping trips.
My fingers found the hidden catch, and the panel slid away with a soft click. The safe itself was impressive—military grade, Marcus had told me once, designed to survive everything from earthquakes to explosions. A bit much for business contracts, but that was Marcus. He didn't do anything halfway.
I punched in the familiar sequence: 1-0-1-5-9-9.
Nothing.
Frowning, I tried again, slower this time. Still nothing. The display just blinked at me like it was laughing.
"Come on," I muttered, pressing my palm against the cool metal. "Don't be difficult."
That's when something weird happened. The safe's display flickered, and I felt this strange tingling sensation run up my arm. For a second, the numbers seemed to glow brighter, almost like they were responding to my touch.
Then the safe clicked open.
I stared at it for a moment, unsettled. That had never happened before. The combination lock was electronic, not biometric. It shouldn't have reacted to my skin at all.
But I didn't have time to puzzle over Marcus's security upgrades. I had documents to find and a presentation to finalize.
The safe was deeper than I'd expected, packed with manila folders, legal documents, and several thick envelopes. I spotted the Riverside file immediately—Marcus was obsessively organized—but as I reached for it, my fingers brushed against something unexpected.
A photograph, tucked behind a stack of bonds.
I probably should have left it alone. Marcus was private about his past, and I'd learned not to pry into things that didn't concern me. But curiosity had always been my weakness, and the photo was partially visible, showing what looked like a woman's face.
I pulled it out.
The breath caught in my throat.
It wasn't just any woman. She was stunning, with long dark hair and the kind of classical beauty you see in old paintings. But that wasn't what made my heart skip. It was her eyes. They were the exact same shade of emerald green as mine, down to the tiny flecks of gold around the pupils.
She was standing next to a tall man with dark hair and kind features, both of them smiling at the camera. Between them was a little girl, maybe four or five years old, with flame-red curls and a gap-toothed grin.
A little girl who looked exactly like me.
My hands started shaking. I'd never seen this photo before, never seen these people. But the resemblance was impossible to ignore. The woman could have been my older sister. The child could have been me.
"What the hell?" I whispered.
I flipped the photo over. There was writing on the back in Marcus's neat handwriting: Elena, Vincent, and Phoenix. Last family portrait. 2004.
Phoenix. That was my name. But who were Elena and Vincent?
My adoptive father had always been vague about my origins. He'd found me when I was five, he said, after my parents died in a car accident. No other family had survived. I'd accepted that story because I'd been too young to remember anything different, and Marcus had given me such a good life that I'd never felt the need to dig deeper.
But this photo suggested something else entirely. Something that made my chest tight with questions I wasn't sure I wanted answered.
I reached back into the safe, looking for more photos, more answers. That's when I found the folder labeled "Dragon Clan Archives."
Dragon Clan? What was that supposed to mean?
I opened it with trembling fingers. Inside were more photographs, newspaper clippings, and what looked like genealogy charts. The photos showed groups of people in elaborate settings, some kind of formal gatherings or ceremonies. The newspaper articles had headlines like "UNEXPLAINED FIRE DESTROYS RIVERSIDE MANSION" and "FAMILY OF FOUR MISSING AFTER MOUNTAIN CABIN BLAZE."
And in every single photo, I saw faces that looked like mine. The same green eyes. The same bone structure. Even some of the same expressions.
One of the genealogy charts was labeled "Draven Family Tree." At the bottom, in Marcus's handwriting, was a single line: Phoenix Draven - Last Known Survivor.
Draven. Not Blackthorne. Draven.
My heart was hammering now, so hard I could hear it over the rain. These weren't random photos. This was documentation. Evidence of... what? Some kind of family I'd never known existed?
I grabbed the first family portrait again, the one with Elena and Vincent. As I stared at their faces—my face, reflected back at me twenty years older—something inside me shifted.
It started as warmth in my chest, like drinking hot chocolate on a cold day. But it spread quickly, racing through my veins until my whole body felt like it was humming with electricity. The photo in my hands grew warm, then hot.
Then it burst into flames.
I dropped it with a gasp, stumbling backwards. The photo fluttered to the floor, half of it already consumed by fire that had sprung from nowhere. But that wasn't the worst part.
The worst part was that the flames weren't dying out. They were spreading from the photo to the Persian rug, and the rug wasn't burning like normal fire. These flames were silver and gold, dancing with colors I'd never seen before. They moved like they were alive, reaching toward me like they recognized something.
And I could feel them. Not just their heat, but their... presence. Like they were part of me.
"What the fuck?" I breathed.
I backed toward the desk, my heart pounding, and that's when I made my second mistake of the night. My hip bumped against the corner, and I reached out to steady myself.
The moment my palm touched the metal desk surface, the same tingling sensation I'd felt with the safe shot through my arm. But this time, it didn't stop at tingling.
Fire erupted from my hands.
Not normal fire. The same silver-gold flames that had consumed the photograph, but stronger now, pouring from my skin like I was some kind of human flamethrower. The metal desk began to glow red, then white-hot, then started melting like wax under a blowtorch.
I screamed and jerked my hands back, but the damage was done. Marcus's hundred-thousand-dollar custom desk—the one made from a single piece of rare Indonesian steel—now had two perfect handprints melted straight through it. Molten metal dripped onto the floor, hissing where it hit the hardwood.
The flames from my hands flickered and died, leaving me staring at the destruction in absolute terror.
This couldn't be happening. People didn't just spontaneously combust furniture. This was insane. I was having some kind of psychotic break, or maybe I was dreaming, or—
The sound of footsteps in the hallway froze my blood.
Marcus was coming back.
I could hear his measured pace on the marble floor, getting closer. In about thirty seconds, he was going to walk into his office and find his safe open, his desk destroyed, and me standing in the middle of it all with a genealogy chart that claimed my real name was Phoenix Draven.
Phoenix Draven, last known survivor of something called the Dragon Clan.
The footsteps stopped outside the door.
I looked at the melted desk, at the burned photo on the floor, at my hands that had somehow channeled fire from thin air. There was no way to hide this. No explanation that would make sense.
The door handle turned.
I bit my lip hard enough to taste blood—an old nervous habit—and touched the small scar on my neck where Marcus's dog tags had scratched me the night he'd carried me home twenty years ago. The night he'd saved me from whatever had happened to Elena and Vincent.
Or maybe the night he'd taken me from them.
The door opened, and Marcus stepped inside, already pulling off his suit jacket. His silver hair was damp from the rain, and he looked tired in that way that made him seem older than his fifty-two years.
Then he saw the office.
His ice-blue eyes took in the scene in a single sweep: the open safe, the burned photograph, the melted desk with my handprints still glowing faintly in the metal. His face went completely blank for a heartbeat.
Then his gaze found mine, and I saw something flicker across his features. Not surprise. Not confusion.
Recognition.
"Hello, Princess," Marcus said quietly, closing the door behind him with deliberate care. "I think we need to talk."