“Yes, sir,” Tristan agreed. “We made contact with Ember Hill, and Garret began establishing a relationship, per orders, to determine if she was the sleeper.”

Ember. Her name sent a little pulse through my stomach. Before the events of Crescent Beach, I’d known who I was—a soldier of St. George. My mission was to make contact with the target, determine if it was a dragon and kill it. Clear-cut. Black-and-white. Simple.

Only…it wasn’t so simple. The target we’d been sent to destroy turned out to be a girl. A cheerful, daring, funny, beautiful girl. A girl who loved to surf, who taught me how to surf, who challenged me, made me laugh and surprised me every time I was with her. I’d been expecting a ruthless, duplicitous creature that could only imitate human emotion. But Ember was none of those things.

Fischer continued to address Tristan. “And what did you determine?” he asked, speaking more for the benefit of the court, I suspected. “Was this girl the sleeper?”

Tristan stared straight ahead, his expression grave. “Yes, sir,” he replied, and a shiver ran through me. “Ember Hill was the dragon we were sent to eliminate.”

“I see.” Fischer nodded. The entire room was silent; you could hear a fly buzzing around the window. “Please inform the court,” Fischer said quietly, “what happened the night of the raid. When you and Sebastian tracked the sleeper to the beach after the failed strike on the hideout.”

I swallowed, bracing to hear my betrayal lined out for everyone, play-by-play. The night that had brought me here, the decision that had changed everything.

“We’d found the target’s hideout,” Tristan began, his voice coolly professional. “A nest of at least two dragons, possibly more. It was a standard raid—go in, kill the targets, get out. But they must’ve had surveillance set up around the house. They were in the process of fleeing when we went in. We wounded one, but they still managed to escape.”

My stomach churned. I had led that strike. The targets had “escaped” because I’d seen Ember in that house, and I’d hesitated. My orders had been to shoot on sight—anything that moved, human or dragon, I was supposed to gun down, no questions asked.

But I hadn’t. I’d stared at the girl, unable to make myself pull the trigger. And that moment of indecision had cost us the raid, as Ember had Shifted to her true form and turned the room into a blazing inferno. During the fiery confusion, she and the other dragons had fled out the back and off a cliff, and the mansion had burned to the ground.

No one suspected what had happened in the room, that I’d seen Ember over the muzzle of my gun and had frozen. No one knew that the Perfect Soldier had faltered for the very first time. That in that moment, my world and everything I’d ever known had cracked.

But that was nothing compared to what had happened next.

“So the strike was a failure,” Fischer said, and I winced inside at the word. “What happened after that?”

For the briefest of moments, Tristan’s gaze flicked to me. Almost too fast to be seen, but it still made my heart pound. He knew. Maybe not the whole affair, but he knew something had happened to me after the failed strike. For a short time after the raid, while headquarters was deciding what to do about the escaped dragons, I’d disappeared. Tristan had found me a while later, and we’d gone after the targets together, but by that time, the damage was done.

What had happened after the raid, I’d never told anyone. Later that night, I’d called Ember, asked her to meet me on an isolated bluff, alone. I’d been wearing my helmet and mask during the raid; she hadn’t known I was part of St. George. From the hurried tone of her voice, I had guessed she was planning to leave town, possibly with her brother, now that she knew St. George was in the area. But she’d agreed to meet with me one last time. Probably to say goodbye.

I’d been planning to kill her. It was my fault the mission had failed; it was my responsibility to fix it. She was a dragon, and I was St. George. Nothing else mattered. But, once again, staring at the green-eyed girl down the barrel of my gun, the girl who’d taught me to surf and dance and sometimes smiled just for me… I couldn’t do it. It was more than a moment’s hesitation. More than a heartbeat of surprise. I’d stood face-to-face with the target I had been sent to Crescent Beach to destroy—the girl I knew was my enemy—and I could not make myself pull the trigger.

And that was when she’d attacked. One moment I was drawing down a wide-eyed human girl, the next I was on my back, pinned by a snarling red dragon, its fangs inches from my throat. In that moment, I’d known I was going to die, torn apart by claws or incinerated with dragonfire. I had dropped my guard, left myself open, and the dragon had responded as any of its kind would when faced with St. George. Strangely enough, I’d felt no regret.

And then, as I’d lain helpless beneath a dragon and braced myself for death, the unthinkable had happened.

She’d let me go.

Nothing had driven her off. No one from St. George had arrived in the nick of time to save me. We’d been alone, miles from anything. The bluff had been dark, deserted and isolated; even if I’d screamed, there’d been nothing, no one, to hear it.

Except the dragon. The ruthless, calculating monster that was supposed to despise mankind and possess no empathy, no humanity, whatsoever. The creature that hated St. George above all else and showed us no pity, gave no quarter or forgiveness. The target I’d lied to, the girl I’d pursued with the sole intent of destroying her, who could have ended my life right then with one quick slash or breath. The dragon who had a soldier of St. George beneath its claws, completely at its mercy…had deliberately backed off and let me go.

And I had realized…the Order was wrong. St. George taught us that dragons were monsters. We killed them without question, because there was nothing to question. They were alien, Other. Not like us.

Only…they were. Ember had already shaken every belief the Order had instilled in me about dragons; that she’d spared my life was the final blow, the proof I couldn’t ignore. Which meant that some of the dragons I’d killed in the past, gunned down without thought because the Order had told me to, might’ve been like her.

And if that was the case, I had a lot of innocent blood on my hands.

“After the raid,” Tristan said, continuing to address the table, “Garret and I were ordered to follow Ember Hill in the hopes that she would lead us to the other targets. We tracked her to a beach on the edge of town, where she did indeed meet with two other dragons. A juvenile and an adult.”