Matteo scoffs. “You are a Lion,” he says, and I open my mouth and close it again. His comment, while confirming my suspicion about my dad, throws me. How can I have all these identities that mean so much to everyone here that I’ve never known anything about?

“I’m also a Bear,” I say, and raise my chin. “Just like my mom and aunt. And even if my dad was born a Lion, in his heart, he wasn’t one of them.”

Matteo steps away from me and for a split second I’m terrified that he’ll go into his bedroom and lock me out. But instead he heads for the fireplace, staring at the logs for so long that I take a few steps toward him.

He nods to himself like he’s made a decision. “Twenty-five years ago there was a group of students here who were the best this school ever had.”

“I’ve heard the teachers talk about them,” I say.

“Right,” he says. “Your mom, my mom, Aunt Jo, Blackwood, your father, and a couple of others were part of that group. But there were two who were better than all the rest—your parents.”

“What?” It takes me a second to wrap my mind around what he’s saying. “Not the…the scroll in the library?” I ask, remembering my visit there with Ash. “That was them?”

He nods, and the look he gives me tells me to shut up and let him finish. “Your parents—the firstborn of the Lion Family and the firstborn of the Bear Family—started at Academy Absconditi the same year. My mother says everyone anticipated fighting, considering it’s what our Families do. And they did at first, but over time they also fell in love.”

My stomach twists uncomfortably. Not only were my parents the best, but they were also both firstborns? The magnitude of information my dad kept from me is staggering.

“My mother said your parents thought they could change Strategia politics for the better,” Matteo says. “But they soon found that the decades of fighting between the Lions and the Bears, and the centuries of the power imbalance, were going to make things nearly impossible. Initially your grandparents refused to come to an agreement about what the terms would be if they were to get married. Jag demanded that your father and mother stay with them and that she give up her standing as a Bear, and your mom’s parents wanted the opposite. They fought viciously among themselves for months, but to everyone’s surprise, they did eventually agree to sit down and try to compromise.”

Jag is my grandfather. Oh, holy hell. “And what happened?” I ask quickly, with some amazement that my parents were actually doing something to fix things. “Did they get their Families to agree?”

Matteo sighs, like he understands the larger question I’m asking. “At the time, some people thought that your parents would restore order and put an end to the Lions picking off members of other Families.”

“By your tone I’m guessing that I’m about to find out how they went from uniting their Families to hiding,” I say.