I drove silently for a few minutes, trying to decide if I could trust her with the details. I’d never kept secrets from Cyrene, not big ones, and I was fairly uncomfortable with holding back information that I knew would interest her . . . and likely impact her, if she continued her fling with a certain black dragon. But I had promised to protect Gabriel and his dragons, and if that meant keeping things from my twin, then that’s what I must do.

It was just all so confusing.

“It’s something to do with Kostya, isn’t it?” she asked, watching me avidly.

I schooled my face to the same blank expression I wore around Magoth. “Not really, no. It has to do with another dragon sept.”

“Oh? Which one?”

“Red,” I said reluctantly, torn with conflicting desires.

“Mayling, I’m your twin, your creator,” she said, patting me on the arm. “You can trust me.”

I slid her a quick glance, shifting the car into a lower gear as we tackled a long incline. “What about Kostya?”

“What about him?”

“You were pretty insistent at the sárkány that you were his mate. That implies you’d feel honor bound to tell him about anything related to dragon politics.”

She examined a perfectly buffed and polished fingernail. “He was just as insistent that I was not his mate.”

I pulled the car off the road into a narrow overlook intended for tourists, turning to face her in the small rental car. “What are you going to do about that?”

“About Kostya, you mean?”

I nodded.

She made a little face. “Nothing. He’s just in denial right now, Mayling. I told you he was suffering from some emotional issues that had to do with him being held prisoner. He’s confused about our relationship; that’s all. Once he gets his feet back under him, he’ll see that we were meant to be together.”

Her words struck a sore spot. Gabriel and I belonged together—even without the dragon shard prompting me to exhibit dragonish tendencies, I knew that we were fated to be together, to share our lives. Perhaps Cyrene felt the same thing about Kostya? Stranger things had happened.

“All right, then; let’s say you are Kostya’s mate. That doesn’t give me a lot of confidence about revealing things that I’d rather not have him know right now.”

The look she gave me was filled with injured dignity. “If you told me something in confidence, I would never repeat it!”

“Cy, you’ve blabbed just about every secret I’ve ever told you, including a few that weren’t even true.”

“Those were your own fault,” she said, ruffling up just a little. “Telling me you were a lesbian just so I’d stop trying to fix you up . . . Honestly, May!”