After the initial confusion over my unannounced arrival died down a little, we decided to change the scenery, as Abram's office was not only stuffy, but I considered the haphazardly piled up boxes a serious health hazard. After considering the dining room and Sebastian's study first, we ultimately decided on a third option in the form of the trophy room where I met with the family head for the first time.

The first one to heed the summons was, surprisingly enough, the mother of the household, and she made quite an entrance at that. Emese was already (or maybe still) partially transformed (as in, there was a conspicuous lack of wings on her back), and unlike her usual modest and dignified appearance, she was currently wearing a low cut blouse and a pair of tiny shorts that left little to the imagination and showed off the flat, light-red scales covering her arms, thighs, and the area between her neck and her cleavage. She also wore her hair in a thick, somewhat loose braid that reached down to the small of her back and it momentarily made me wonder about how Elly would look with the same hairstyle.

The moment she entered the room she locked her eyes on me, and before I could properly react, she dashed over to my side with a beaming smile and glomped me in an embrace that was simultaneously too hard and unnecessarily squishy.

"Leonard! I didn't know you were coming over!"

"It was kind of the point," I tried to object and worm my way out of her hug, but she just clamped down on me even harder, followed by a mirthful giggle that made me feel just a tad embarrassed.

"Mooom!" my girlfriend suddenly burst into the scene and grabbed hold of her mother's shoulder. "Let go of Leo! You are smothering him!"

"Oh my? Could it be that you are jealous of your own mother?" Emese teased her, yet it wasn't Elly who answered first.

"To be fair, darling, even I'm getting a little bit jealous..." Papa Dracis mumbled behind me, at which point Emese finally let go of me with a breathy 'Oh, you!' and she subsequently attached herself to her husband instead.

My un-hugged state lasted for only a split second though, as Elly immediately replaced her. Not only that, she more or less hung from my neck with a defiant expression and rubbed her face against mine like a cat desperately trying to mark its owner after he petted the neighbor's kitten.

"It appears everyone is here already," came a stray comment from the last arrival as Sebastian quietly closed the door behind him.

"Right. Let's get started," I addressed everyone with a slightly raised voice as I simultaneously peeled the princess off my neck. "Please sit down."

The Dracis family shared a few curious glances between each other, but at the end of the day they obediently followed my instructions and formed a small cluster on the nearby canape... except for Sebastian, who defiantly kept standing by them, ramrod straight like a British palace guard.

I didn't take a seat either, but instead I stood before them and, after taking a deep breath, I decided to stop delaying and began by telling them, "First off, there is something important I want all of you to know. Elly is already aware of this, but I suffer from a case of retrograde amnesia."

"Amnesia?" Sebastian repeated after me while raising a single incredulous brow at my expense.

"Yes. I have absolutely no memory about practically anything before the first of September."

For some reason, the Dracis parents seemed absolutely shocked and mortified by this, yet Sebastian only looked at me funny.

"I'm sorry to hear that, but was this truly the reason why you asked us to gather on such short notice?"

"No. It's just something that I wanted to make clear before we move on to the actual reason why we are all here." I paused here for a long moment as I considered how I should breach the topic, and at last I decided to employ the blunt approach. "I'm not going to mince my words here: until last night, I was entirely unaware of my own background. Unfortunately, all evidence points to the fact that I'm related to the Knights of the unnecessarily long name."

Despite my feeble effort to dampen the impact, the atmosphere in the room immediately turned tense like a piano wire.

"You're one of the accursed knights?" Abram promptly broke the developing silence, his voice more incredulous than anything else.

"Maybe, though I find it a little doubtful," I told him honestly and shrugged my shoulder. "The one thing that is certain is that I was contacted by them yesterday."

"That's... Unreal," Lady Emese muttered, and for some odd reason, she seemed to be the one who took the news the hardest. "So... Are you a spy, or an infiltrator, or something?"

"I'll be damned if I knew. I had more important things to focus on, so I didn't bother to ask."

"What could be more important than learning your own history, my boy?" Sebastian asked me with an unexpectedly concerned look in his eyes.

"Thank you for asking," I replied with a bit of forced enthusiasm, and then I cleared my throat and explained, "My background also wasn't the main reason why I came over to talk to all of you, just another detail I wanted you to know in order to explain from where I got the following information: the Knights are coming to Critias, and they are planning an attack on you."

"When?" Sebastian leveled the question at me right away, and I answered on the spot.

"On the third of next month. I couldn't narrow it down any further without raising suspicion."

"We need to prepare then!" Abram declared without a hint of hesitation, and it was my turn to feel a little odd. I mean, even knowing their respective personalities, considering this incident was related to the Knights, I expected at least a little bit of suspicion.

"Actually, could you not?" That comment earned me an almost comically baffled expression from Papa Dracis, so I hastily clarified, "What I meant to say was; please make sure to be subtle, so that they wouldn't know that you are expecting the attack."

"Oh, I get it!" the Dracis patriarch exclaimed with an excited grin. "We are going to ambush them! Give them a good taste of their own medicine!" He paused there, only for as long as it took to give me a thumbs-up, and then he added, "I approve!"

I gave my self-imposed father-in-law a wry look, but since he didn't respond to it, I noted, "To be perfectly honest with you, after telling you about my connection to the Knights, I expected slightly more apprehension than none at all."

"Oh please, son!" Abram scoffed at my comment, and he even emphasized his words with a dismissive wave of the hand. "If you can't trust family, then who can you trust?"

"While I would like to object under normal circumstances," Sebastian cut in after letting out a shallow sigh, "It is an undeniable fact that you have already proved your loyalty without a shadow of a doubt. It's to such a degree that I can't help but wonder why you found it necessary to preface this discussion with the reveal of your background." I must have looked either really curious or really confused at this moment, because after taking a single glance at my face, the old butler's shoulders drooped in resignation, and he clarified, "What I'm trying to tell you is that, as much as I loathe to admit it, if you came to us by saying that your alleged information network warned you about an incoming attack, I would have believed your words just as readily as I do them now."

I stayed silent for a moment as I let Sebastian's comment sink in, then eventually I told him, "I'm not going to lie, I'm flattered by the amount of trust that you place in me, yet I think you're all misunderstanding something."

"How so?" Emese poked the conversation ball to keep it rolling, and so I told them:

"I told you all that mainly to forestall any predictable complications in the future. For example, imagine that the Knights show up, with all their shiny armor and swords and all, and everyone is squaring up against each other, and just then… Bam! One of the knights looks at me, and then yells something like 'Let's go, brother! Stab them in the back, for great justice!'"

"That… was certainly something they would say," Emese commented, putting me off my original train of thought right away.

"They would? I thought I was lampooning them… Anyhow, let's say I didn't tell you about my background and you heard that. You would probably get surprised, maybe even stunned for a second, and then you actually get stabbed in the back while you are paying attention to me, and let me tell you, fixing you up once was hard enough, so I would prefer if that wouldn't happen."

For some reason Abram found my description of a possible life-or-death battle amusing, as he could barely contain his chuckles. Meanwhile, Sebastian raised his hand to his chin in one of those ever-so-slightly insufferable 'sophisticated intellectual' poses and stated, "That is a possible situation that slipped my mind. I shall grant you the point."

"You better," I told the old man with a smirk, but even while I was doing that, my attention was being drawn to something else, or rather, the lack of something. While we were having this whole conversation, Elly stayed suspiciously silent, so I sent a questioning glance at her and quickly noticed that she seemed to be straining herself quite a bit. "Is there… a problem?"

Mama Dracis followed the direction of my eyes, and a moment later she giggled out loud and told me, "Oh, you mean her? I'm holding her back right now."

"… I can't decide whether I'm more curious about the 'how' or the 'why'…"

"It's just bloodline suppression. Anyone with a pure enough draconic heritage can do it," Sebastian supplied the answer, which somehow only made me more confused.

"Okay, I bite: why did you use this suppression thing on her?"

"Because if I didn't, she would've jumped on you the moment you told us about your connection to the Knights, and then we couldn't have had a proper discussion," Mama Dracis explained to me as dryly and straightforwardly as if she was talking about the weather.

"So… can you please stop that? She looks really uncomfortable."

"Are you sure you want that?" she asked, and I immediately nodded.

Without further ado, my girlfriend twitched and then she practically flew off the canapé (which, incidentally, was also the point when Abram was no longer able to stifle his laughter and he began heartily chuckling at… something), and then she turned on her heel and glared at her mother.

"Mom, you are an idiot! A meanie! A nincompoop!"

Oh, that was her rule of three of silly insults! I haven't heard that in a while… I might've even felt nostalgic, if not for the fact that in the blink of an eye the princess put me in her crosshairs and she leaped at me with such gusto I was afraid she wanted to tackle me off my feet. My first instinct told me to do that thing where I casually step out of her way the last moment and watch her fall flat on her face as she missed her lunge, but then a more rational part of me concluded that doing that would've been mean, so instead I decided to dust off my slightly rusty girl-catching reflexes.

Just like that, I managed to slip my hands under her armpits and, by turning a full 360 degrees on my feet, I managed to disperse all the momentum so that in the end I could simply set her down onto the ground in front of me. Hm? That actually sounded a little familiar.

"Hey, princess? Didn't we already do something like this in the—?"

I got that far with my question before Elly grabbed hold of my clothes and began shaking me.

"Leo, you jerk! Why didn't you tell me!?"

"Easy there!" I rebuked her as I hastily unclamped her fingers and, after a brief consideration, I decided to keep holding onto her hands, just in case she wanted to grab onto me again in the future. "If you mean about me being related to the Knights, even I only learned about that yesterday."

"That's no excuse! You should've told me right away!"

"Yes, and that's why I came over to tell all of you about it today," I spoke in a level, soft voice while looking Elly right in the eye, and it didn't take long for her to avert hers.

"Yes, but…" she began to grumble, only to ultimately lean her head against my chest… or so I have thought, but instead she headbutted me! It was probably since I was still holding onto her hands, but it was still harsh. She repeated the process a couple more times and then she burst out, "Argh! This is so weird! Why does everything have to be so complicated!?"

"I don't know about weird," I mused as I tried to position myself to be out of the way of her headbutts. "I mean, isn't everyone and everything around us pretty weird already? This doesn't seem particularly special."

"Maybe… I mean, I get your point, but… Argh!"

Just like that, we were back to head-inflicted trauma county. Lovely. Not to mention, as if that wasn't enough, I couldn't help but notice the parents of the household sharing a laugh at my expense, and while their harmonious little huddle was cute and all, I was way past the point where I could appreciate it.

"Lady Emese? Can you please teach me that bloodline suppression thing? I could really use it right now..."

"Call me mom," my previously taciturn alleged mother-in-law demanded, but then she amended her words with an impish smile. "Not to mention, you're doing fine without it."

"If that's what this looks like from there, you should—" I began, only for my words to get cut short by Elly suddenly crying out.

"Ouu! I don't care! Knight or not, I still love you!"

I was almost relieved by that remarkably quick turn-around on her dilemma, but my happiness was short-lived, as she quickly yanked her hands out of mine and proceeded to catch me in a hug that would have made a fully grown Siberian bear skulk away in shame and embarrassment. To be fair, I would've loved to join said theoretical bear, as spending time in the corner in the company of a vicious predator felt vastly preferable to standing in the crossfire of the sickeningly affectionate gazes directed at me.

"Awww. Look, honey! Elly is having a forbidden romance right in front of our eyes," Mama Dracis commented while snuggling up to her husband, careful so that she wouldn't poke his eyes out with the tip of her horns.

"It's nice, isn't it?! Oh, the fire of youth!"

I really wondered what Papa Dracis considered 'fiery youth', considering the way he was hugging and flirting with his wife was pretty much the dictionary definition of hormone-addled lovebirds, but instead I exclaimed, "Could I humbly ask the peanut gallery to at least pretend that we are having a serious discussion about an impending threat to the lives of everyone in the room?"

"That definitely sounds rich coming from you, my boy, considering your current situation," Sebastian commented with his usual, unflappable voice, after which he quickly added, "However, I do find your choice of words curious. Bearing in mind you said 'everyone in the room', could it be that you are already considering yourself part of the family after all?"

The look which I gave the old man at this point had its exasperatedness-levels measured in giga-class-reps (a novel metric I was still developing, patent pending), then I sent a considerably softer and maybe just a teensy bit defeated glance at the girl still trying to crush my chest, and at last I said, "It's not like I have much of a choice in the matter at this point, do I?"

"Did you hear that, honey?!" Papa Dracis suddenly exclaimed, followed by a mirthful giggle from her wife.

"I sure did! Leonard is finally willing to be accepted into the family!"

"We must toast to this!"

"I advise against drinking just before lunchtime," the incognito butler intervened, earning him a thoughtful huff from the patriarch.

"You're right, grandpa! Let's have lunch, and then a toast!" Abram beamed at Sebastian first, then at me, which I considered his own way of asking if that was a good idea.

"I can't stay for lunch, I already have an appointment," I stated without any reservations, but instead of its intended effect, it only made Emese jump to her feet (she really, really enjoyed being able to walk again, I supposed).

"In that case, I'll go and tell the staff to arrange a cold cuts buffet."

"How is that better than…" I began, but then my words got overwhelmed by Abram also rising to his feet with a merry bellow.

"I'm going to the cellar and pick a great vintage for the occasion! See you kids in the dining room!"

And just like that, both parents rushed out of the trophy room, leaving me with the slightly-less-grouchy-than-usual butler and the involuntary lung-compressor I affectionately call my girlfriend. After the dust settled, I decided to ask a question that had been on my mind for a while, and I directed it to Sebastian.

"How the hell did these happy-go-lucky people manage to survive being hunted by a whole knighthood of angry dragon hunters for so long?"

"Listen, my boy," Sebastian raised his voice, apparently by reflex, then he fell silent for a long beat before finally admitting, "That… is a question I often asked myself in the past, yet I am no closer to an answer than you are."