Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Maeve’s kitchen was cold.
That was the first thing Duff noticed because Maeve’s kitchen was never cold. The old-fashioned cast-iron stove was her pride, her anchor, the heart of the safe house. She kept it burning day and night, summer and winter, because a cold kitchen meant an empty home, and Maeve’s home was never empty.
The stove was dead. Ashes gray and settled, not a trace of warmth left in the iron.
On the kitchen counter, her favorite mug sat half-full, a skin of mold floating on the surface of tea she’d never finished.
Her coat hung on its hook by the door. Her boots stood on the mat, toes pointed outward, ready for feet that hadn’t come to claim them.
She hadn’t left her house voluntarily. People who left took their coats, finished their tea or poured it out.
People who left said goodbye, especially people like Maeve, who had never once in the decades Duff had known her failed to kiss his cheek and make him promise to eat properly.
She’d been the closest thing to a mother he’d had since his own walked out when he was seven.
She hadn’t left. She’d been taken.
He’d been gone for ten days, and she’d been taken.
Duff stood in the center of the kitchen and let the reality of it settle into him like the bitter cold of a Highland winter creeping into his very bones. Thomas. Henry. Cormac. Liam. Niamh. Conn. Seána. And now Maeve.
Eight people in two months. Eight members of a network that had already been dying, snuffed out one by one like candles in a draft.
Cormac had died in a car accident. Thomas and Henry had drowned after going out to fish in a storm—even though neither of them had ever shown any interest in fishing.
Others had been taken by mysterious illnesses, had died from carbon monoxide poisoning, or had simply vanished.
And Duff hadn’t been able to stop it, hadn’t been able to do a single goddamn thing except watch the colored markers on his map get crossed out in red.
He was alone. The last dragon slayer in the world, standing in a dead woman’s kitchen with nothing but the cold and the silence and the mold growing on her tea.
The ember in his chest didn’t flicker. It guttered, sputtering like a flame starved of oxygen, and for one terrible moment, Duff felt it nearly go out.
He caught the edge of the counter to steady himself against the dizzying sensation flooding him.
What was he without the fire? What was a Bás without the burn?
Then he saw the thick cream-colored envelope on the kitchen table, his name written in neat, impersonal handwriting on the front. The same stationery as every envelope Cormac had received over the years. The same anonymous source.
But Cormac was gone. And this had been delivered here, to a safe house whose location was known only to network members. Duff stared at the envelope, the implications hitting him one after the other like slaps to his face.
The source knew where the safe houses were. Had probably always known. That meant he could’ve found any of them at any time, at any safe house, anywhere. He could very well have been the one who’d taken Maeve. He probably was. Duff had been such a fool.
His hands were steady as he picked up the envelope, even though everything inside him was shaking apart.
One sheet of paper was folded around a stack of bills: a thousand Swedish Krona.
The exchange rate was roughly a hundred to one, so a quick estimate taught him he was holding roughly two thousand euros. That was quite a bit of money.
He put the Krona aside and unfolded the paper, then read. His heart skipped a beat. The note contained detailed intelligence about the upcoming Dragon Council in Sweden, including the exact location coordinates, security layouts, and a list of attendees organized by clan.
And below, in a note in the same neat handwriting as on the envelope, it said:
Erwan Doyle, crown prince of the Doyle clan and rumored to be a white dragon, will attend with his boyfriend, Rhene Hightower, a wolf shifter. They will be vulnerable, traveling without a security detail. Choose a spot for your ambush, and I will ensure they’re herded there.
Duff read it three times. His hunter’s mind processed the tactical information automatically—terrain, timing, the best trap for a wolf shifter since he had no experience in that area—but the rest of his mind was screaming.
What the fuck was a dragon doing with a wolf shifter?
Duff had asked himself that when he’d heard the Doyle dragons had taken refuge with the Hightower pack.
Of course he’d learned of the return of the wolf shifters, led by the True Alpha Lidon Hayes.
But this was not the Hayes pack, but a different one—though the Hightower pack was historically closely aligned with the Hayes pack.
Maybe the wolves didn’t know who they were dealing with.
Also, Erwan Doyle was a white dragon? They hadn’t seen one of those in centuries. That was definitely good intel to have, though Duff did wonder how the source discovered the information. And why had he told Duff?
Which led him to the much bigger question: who had sent this?
Details surrounding the Dragon Council that convened once every five years were impossible to uncover.
They were more closely guarded than most countries’ intelligence reports.
Duff hadn’t been able to confirm the exact location of this year’s Dragon Council, and he’d sure as fuck tried.
So, for someone to have this kind of information even before the Dragon Council had started, not to mention the details about Erwan Doyle being a white dragon… That meant inside access. This information was without a doubt coming from a dragon—one who would be attending the Council.
Duff leaned back in his chair and rubbed his temples.
It wouldn’t have come from the Fitzgeralds.
Their king and his brother had just been taken out, and there was no way the new young king would be capable of a bold move like this.
It wasn’t coming from the O’Connors either.
They were cowards, all of them, and had made a habit of keeping to themselves.
Other than at the Dragon Council, they barely had contact with the other clans.
The Murphys then? Duff sat with that for a while.
They’d certainly be capable of a move like this.
Within the dragon world, they were at the top of the food chain—ruthless bastards, every single one of them.
But why would they make a move against Erwan Doyle when they’d literally come to his aid mere months ago when those rogue dragon slayers had attacked the Doyles? It didn’t make sense.
That left…
Duff swallowed.
When he’d learned Erwan Doyle and his brothers had fled the Doyle clan, taking a few more people with them, he’d known this was a big development.
Not only had the Doyles come out of hiding, but the crown prince and his brothers had broken with their father and uncle.
Duff had no idea what had led them to that decision, but regardless of the reason, King Cladhaire would’ve been furious.
Furious enough to sell out his own son?
Oh, that thought made Duff sick to his stomach. He couldn’t imagine ever betraying someone he loved, least of all his kin. And his father had been the same. He would’ve died for Duff. He wouldn’t have given up his location under torture—Duff was certain of it.
So what did it mean that a dragon king was betraying his own son, the very man destined to follow in his footsteps? Yes, it confirmed every bad thing he’d ever thought, heard, and said about dragonkind, but this went much deeper than that.
The pattern Maeve had suggested was now a fact.
Same envelope, same method of communication.
If Cladhaire was behind this, every cream-colored envelope, every anonymous donation, every piece of inside intelligence that had guided slayer operations for years had come from a dragon who was using them as weapons against his own kind. Against his own son.
And now that the go-betweens were gone, now that every buffer between the source and Duff had been systematically removed, the leash was being placed directly around Duff’s neck.
We should know what we’re killing, and why, and for whom.
He heard Maeve’s voice, as clearly as if she were sitting across from him with her tea and her sharp dark eyes.
Duff set the papers down on the table, next to the mold-covered mug, and sat in the chair that had been Maeve’s.
Her chair. It still smelled faintly of her—wool and wood smoke and the lavender soap she made herself.
He should walk away. Every instinct Maeve had helped sharpen, every doubt she’d given him permission to feel, said this was wrong. He was being used. He’d been used for years. The sacred oath was a leash, and the hand holding it belonged to the very creatures he’d sworn to destroy.
But if he walked away, it was over. The Bás line ended.
His father’s life would mean nothing. Every ancestor who had taken the oath, every slayer who’d died in the name of the cause, all of it would become pointless.
And Duff couldn’t carry that. Not on top of Maeve and Thomas and Henry and all the rest.
And there was something else. Something that burned hotter than the dying ember, hotter than grief, hotter than the betrayal coiling in his stomach.
He wanted answers.
He wanted to understand what was really going on.
Who was pulling the strings and why? He wanted to follow the trail wherever it led because that was what hunters did.
That was also what Maeve would’ve wanted—not blind obedience to an oath that had been corrupted, but the truth. The actual, ugly, complicated truth.
So he’d go to Sweden. He’d set the trap and catch the crown prince and his wolf. Not for the anonymous dragon who’d sent the cream-colored envelope. Not for the sacred oath or the Bás legacy or any of the things he used to believe in with such unshakable certainty. But for Maeve. For the truth.
And for the small, desperate hope that somewhere in this mess, there was something worth believing in that wasn’t built on lies.