Chapter 35
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The sound Fergal made when Gregor’s arms closed around him was not one he’d ever made before.
It came from somewhere below conscious thought—a raw, cracked, almost animalistic sound that bypassed his brain entirely and emerged from the place where the mate bond lived, the place that had been hollow and screaming for days and was now flooding with warmth so fast it hurt.
Like blood rushing back into a frozen limb, like lungs filling after too long underwater, like every metaphor for resurrection that poets had ever written.
Except none of them were truly adequate because this was Gregor, this was his mate, this was the other half of his soul pressing against him so hard that Fergal couldn’t tell where his own heartbeat ended and Gregor’s began.
He was crying. The tears came from the same place as the sound, from his broken-open core. He had held himself together through kidnapping and captivity and interrogation and the agonizing silence of a severed bond, and now he could finally, finally stop.
Gregor was shaking. That was the thing that undid Fergal completely, the realization that the most controlled man alive was trembling in his arms. Gregor’s face was buried in Fergal’s hair, his breathing ragged, his arms wrapped around Fergal with a ferocity that would leave bruises and that Fergal never wanted to end.
Through the bond—gods, the bond, blazing and whole and so fiercely alive—Fergal could feel everything.
Gregor’s relief vast as an ocean. His fury still burning hot beneath the surface.
His guilt—familiar, ever-present, but edged now with something sharper, something that tasted like a vow.
And underneath it all, running through everything like a river through bedrock, the love.
The love Gregor had never been able to say but the bond had made impossible to hide, enormous and terrifying and absolutely, unequivocally real.
I know, Fergal thought, pressing his face harder against Gregor’s chest. I can feel it. I’ve always known.
“Don’t ever do that again,” Gregor said against his hair, his voice wrecked. “Don’t ever walk away from me again.”
“They said they’d kill you.” Fergal’s voice was muffled against Gregor’s shirt. “They said they had men on your patrol route and if I didn’t come alone—”
“I know.” Gregor’s arms tightened. “I know why you did it. And I will never forgive you for it.”
“That’s fair.”
“It’s not fair. Nothing about this is fair.
” Gregor pulled back just enough to take Fergal’s face in both hands, his gray eyes red-rimmed and wild and looking at Fergal with an intensity that the bond amplified into something almost painful.
“You walked into a trap to save me, and I wasn’t there to stop you. ”
“You couldn’t have—”
“I should’ve been there.” The words cracked. “I should’ve been in that cabin, not walking a perimeter that didn’t need walking, and we both know the reason I wasn’t there was because I was avoiding the silence between us, and the reason for the silence is because I—”
He stopped. His jaw clenched. The deadbolt—the familiar, infuriating deadbolt that Fergal had been fighting against for years—slammed shut behind his eyes.
But this time, Fergal could feel what was behind it.
Through the bond, as clearly as if Gregor had spoken the words aloud, he could feel the shape of the secret—its weight, the guilt that had been corroding the man he loved from the inside out.
It was old. It was heavy. And it was connected to something Gregor had done, something he believed was unforgivable.
Gregor’s eyes closed. A single tear escaped, tracking down his scarred cheek, and Fergal caught it with his thumb the way Gregor had once caught his.
“Later,” Fergal whispered. “Tell me later. Right now, just hold me.”
Gregor held on.
They stood like that for what might’ve been a minute or an hour—time had lost its meaning somewhere between the bond breaking and the bond being restored—until the sounds from the corridor filtered back in. Footsteps. Voices.
Fergal pulled back reluctantly, keeping hold of Gregor’s hand because releasing it was not an option his body was willing to consider. “What happened to Simon?” he asked. “Why did he do it?”
“The Murphys have his little brother Tiernan. He’s a teenager, fifteen if I remember correctly.”
The crying sound. “I think I know where he’s being held. Oh, and Duff is next door to me.”
Not one cell in his body was angry at Simon. Not even a little bit.
They stepped into the corridor together, still holding hands.
The first thing he saw was Cladhaire and Baoth, frozen in place like statues of their own failed ambition. Their eyes were open, conscious, and the impotent fury in Cladhaire’s gaze was almost satisfying enough to compensate for the week Fergal had spent in a cell.
Almost. Not quite. But close.
Erwan and Lidon stood nearby, Lidon dressed in only shorts.
He must’ve shifted back because Fergal had heard his growl before.
Erwan looked exhausted but peaceful—a man who had faced his worst demon and chosen to be better than it.
He could’ve killed them, and Fergal wouldn’t have judged him for it.
But the choice he’d made instead was the better one, the one that would forever cement his legacy as the White Dragon.
“Thank you,” Fergal said to Erwan, and the two words carried the weight of everything—the rescue, the alliance, the choice Erwan had made to freeze rather than kill, the honor that had held when lesser men would have let it break.
Erwan nodded. “Let’s get everyone out of here.”
They broke open the cell next to Fergal’s.
Duff was on his feet, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed and a bruise purpling along his jaw.
He looked like a man who’d been in a bar fight and was considering going back for a second round.
They’d taken him out of his cell for a second round of interrogations, and this time, they’d been less polite.
But he’d told Fergal that he hadn’t said a word.
“About time,” Duff said, then looked at Fergal. “I was starting to think your rescue plan was to bore them to death with legal arguments.”
“It was working. I had Kerry citing the Code back at me by day two.”
The ghost of a smile crossed Duff’s battered face. Then his eyes moved past Fergal to the corridor—to the frozen forms of Cladhaire and Baoth, to Erwan and Lidon standing over them, to the broken cell doors and the sounds of liberation beginning throughout the building.
Something shifted in his expression. The dry humor faded, replaced by something harder, more deliberate. He stepped out of the cell and stood in the corridor, looking at each person in turn like a man making a final calculation.
Then he looked at Erwan. The White Dragon. The man Duff had been sent to kill by the very people who now stood frozen in this corridor.
“I’ve spent my whole life believing your kind was the enemy,” Duff said. His voice was steady, stripped of performance. “I was wrong. The men who used my family and me to do their dirty work for generations were the enemy.” He paused. “I’m done with it. I’m done being their weapon.”
The corridor was quiet. Duff’s gaze moved to Lidon. “You’re the one they could never figure out. The True Alpha who allied with dragons. They said you had to be corrupted or deceived. But you’re neither, are you? You’re just a man who chose to do the right thing.”
Lidon’s expression held no judgment. “So are you. Right now.”
Duff swallowed. Then he straightened. “If you’ll have me, I’d like to help make this right.
All of it. Not because of the oath my father made me swear or the mission I was raised for.
But because it’s what Maeve would’ve wanted.
” His voice roughened on the name. “And because the people in these cells deserve better than what was done to them. Same as I did.”
Erwan extended his hand. “Welcome to the right side, Duff.”
Duff looked at the hand for a beat—the hand of a white dragon, offered in alliance to the last dragon slayer—and took it.
They moved through the basement, breaking open cells.
Gregor’s hand stayed in Fergal’s, and Fergal cataloged everything even as his heart cracked with each door they opened.
The seventeen Doyle dragons were in the worst condition—months of captivity had left them gaunt and disoriented.
Some recognized Erwan and wept. Others stared blankly, unable to process what was happening.
An older alpha asked about Queen Grian, and when Erwan told him she had passed, the man’s legs buckled and Lidon caught him before he hit the ground.
Fergal watched Erwan deliver the news to each group of prisoners—his mother’s death, his kingship, the rescue—and marveled at the young king’s composure.
Every repetition cost him, Fergal could see that, but Erwan didn’t flinch, didn’t soften the truth, didn’t hide behind euphemism.
His mother had raised him well, and Fergal’s respect for the late Queen Grian only rose.
The Murphy omegas were fewer—seven, held in cells on the far end of the corridor.
Their condition made Fergal’s stomach turn.
Thin, hollow-eyed, moving with mechanical stillness.
One of them flinched when Fergal’s shadow fell across the doorway of her cell, pressing herself against the wall with a whimper that Fergal would hear in his nightmares for a long time.
And then, second corridor, third door on the left, the door Fergal had marked during his captivity, the door behind which he’d heard crying.
The boy inside was perhaps fifteen, curled on a cot with his knees drawn to his chest and his face hidden in his arms. His sandy hair was matted, his frame painfully thin, and when the door opened, he flinched so violently the cot scraped against the floor.
“Hey,” Fergal said softly, crouching to make himself smaller, less threatening. “It’s over. You’re safe.”
The boy raised his head. His eyes—red-rimmed, exhausted, carrying a fear so deep it had become structural—found Fergal’s face and searched it with the desperate scrutiny of someone who had been lied to too many times to believe anything at face value.
“Who are you?” he whispered.
“My name is Fergal. We’re here to get you out.”
“All of us?”
“Every single one.”
A tremor ran through the boy’s thin frame. “My brother. Simon. Is he—”
“Simon is safe,” Fergal said. “He’s with the Hightower pack. He’s been worried about you.”
The boy’s face crumpled, and Fergal caught him as the sobs came—huge, wracking, the kind that shook a body too small and too starved to contain them. He held the boy the way Gregor held him—fiercely, completely, with the unspoken promise that no one would hurt him again.
Over the boy’s shaking head, Fergal met Gregor’s eyes. His mate stood in the doorway, watching, his eyes endlessly soft.
They emerged into sunlight twenty minutes later—Fergal, Gregor, Duff, and a stream of freed prisoners blinking against the morning brightness like people surfacing from a long, dark dive.
The compound yard was controlled chaos—Murphy alphas restrained and guarded, wolf fighters maintaining the perimeter, Fallon’s magic crackling as he maintained suppression wards on the captured dragons.
Kerry sat in the dirt with his hands zip-tied behind his back, his composure finally, thoroughly shattered.
When his eyes found Fergal, the hatred in them was pure and impotent, and Fergal looked at the man who had interrogated him, who had tried to steal his clan, who had orchestrated the murder of his father, and felt nothing but the vast, tired satisfaction of a case closed.
“I did warn you,” Fergal said pleasantly as he passed. “Wrong side of the Code. Wrong side of history. Free legal assessment, as promised.”
Kerry said nothing. There was nothing left to say.
Hubert hadn’t made it. He’d attacked Fallon, and the little omega had stood his ground, but in the end, Fallon had no other choice but to kill him. Fergal could only hope Fallon wouldn’t lose a minute of sleep over it.
Fergal stood in the sun and let the warmth sink into his skin.
Gregor’s hand was in his, solid and warm and real.
Through the bond, he could feel his mate—the relief, the exhaustion, the guilt that hadn’t dissolved and wouldn’t until the truth was spoken, and the love that blazed beneath everything like a fire that had finally found enough air.
Around them, freed dragons took their first steps into sunlight. Wolf alphas offered water and blankets to prisoners who hadn’t known kindness in months. Duff stood apart, watching it all with a kind of wonder on his face. And somewhere above them, the morning sky stretched wide and blue and open.
They were going home. All of them—the freed prisoners, the rescued king, the reformed dragon slayer, the mate whose secrets were finally ready to be told. Home to the pack that had somehow become the place where wolves and dragons and a man who’d spent his life hunting dragons could all belong.
Fergal leaned into Gregor’s side and felt the arm that wrapped around his shoulders, automatic and fierce and unwilling to let go.
“Take me home,” he said.
Gregor pressed his lips to Fergal’s hair. “Anything you want.”
And when we get there, Fergal thought, you’re going to tell me everything.
He could wait a little longer. But not much.