Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
The compound was as secure as Gregor could make it, which meant it was as secure as anyone on earth could make it, and it still didn’t feel like enough.
He stood outside Fergal’s quarters—the prince’s quarters, not the king’s, because Fergal had refused to move into his father’s rooms with a quiet “not tonight” that had shut down the suggestion entirely—and ran through his mental checklist one final time.
Perimeter wards reinforced and verified.
Every guard on double shift, with his own hand-selected men covering the royal wing. All access points locked and warded.
Duncan and Donovan had been located, documented, and were under discreet surveillance by the two guards Gregor trusted most. The crime scene was sealed. Gregor’s preliminary examination was complete, every detail committed to memory before he’d allowed anyone else near it.
The crossbow bolts had been custom-made.
Short-range, heavy-tipped, designed to punch through dragon-scale armor at close distance.
Whoever had fired them had known exactly where Lorcan and Brian would land after their evening flight, had positioned themselves within fifty yards of the landing site, and had executed both kills within seconds of each other. Two shooters, minimum. Professionals.
And the landing site—that was the detail that kept circling in Gregor’s mind like a vulture over a carcass.
The king’s flight schedule wasn’t public knowledge.
Lorcan deliberately varied his routes, a security measure Gregor himself had recommended years ago.
But the landing site was always the same—the north clearing, shielded from the compound’s main sightlines by a stand of old-growth spruce.
Only a handful of people knew about that clearing. Gregor. Ruben. The king’s personal guards.
And his advisors.
He’d shared his preliminary findings with Fergal in clipped, clinical terms while walking with him to view his father’s body, which had been brought over from the crime scene to prepare for the viewing and last rituals.
Gregor hadn’t softened the news. Fergal deserved the truth, and more importantly, Fergal needed the truth to survive what was coming.
The new king couldn’t afford the luxury of ignorance, not with enemies potentially sitting in his own council chamber.
Fergal had listened without interrupting, his face bloodless, his spine rigid. He’d looked at his father’s body for exactly twelve seconds, then turned and walked out of the room with a steadiness that would’ve fooled anyone who didn’t know him.
It didn’t fool Gregor. He’d seen the way Fergal’s hands had trembled at his sides. The way his throat had worked around a swallow that didn’t quite succeed. The way his eyes had gone glassy and distant for the span of a single heartbeat before the steel came back down.
He’d been holding it together all day. Sixteen hours of being king, of making decisions, issuing orders, receiving condolences from clan members who’d looked at him with expressions ranging from genuine grief to barely concealed calculation. He hadn’t cracked once. Not in public.
Gregor knocked on the door. It felt absurd since he’d let himself into this room a thousand times over the years to wake Fergal for early lessons, to check on him during illness, or to reinforce wards that didn’t need reinforcing because Gregor checked them compulsively.
But everything was different now. The rules that had governed their interactions—tutor and student, guard and prince, the careful architecture of professional distance—had been incinerated along with the world that created them.
“It’s open.”
Fergal’s voice was hoarse. Gregor entered and closed the door behind him, engaging the lock and activating the ward in a single practiced motion.
The room was dim. A single lamp burned on the nightstand, casting a pool of warm light that didn’t reach the corners.
Fergal sat on the edge of his bed, still in the clothes he’d worn that morning—the green sweater, the dark trousers, boots still on.
He hadn’t changed. Hadn’t showered. On the desk, an untouched tray of food sat beside a glass of water that looked like it hadn’t been touched either.
He was holding something in his hands. Gregor stepped closer and recognized it—a small leather journal, soft with age, its cover embossed with a pattern of interlocking Celtic knots.
Queen Ciara’s journal. Fergal had kept it in his nightstand since his mother’s death, and Gregor knew he read it on the nights when the compound felt too cold and too quiet and too empty.
Fergal looked up, and the expression on his face nearly buckled Gregor’s knees.
The tight control was still in place, the jaw clenched, the red-rimmed eyes dry through sheer force of will.
But the effort of not crying was written across every line of his face with a clarity that was worse than tears.
He looked exhausted. He looked young. He looked like the boy Gregor had pulled from the frozen lake, small and shaking and in desperate need of someone to hold him.
Gregor opened his mouth to deliver his security update on the perimeter status, guard rotations, and the surveillance on Duncan and Donovan. The words were lined up and ready, professional and precise, the same briefing he’d deliver to any commanding officer. What came out was, “Have you eaten?”
Fergal shook his head.
“You need to eat.”
“I know.” He didn’t move toward the tray.
Gregor crossed the room and sat on the bed beside him, close enough that their shoulders touched, close enough that the heat of Fergal’s body bled through both their sleeves, close enough that he could smell coffee and woodsmoke and something underneath that was purely Fergal.
“The perimeter is secure,” he said because the briefing needed to happen, even if his voice had gone quiet and rough.
“I’ve placed my own men on the royal wing.
Duncan and Donovan are under surveillance in their quarters.
They’ve already started telling anyone who’ll listen that it was dragon slayers. ”
Fergal’s laugh was a hollow, bitter thing. “Of course they have.”
“I’ve documented everything from the crime scene. When you’re ready, we’ll go through it together. Not tonight.”
Fergal nodded slowly. His thumb traced the Celtic knots on his mother’s journal in a repetitive motion that Gregor recognized as self-soothing. “He wasn’t a good king.”
Gregor said nothing. This wasn’t a moment that required his opinion.
“He wasn’t a good father either. He was selfish and stubborn and willfully blind, and he let his advisors run his clan into the ground while he drank and hunted and pretended everything was fine.
” Fergal’s voice was steady, almost clinical, as if he were presenting a legal argument rather than eulogizing his father.
“He let omegas get beaten. He let Duncan and Donovan take root like a cancer. He ignored every warning I gave him, and he looked at me like I was an inconvenience rather than his son.” His hands stilled on the journal.
“And I wanted him to be proud of me anyway. How pathetic is that?”
“It’s not pathetic. It’s human.”
Fergal turned his head. They were close enough that Gregor could see the exact moment the steel cracked.
Not a dramatic collapse. Just a fracture, hairline-thin, running through the composure Fergal had maintained for sixteen hours, and behind it, the raw, unprocessed grief of a man who had lost the last chance to fix something that had been broken his entire life.
“He never said he was proud of me.” Fergal’s voice was barely a whisper. “Not once. My mother said it all the time. She’d tell me every day, multiple times a day. But after she died, no one ever…” He stopped. Swallowed. “Is it stupid to grieve for something you never had?”
“No.” Gregor’s throat was tight. “That might be the worst kind of grief there is.”
The fracture widened. Fergal’s face crumpled—not all at once, but in stages, like a building losing its structural supports one by one. First, the jaw unclenched. Then the brow furrowed. Then the eyes, those sharp brown eyes that had been holding back a flood all day, overflowed.
He didn’t sob. The tears came silently, sliding down his cheeks and into his beard with a quietness that was somehow more heartbreaking than any sound could have been. His shoulders shook once, twice, then stilled as he fought for control.
Gregor pulled him in. His arms moved the way they had at the frozen lake—on instinct, driven by a force older and more powerful than discipline.
One arm around Fergal’s shoulders, the other hand cradling the back of his head, pulling him close until Fergal’s face was pressed against Gregor’s neck and his tears were hot against Gregor’s skin.
Fergal grabbed fistfuls of Gregor’s shirt and held on.
They stayed like that for a long time. Gregor didn’t count the minutes.
For possibly the first time in his life, he wasn’t tracking time, wasn’t calculating, wasn’t running scenarios in the back of his mind.
He was just here, holding Fergal while the grief poured out of him in waves, each one smaller than the last, until the shaking subsided and Fergal’s breathing evened into the deep, ragged rhythm of someone who had emptied himself of everything.
“I’m sorry,” Fergal murmured against his neck. “I told myself I wasn’t going to do this.”
“Shut up,” Gregor said with a gentleness that robbed the words of any sting.
The sound Fergal made might’ve been a laugh or another sob. Or maybe it was something in between that didn’t have a name. He didn’t let go of Gregor’s shirt.
“You should eat,” Gregor said after a while.
“I can’t.”
“Then sleep.”
“I can’t do that either.”
Gregor’s hand moved in slow circles on Fergal’s back, tracing patterns that had no meaning beyond the simple language of comfort. “Try.”
“Only if you stay.”