Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The message arrived at nine on a Tuesday evening, and Duff’s world shifted on its axis. Again.
He was sitting at Maeve’s kitchen table, cleaning his guns.
It was a ritual his father had taught him, and Duff found it soothing, each component disassembled, inspected, oiled, and then reassembled with care.
Their lives depended on the tools they maintained, his father had taught him, and Duff had listened, like he always did.
Maeve’s safe house in the Scottish Highlands had become his unofficial base of operations since his father’s passing, a converted farmhouse tucked into a valley so remote that the nearest neighbor was a sheep farmer three miles down a single-track road.
It was practical, defensible, and lonely.
Three qualities that pretty much defined Duff’s life these days.
Thomas and Henry were in the next room, arguing about football, as usual.
One was a Man City fan, the other supported Arsenal, so that made for plenty of heated discussions.
The two brothers had grown from eager recruits into competent, reliable operatives under Duff’s training.
They followed orders, asked few questions, and looked at Duff with a devotion that bordered on religious.
He appreciated their loyalty, but the weight that came with it made him uncomfortable.
The network had shrunk even more. Two more members had dropped out—old Padraig, whose joints could no longer handle the physical demands, and Seána, who’d simply stopped answering communications, like a radio signal weakening until nothing was left but static.
Duff had tried to reach her for weeks before accepting that she was gone.
Some days, Duff wondered if believing was the same thing as knowing.
His father had never seemed to struggle with the distinction.
For Ronan, belief and knowledge had been identical—two words for the same unshakable certainty.
But Duff had been finding, more and more often, that certainty required maintenance.
Like his guns, it needed regular cleaning, inspection, oiling. Left unattended, it corroded.
The ember in his chest still burned. It was always there, warm and steady behind his sternum, flaring when he tracked, when he sensed, when the Bás instinct whispered that something ancient and dangerous was near.
But some days—days like today, when he’d spent twelve hours chasing a lead that dissolved into nothing—the ember felt less like a flame and more like a habit.
He could still feel its heat, but he’d stopped being sure where the fire ended and the memory of fire began.
He pushed that thought aside and focused on the firing pin in his hands.
The Dragon Council was coming up in two months, rumored to be held in the Arctic Circle of Sweden this time, and he intended to be there to see if he could take out at least one of the attending dragons, though preferably more.
And the ones going wouldn’t be just any dragons but those in leadership positions, maybe even kings.
He’d need more intel for sure, but he was working on it.
Would the Doyles attend? They’d popped back up on the radar after two centuries of being gone, and Duff had been shocked to his core.
His father had considered the clan extinct, even if no one had known who’d taken them out.
They had to be since no one had even heard from them in so long… and now they were back. Strange.
Maeve appeared in the doorway with a mug of tea in one hand and her phone in the other, interrupting his thoughts. “Message from Cormac. Encrypted channel.”
Duff set down the firing pin and took the phone. The message was brief, which was Cormac’s style, functional as a bullet.
Cormac
Fitzgerald King Lorcan and Prince Brian confirmed killed. Professional hit. Clean. Our friends send their congratulations.
Duff read it twice. Then a third time.
“Lads,” he called, and something in his voice brought Thomas and Henry to the kitchen doorway in seconds, the football argument forgotten. “The Fitzgerald king is dead. He and his brother both.”
The reaction was immediate. Thomas let out a whoop and slammed his fist against the doorframe. Henry grabbed his brother and shook him, both of them grinning like boys who’d just won a cup final. “Two royals! Duff, that’s brilliant!”
It was brilliant. The biggest dragon kills in decades, if not a whole century.
The king and a prince of one of the four remaining clans, taken out in a single operation.
This was the kind of victory that could revitalize the movement, remind the world—their small, shrinking world—that the cause was still alive and capable of striking at the heart of the enemy.
Duff said the right things. He nodded. Accepted their congratulations. Raised a glass of Maeve’s whiskey when Henry poured one for each of them. “To the cause,” Henry said, his eyes shining.
“To the cause,” Duff repeated, and the whiskey burned going down, matching the burn in his chest.
But something wasn’t right.
The splinter had been there since his father’s funeral, that small, persistent discomfort lodged beneath the surface of his certainty, and it drove itself deeper now as the celebration continued around him.
He smiled when they toasted. He told stories about his father’s kills when they asked.
He played the role of leader, keeper of the flame, the last true Bás, and he did it well enough that neither Thomas nor Henry noticed the questions multiplying behind his eyes.
Who made this kill?
Duff knew every active cell in the network.
His father had maintained contacts within every group, and since taking over, Duff had worked to consolidate resources and coordinate operations.
There was no cell operating anywhere near the Fitzgerald compound in northern Canada. None. He would’ve known.
He messaged Cormac.
Duff
Who carried out the hit?
Cormac
Friends of the cause. They prefer anonymity. Same as before.
Same as before. The same language Cormac had used about the well-dressed stranger at the funeral. The man with the expensive overcoat and the cream-colored envelope who’d slipped through the gathering like smoke and vanished without a word to anyone but Cormac.
And the same pattern as the attack on the Hightower pack, though that one had been a disaster.
That one still bothered him, even a year later.
A group of men had hit a small cluster of Doyle dragons living with the well-organized Hightower pack, a group of wolf shifters.
It hadn’t gone well. The wolves and the dragons had fought hard, and then the Murphys had come to their rescue—an event that raised all kinds of questions in itself.
All but one of the attackers had been killed, and the one who’d gotten away had never surfaced again.
They’d been men who’d identified as dragon slayers but whom Duff had never heard of, never authorized, never even known existed.
They’d been well-informed because Duff hadn’t had a clue that the Doyle dragons had come out of their centuries-long hiding.
But they hadn’t been prepared for the force of the resistance, especially with the Murphys joining the fight.
When news of the attack had reached Duff through the network’s channels, he’d been alarmed. Yes, he’d been thrilled there had been an attack, even more thrilled that the Doyle dragons were out in the open, but what the fuck was going on?
He’d investigated but had hit nothing but dead ends. Every channel, every contact, every thread he pulled led nowhere. No names, no affiliations, no trail. At the time, Duff had told himself it was a rogue cell. Lone wolves operating independently. It happened sometimes in decentralized movements.
But now, sitting in Maeve’s kitchen with the Fitzgerald report glowing on the phone screen, the Hightower attack and this assassination aligned like crosshairs on a scope.
Both had been carried out by unknown operatives with professional-grade resources.
Both had involved intelligence that exceeded anything the slayer network could have gathered independently.
Both were funded or coordinated by someone who preferred to remain anonymous.
Someone who sent cream-colored envelopes and wore overcoats too expensive for an Irish fishing village.
One anomaly was a coincidence. Two was suspicious. Three data points made a pattern.
The celebration continued around him. Thomas was describing what he’d do if he ever faced a dragon in combat, his gestures growing wilder with each glass of whiskey.
Henry was quieter but no less fervent, already discussing potential next targets.
Maeve watched them from the kitchen doorway with an expression Duff couldn’t read, though he thought he caught something sad in it.
The next morning, Cormac sent a message with additional intelligence about the Fitzgerald hit.
The kills were clean and precise. Ambush-style, executed during what should’ve been a routine, heavily guarded journey.
The attackers had known the Fitzgeralds’ travel route, their security protocols, their exact schedule.
Duff studied the details, and what he saw only tightened the knot in his stomach.
It hadn’t been a lucky encounter or an opportunistic strike, but a planned execution.
The level of intelligence required for this operation was extraordinary.
Someone with inside knowledge of the Fitzgerald clan had provided the tactical information.
No external surveillance, however sophisticated, could’ve produced this level of detail.
This came from someone close to the Fitzgeralds, from someone who had dealings with the Fitzgeralds.
A dragon. The intelligence came from a dragon.