Chapter 11 #2
The thought wasn’t new. It had been circling since his father’s funeral, growing larger with each orbit, and Duff was running out of sky to push it into.
Dragons providing intelligence about dragons.
Dragons funding operations against dragons.
Dragons using the slayer network—his network, his father’s legacy—as a weapon against their own kind.
If that was true, if their anonymous benefactor was a dragon using them as hired killers, then the sacred mission wasn’t sacred at all. It was mercenary work—contract killing dressed up in the language of holy purpose.
He shared none of these observations with Thomas and Henry. They were still riding the high, already planning, already dreaming of the next victory. Their certainty was pure and uncomplicated, exactly as Duff’s had been once upon a time. He envied them. He also feared for them.
Over the following weeks, three more members of the network went dark.
Duff tried every channel, every backup protocol, every emergency contact his father had established.
Nothing. They’d simply vanished, and a cold dread was settling into Duff’s bones that had nothing to do with the Scottish winter.
Cormac offered explanations that were reasonable on the surface.
People moved on. Lost faith. Decided the fight wasn’t worth the risk.
It happened. The cause was old and the enemy was invisible, and not everyone had the constitution to spend their life hunting shadows.
All true, yet none of those explanations satisfied Duff.
He was sitting at the kitchen table late one evening, staring at a map on his laptop that had colored markers representing network members—too many of them now crossed out—when Maeve appeared with two mugs of tea and set one in front of him without asking.
“You’ll wear a hole through that screen with your eyes,” she said, settling into the chair across from him.
“I’m trying to make sense of it.”
“The vanishings?”
He looked up. Maeve’s face was calm, but her eyes—sharp and dark beneath a fringe of gray hair—held something he hadn’t expected. “You’ve noticed.”
“Hard not to.” She wrapped both hands around her mug, the steam curling between her fingers.
“Padraig, I understood. The man could barely climb stairs. And Seána was always more of a sympathizer than a soldier. But Liam? Aoife? Conn?” She shook her head slowly.
“Conn took that oath with tears streaming down his face. You don’t walk away from something you wept over. ”
Duff’s throat tightened. He’d been thinking the same thing, but hearing it from Maeve—steady, unshakable Maeve, who’d been running safe houses since before Duff was born—made it harder to dismiss. “Cormac says they lost faith.”
“Cormac says a lot of things.” The words were mild, but something underneath them was not. Maeve took a sip of tea, watching Duff over the rim. “Your father trusted Cormac completely. I never quite managed it.”
That startled him. “You never said anything.”
“Wasn’t my place. Ronan made his own choices about who to trust, and questioning them would’ve been questioning him.” She set her mug down. “But Ronan’s gone, and you’re not your father, Duff. You see things he didn’t. You always have.”
The ember pulsed behind his sternum. Duff wasn’t sure if it was warming him or warning him. “What things?”
“The money, for one.” Maeve’s voice dropped, though there was no one to overhear. Thomas and Henry had gone to bed an hour ago. “Those envelopes Cormac gets. Your father never questioned where they came from. I always wondered if he should have.”
“You think the money is dirty?”
“Money that arrives in cream-colored envelopes from men in expensive overcoats who refuse to give their names is money that comes with strings. Whether those strings are dirty or not depends on who’s holding the other end.” She paused. “And I think you’ve been wondering the same thing.”
He had. For four years, he’d been circling that question without letting himself land on it. Hearing Maeve voice it—calmly, without drama, like she was discussing the weather—somehow made it both more real and more manageable. He wasn’t alone in his doubt.
“There’s something else,” Duff said. He pulled up the Fitzgerald report and turned his screen so Maeve could read it.
“The hit on the Fitzgerald royals. Professional job, inside intelligence, same anonymous source. And last year, the Hightower attack was done by men calling themselves dragon slayers, but I’d never heard of them. ”
Maeve read the report slowly, her expression unchanging. When she finished, she folded her hands on the table. “That’s a pattern, love.”
“I know.”
“A pattern that looks a lot like someone’s been using us.”
The word us hit harder than Duff expected.
Not him. Not the network. Us. Personal and collective all at once.
“The intelligence is coming from a dragon,” Duff said.
He’d never spoken the words aloud before.
They tasted like bile. “It has to be. No one else would have this level of detail about the Fitzgeralds’ movements.
The security protocols, the travel routes—that’s inside knowledge. ”
Maeve didn’t flinch. She held his gaze like a woman who’d been waiting a long time for someone to say what she’d already been thinking. “Then the question is: why would a dragon want other dragons dead?”
The exact question that had been haunting Duff’s sleepless nights, spoken in Maeve’s soft Highland accent, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to wonder. “Power, maybe. Territory. Politics.”
“Politics,” Maeve repeated. “You know what politics means, don’t you? It means they’re not all the same. It means they have factions and disagreements and competing interests, just like anyone else.”
Duff stiffened. “They’re not like anyone else. They’re—”
“The Fitzgerald king who just died had a son, only twenty-six in human years.” Maeve cut him off gently.
“He lost his older brother decennia ago in some accident, and now his father and uncle in one stroke.” She paused, letting the words settle.
“That’s a boy who’s lost his entire family, Duff. Whatever else he is, he’s that.”
“He’s a dragon.”
“Aye, he’s a dragon. And he’s a boy who’s just been made king of a clan that someone is systematically dismantling.” She tilted her head. “Doesn’t that seem like the kind of thing we should understand before we celebrate?”
Duff opened his mouth. Closed it. The ember flared hot, defensive, as if his body was trying to reject what his mind was already processing. A prince who had become a king and was now alone, sitting on a throne built from the bodies of his murdered family.
“I’m not saying they’re good,” Maeve said quietly, reading his face the way she’d always been able to, even when he was a child sitting at this same table with skinned knees and a bruised ego.
“I’m saying we should know what we’re killing, and why, and for whom.
Your father believed knowing was the same as believing.
But you’ve always known the difference, even when you didn’t want to. ”
She picked up her mug, took a long sip, and stood. “Don’t stay up too late, love. The map will still be there in the morning.”
She squeezed his shoulder as she passed, a brief, warm pressure that reminded him so sharply of his mother for a moment that his eyes burned.
Then she was gone, and Duff was alone with his tea and his map.
He sat for a long time. The Highland wind battered the farmhouse walls, rattling the windows in their frames.
The colored markers on the map stared back at him—nine remaining, scattered across a continent, held together by an oath that felt thinner every day.
Maeve was right. About the money. About the pattern. About the young king sitting alone on a stolen throne. She was right, and Duff had known it for longer than he wanted to admit, and knowing didn’t help because it only led to more questions he wasn’t ready to answer.
But he was a hunter. And hunters didn’t stop tracking just because they were afraid of what they’d find.