Chapter 29
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The wall between their cells was thin enough to talk through but thick enough to make every word feel like an effort, like pushing sound through water.
Duff sat on the floor with his back against the plaster, his knees drawn up, his head resting against the wall where he could feel the faint vibration of Fergal’s voice when the king spoke.
King. A dragon king. And Duff was sitting here talking to him like they were mates at a pub, sharing war stories over a pint. His father would’ve had a stroke.
Then again, his father had believed the lies just as completely as Duff had, and look where that had gotten all of them.
“Tell me about the email,” Duff said. They’d been talking for what he estimated was an hour, trading pieces of the puzzle back and forth through the wall, each revelation slotting into place with the sickening precision of a mechanism that had been running for decades without either of them seeing the gears.
“It arrived three days after the assassination,” Fergal said.
His voice was steady, but Duff had learned enough about the man in the past few hours to recognize the control it took to keep it that way.
“Sent to the clan’s official diplomatic address.
It claimed responsibility for the murders and promised more attacks. And it was signed with your name.”
Duff closed his eyes. Gregor had told him about the email during their meeting at the pack’s land weeks ago.
But hearing it from Fergal, from the son who had received the message, who had read those words while still reeling from his father’s death, was different.
That made it personal in a way Gregor’s measured briefing hadn’t. “What did it say exactly?”
Fergal recited it from memory—of course he did, the man was a lawyer with a mind like a steel trap, Duff had discovered—and Duff listened to his own name being used to taunt a grieving son about his murdered father, and something inside him that had been cracking for two years finally shattered.
“By the way, you’re welcome for killing your uncle as well,’” Fergal quoted, his voice flat like someone reciting something they’d read too many times. “‘We’re pretty sure he would’ve taken the throne otherwise instead of you.’”
“Fuck, that’s cruel.” Duff’s voice came out rougher than he intended.
Silence from the other side. Then, carefully, “I’m not telling you this to hurt you.”
“I know. And I needed to hear it. I just—” He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, a gesture that did nothing to stop the burning.
“That’s not how I write. That’s not how any of us write.
The tone is wrong, the language is wrong, the whole thing reads like someone performing the role of dragon slayer rather than being one. ”
“That’s exactly what Gregor said.”
“Your commander is a smart man.”
“He is.” Something shifted in Fergal’s voice—a warmth that crept in despite the circumstances, involuntary and immediate, like a reflex. The warmth of a man talking about someone he loved. “He’s also the one who figured out the Murphy connection to your funding.”
“I know. He told me.” Duff lowered his hands and stared at the ceiling of his cell.
Water-stained plaster, a single bare bulb that buzzed faintly, faded wallpaper peeling at the seams. “I sat across from him at a table in the sunshine, and he looked me in the eye and told me that the people who funded my organization were the same people who destroyed it. And I believed him because—” He stopped.
“Because?”
“Because he reminded me of someone. The way he holds himself. The way he tells you the truth, even when it’s the last thing you want to hear.
” Duff swallowed. “I had someone like that. Her name was Maeve. She ran one of our safe houses. She was the one who first made me question everything—the money, the anonymous donors, the operations that went wrong too often to be bad luck.”
“What happened to her?”
“They took her. The same way they took all the others—one by one, quietly, until I was the only one left.” His jaw clenched. “I found her kitchen cold. Her tea had mold growing on it. Her boots were still by the door.”
The silence from Fergal’s side lasted longer this time. When he spoke, his voice was rough. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry for me. Be sorry for her.” Duff pressed his palm flat against the wall between them. “She deserved better. They all did. And the men who killed them are on the other side of that door, walking around like they own the world.”
“They think they do.”
“Then it’s time someone taught them otherwise.”
The conversation trailed into silence—not the empty kind but the productive kind, both of them processing, integrating, filing away the pieces for later assembly. Duff heard Fergal shift on his cot, the creak of a thin mattress, a slow exhale.
“Get some rest,” Fergal said. “They’ll come for us eventually, and we should be sharp when they do.”
“Agreed.”
He heard Fergal settle and marveled at the man’s ability to find rest under these conditions.
Discipline, probably. The kind that came from months of running a kingdom while enemies sat in your own council chamber, smiling at you with faces you couldn’t trust. You learned to sleep when you could because the alternative was collapse.
Duff couldn’t sleep. He sat in the dark—they’d killed the overhead bulb sometime in the last hour, leaving only the thin light from the hallway seeping under the door—and let the full weight of everything settle onto his shoulders.
Five years. That was how long he’d been carrying the doubt, ever since his father’s funeral when the man in the expensive overcoat had slipped Cormac that cream-colored envelope and something in Duff’s gut had whispered, “Wrong.” Five years of questions multiplying faster than answers, of watching his network shrink, of feeling the ember in his chest gutter and flare and gutter again as the foundations of his belief system eroded beneath him.
And now he was here, locked in a cell by the very people who had been pulling his strings for god knew how long, sitting next to a dragon king who’d lost his father and uncle to the same conspiracy that had taken Maeve and Thomas and Henry and Cormac and all the rest.
The irony was so thick he could choke on it.
He’d devoted his life to killing dragons.
He’d taken the oath at his father’s grave with tears on his face and absolute conviction in his heart.
He’d trained two young men and watched them die—not an honorable death, not at the hands of dragons in battle, but at the hands of the puppet masters who’d been using dragon slayers as expendable assets in their own power games.
His people hadn’t died fighting the enemy. They’d died because they’d become inconvenient to their handlers.
Maeve’s voice, soft and Highland-warm: We should know what we’re killing, and why, and for whom.
He knew now. He knew the whom—the Murphy alphas, working with Cladhaire, using the dragon-slayer network as a weapon and a scapegoat.
He knew the why—power, control, the systematic elimination of anyone who threatened their dominance.
And he knew the what—not the righteous destruction of an evil species, but the murder of specific people with families and names and lives, killed not because they were dragons but because they were in the way.
Fergal was right. The Murphys had been playing both of them for a very long time.
The ember in his chest burned. Not the feeble, guttering flame of the Swedish wilderness, not the hollow heat of catching Rhene in a trap he hadn’t believed in. This was something different—hotter, sharper, fueled not by sacred purpose but by something more fundamental.
Rage.
The Murphys had killed his people. Had used his name to cover their crimes.
Had funded his organization with one hand and strangled it with the other, playing both sides of a war they’d manufactured for their own benefit.
And now they’d put him in a cell and taken his weapons and thought that was enough to neutralize him.
They didn’t know Duff Bás. Not really. They knew the weapon they’d created—the blunt instrument, the useful idiot, the last dragon slayer dancing on strings he couldn’t see.
They didn’t know the man Maeve had helped shape with her questions and her tea and her sharp dark eyes.
The man who’d gone to Sweden not for the oath but for the truth.
The man who’d sat across from Gregor and felt the ground shift beneath his certainties and chosen to keep standing anyway.
That man was dangerous in ways the Murphys couldn’t predict because they’d never bothered to look past the label they’d stuck on him.
He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes.
Out of habit—the same habit that had governed his mornings and evenings for as long as he could remember—he murmured the words his father had taught him.
The protection prayers. The Irish blessings that every Bás recited upon waking and before sleeping. They were as automatic as breathing.
“Go gcosnaí na déithe an teach seo.” May the gods protect this house.
“Go gcosnaí siad mo chorp.” May they protect my body.
“Go gcosnaí siad m’anam.” May they protect my soul.
“Go gcoinní siad an dorchadas amach.” May they keep the darkness out.
The words flowed from him in a whisper, and as they always did, they settled something inside him—a calming, a centering, a subtle shift in the quality of the air around him that he’d always attributed to the comfort of ritual.