Chapter 36 Rhystan
Rhystan
My father's blade is six inches from Kess's throat when I shift.
No thought. No decision. Just the dragon exploding out of me with force that shatters the stone beneath my feet, jaws closing around my father's arm before the blade can fall.
Bone crunches.
He screams—a sound I've never heard him make, not in three hundred years of knowing him. The blessed blade clatters to the ground. I wrench my head sideways and throw him across the throne room, his body crashing through a pillar and into the far wall.
He doesn't stay down.
Of course he doesn't. He's Valdris Vhal'kar, the Dragon King who held his throne for five hundred years before passing it to me. Who watched his own father die and felt nothing but satisfaction. Who's killed more men than I can count and never lost a moment's sleep.
He shifts mid-rise, the change taking him between one heartbeat and the next. Crimson scales erupt across his body. Wings unfurl, tattered from our earlier battle but still functional. His jaws open wide, dragonfire building in his throat.
He's aiming at Kess.
I hit him before the fire can release.
We crash through the wall together, out into the courtyard, into the fading light of a sun that's nearly gone. The impact drives the breath from both of us. But I don't let go. Can't let go. If I give him an inch, he'll go back for her.
"She's an abomination," he snarls into my face, claws raking at my eyes. "Look what she's become. Look what you've let her become."
"She's my mate."
"She's a monster wearing your curse. You think that makes her yours?" He twists, gets his hind legs up, rakes them down my belly hard enough to spill blood. "She'll turn on you. The rage will consume her. Everything you love about her will drown in three centuries of divine punishment."
"You don't know her."
"I know the curse." He breaks free, gains distance, circles me in the blood-soaked courtyard.
Bodies everywhere—his priests, my guards, dragons fallen mid-shift.
"I've watched it destroy four generations of our family.
Your mother. Your grandfather. Everyone who gets too close to it dies screaming. "
"Then it ends with me."
"It ends with HER." He lunges again, jaws snapping. "Kill her now and the curse returns to you. The children die, yes, but you survive. The bloodline survives. Everything I built—"
"I don't want what you built."
I catch him mid-lunge. My claws sink into his shoulders, my weight bearing him down. He's weaker than he was an hour ago—blood loss and exhaustion taking their toll. I'm weaker too. But I'm fighting for something that matters.
He's just fighting to preserve a legacy of pain.
"You could have been different," I tell him, and my voice comes out dragon-rough, barely human. "You could have loved me. Could have tried to break this curse instead of worshipping it. Could have been a father instead of a king."
"I was always a king first." No regret in his voice. No apology. "That's what you never understood. The bloodline matters more than any individual. More than love. More than children. More than you."
"Then the bloodline ends here."
His eyes widen. "Rhystan—"
I close my jaws around his throat.
He struggles.
Claws at my face, my neck, anywhere he can reach. Opens wounds that will take weeks to heal. His tail whips against my flanks hard enough to crack ribs.
But I don't let go.
I think of Kess. Of the transformation wracking her body, the agony I felt through the bond as the curse poured into her. Of the children she just saved—our son freed from divine rage, our daughter no longer hunted by her own brother.
I think of my mother. Stepping between me and that omega girl during my first rut. Dying under my claws because she loved me too much to let me become a monster without trying to stop it.
I think of three hundred years of guilt. Of forty-seven dead omegas. Of carving memorial stones with my own bleeding hands because I needed to feel something that matched the pain inside me.
I think of a future where none of that gets passed on. Where my children grow up free. Where the curse ends here, in this courtyard, in this moment.
My jaws tighten.
His struggles weaken.
"You could have loved me," I say again, though he probably can't hear anymore. "That's all I ever wanted. For you to look at me and see your son instead of your curse."
His eyes find mine. Something in them—surprise, maybe. Or regret. Three hundred years too late for it to matter.
"I did," he manages. Blood bubbles from his throat, from around my teeth. "I did love you. I just couldn't—"
I bite down.
The crack of his neck echoes across the courtyard.
He goes limp.
I let him fall.
For a long moment, I don't move.
Just stand there in dragon form, blood dripping from my jaws, staring down at the body of my father. The man who raised me. Trained me. Blamed me for my mother's death and never let me forget it. The man who came here to kill the woman I love and the children she's carrying.
I should feel something. Grief, maybe. Or triumph. Or at least the sick satisfaction of finally ending a threat that's loomed over me for three centuries.
Instead I just feel empty.
I shift back to human. The change is harder than it should be—my body protesting, wounds screaming as they compress into smaller form. I stagger, nearly fall, catch myself on a pile of rubble that used to be part of my castle wall.
Kess.
I have to get back to Kess.
I turn toward the throne room. What's left of it—walls half-collapsed, ceiling gone, silver circle still glowing faintly in the growing dark. And there, in the center of it all, a figure that's only barely human anymore.
She's on her knees. Scales cover her arms, her shoulders, spread across her collarbone in patterns that catch the dying light. Her eyes are gold—fully gold, with slitted pupils that track my movement as I stumble toward her. Claws where her fingernails used to be. Teeth too sharp for a human mouth.
Transformed.
Changed.
Alive.
"Kess." Her name comes out broken. I drop to my knees in front of her, bloody hands reaching for her face. "Are you—the transfer—did it—"
"It worked." Her voice is strange—rougher, with harmonics underneath that resonate in my chest. "The twins are safe. Both of them. The curse is..." She presses a clawed hand to her chest. "Inside me now. Contained."
"You're alive."
"I'm alive."
The relief hits me so hard my vision blurs. Or maybe that's tears—I can't tell, can't separate anything from anything else right now. She's alive. The twins are safe. The curse is broken.
My father is dead in the courtyard behind me.
"Rhystan." Her gold eyes look past me, toward the body. "Your father—"
"Dead." I don't look away from her face. "He tried to kill you. While you were transforming. The blade was at your throat. I stopped him."
"You killed him."
"Yes."
I wait for horror. For disgust. For her to pull away from the man who committed patricide, who has his own father's blood still wet on his hands.
Instead she reaches up and cups my face with clawed hands, careful not to scratch.
"He would have killed me," she says quietly. "Killed our children. Killed everyone in this castle who stood between him and his precious legacy."
"Yes."
"And you stopped him."
"I chose you." The words come out fierce, absolute. "Over him. Over the kingdom. Over everything. That's not a choice I had to make—it's just what I am. What I've been since the first time you looked at me like I was worth saving."
She's quiet for a moment. The bond hums between us—wide open, nothing hidden, her exhaustion and relief and something warmer underneath tangling with my own.
"Thank you," she says finally. "For choosing me. For stopping him. For—" Her voice breaks. "For not lying about it after. For letting me see what you did instead of hiding it."
"No more hiding." I press my forehead to hers, feel the slight roughness of scales beginning to form along her hairline. "Whatever happens. Whatever it costs. You get the truth. Always."
"Always," she echoes.
We kneel there in the ruins of the throne room, blood-soaked and transformed and finally, finally free.
The sun sets.
The curse is broken.
And somewhere in the wreckage, something new begins.