Two priests dive at me while I'm recovering. Their dragons are smaller, faster, bred for harassment rather than combat.Their weapons make up the difference. Holy fire scores my back. A blessed blade opens my shoulder to the bone.
I kill one of the dragons. Snap its neck with a twist that sends the priest tumbling toward the ground. The other retreats before I can reach it.
But the damage is done. I'm bleeding from a dozen wounds now, some shallow, some deep, all burning with that particular agony of consecrated steel.
My father slams into me from above.
His weight drives me toward the castle roof. I twist at the last moment, take the impact on my shoulder instead of my spine, but stone shatters beneath us anyway. We crash through into a corridor, through a wall, into what used to be a sitting room and is now rubble and dragonfire.
"You could have been great." He pins me beneath him, claws sinking into the wounds the blessed weapons opened. "Could have ruled for another three centuries. Had heirs who carried the bloodline forward with pride."
"My heirs will carry something better." I get my hind legs up, drive them into his belly. "Freedom."
He staggers back. I gain my feet. We circle each other in the ruins of my castle, both bleeding, both exhausted, neither willing to yield.
"She's going to die," he snarls. "Your contaminated omega. The ritual will tear her apart and you'll have nothing—no mate, no children, no kingdom. Just the ashes of everything you destroyed for a woman who was already dead."
The words hit harder than his claws.
Because part of me fears he's right. Part of me is terrified that Kess won't survive, that I'm fighting for nothing, that I'll descend from this sky to find her broken in the silver circle with our children dead inside her.
The fear nearly costs me my throat.
His jaws snap closed an inch from my neck—would have killed me if I hadn't twisted at the last moment. His teeth score a line across my scales instead, shallow but bleeding.
"Fight back properly," he growls. "Or this ends now."
So I fight back properly.
We tear each other apart for what feels like hours.
Through the castle, through the sky, through courtyards full of the dead and dying. My guards are falling—good men, loyal, utterly outmatched by war dragons and blessed weapons. I see Corvith go down with a spear through his thigh, see stable hands dragged from hiding and cut down, see the home I've known for three centuries turned into a slaughterhouse.
And still my father keeps coming.
He's wounded too—I've torn chunks from his hide, broken one of his horns, left claw marks across his face that will scar even with dragon healing. But he's driven by something beyond pain. Righteousness, maybe. Or just the desperate need to preserve what he's spent his whole life building.
I understand that need. I just can't let it win.
We crash together again over the throne room. I'm trying to keep him away from Kess, from the ritual, from everything that matters. He's trying to get past me. To end this the quick way—kill the omega, kill the children, let the curse pass to the next generation the way it's always done.
I won't let him.
Ican'tlet him.
A blessed arrow takes me in the wing—fired from somewhere I didn't see, buried deep in the membrane. The pain is blinding. I falter, lose altitude, and my father is on me before I can recover.
His claws sink into my chest. His weight bears me down toward the castle roof. His jaws open wide, aiming for my throat,and I know with cold certainty that this is how it ends. Three hundred years of guilt and grief and desperate hoping, and I'm going to die ten feet from the woman I love while she?—
The bondignites.
Not pain. Not fear. Something else—something ancient and powerful, words in a language that died before I was cursed, resonating through the connection between Kess and me like a bell being struck.
She's started the ritual.
Power floods through me. Not mine—hers. The curse recognizing its own, responding to the call of blood and magic and three centuries of divine punishment about to change hands.
My father feels it too. His eyes go wide. His grip loosens just slightly.
