The descent into the dungeons blurred into a hollow, nightmarish haze.
Finn moved as if untethered from himself, his body a vessel stripped of will, reduced to a thing being led. A thing being discarded.
The guards marched him down a spiraling, torch-lit staircase, deeper and deeper beneath the castle. With each step, the air thickened—damp, cloying, laced with the bite of mildew and rusting iron. Every breath tasted like decay. Water dripped somewhere in the dark, a slow, haunting beat, counting down the moments of his ruin.
How had it come to this?
He had known Darius would be displeased. But this was something else. The fury in the king’s voice, the vehemence of the accusations—it went beyond wrath, beyond punishment. Treason. Had he miscalculated that badly? Had Darius always been this unhinged, or had Finn simply been too blind to see it?
Boots scuffed against uneven stone as they reached the corridor, a narrow gauntlet of iron-barred cells, yawning dark mouths waiting to swallow him whole. A guard wrenched open one of the heavy doors, the screech of metal on stone cutting through the silence like a death knell.
“Inside, traitor.” The word hit harder than the shove that followed.
Finn stumbled forward, catching himself against the damp, unyielding wall. The door crashed shut behind him with a brutal thud.
The lock turned.
And just like that, Sir Finnian, once one of Lunareth’s most trusted knights, was no one.
Finn slumped against the damp stone wall, his breath coming slow. His body still thrummed with the aftershocks of adrenaline, the phantom pulse of a battle already lost. Cold seeped through his shirt, slithering against his skin.
His mind would not still. He had failed.
Failed his mission. Failed his duty. Failed his king. And now…now he had failed Cedric and Gwenna as well.
How long before Darius sent others? How long before the king hunted them down, loosed his wolves upon them?
Finn clenched his fists. I should have seen this coming.
He had been too careful. Too restrained. He had thought he was choosing his words wisely, treading carefully through the storm of Darius’s rage. But he had miscalculated. If he had pressed harder, questioned more, he might have seen the truth buried beneath the king’s fury.
This was never about Gwenna.
It was about power. About control. About the dragon.
Cedric’s face flashed through his mind—not as a beast, but as a man. His golden-brown eyes warm with laughter. His lips parting in a breathless sigh.
A softness that Finn had not been meant to witness. A truth he had never been meant to hold.
His throat tightened. He shut his eyes against the ache hollowing out his heart, but it did nothing to dull it.
Hours bled past, marked only by the distant shuffle of boots, the slow, rhythmic drip of water. The cold deepened, burrowing into his bones. His muscles locked against the unyielding stone.
Still, his mind refused to be silent.
This will not be the end.
Finn’s jaw tightened. Somehow, some way, he would find a way out of this dungeon.
He had to. Because Gwenna and Cedric were in danger. And he would not let them face it alone.
Chapter Nineteen
The shrill ring of a contraption beside the bed jolted Gwenna awake, her heart lurching into her throat. She swore under her breath, scrubbing a hand down her face. Every single time. You’d think she’d get used to her own blasted invention by now, but no—it still startled her like a war horn at dawn.
With a groan, she swung her legs over the side of the bed, shaking off the remnants of uneasy dreams. The images clung to her mind, sticky as cobwebs: Cedric, trapped in his dragon form, surrounded by soldiers, their blades glinting in torchlight. She had screamed for him, fought to reach him, but her limbs had been made of lead, her voice swallowed by the night. And then…
She shook her head violently. No. It was just a dream. But the unease remained, burrowing deep in her gut like the embers of a dying fire.
