“I’m going to finish it, Da.”
His voice sounded strange in the silence. Raw. Smaller than he’d expected.
“Every last one of them. I’ll find them whenever they set foot outside their compounds, and I’ll end them. The way you would have. The way your father would have. All the way back to the first Duff. I won’t let the line end with me. I won’t let it mean nothing.”
The ember in his chest burned hot. Hotter than usual. He pressed his palm flat against his sternum—the same spot where his father had placed his hand all those years ago—and felt it pulse like a second heartbeat.
Then Duff stood. He brushed the mud from his knees and straightened his shoulders, eyes forward. Always forward. Looking back wasn’t in the Bás blood.
He walked away from the grave and into the darkness.
He was thirty-three years old. He was the last of his line. He knew exactly who he was and what his life was for, and the fire in his chest would burn until there were no more dragons left in this world.
He was certain of it.
CHAPTER ONE
Four Years Later
A hundred-and-eighty-six should not look this young.
Fergal leaned in, studying his reflection with critical intensity. The beard was coming in nicely—finally—after years of what Gregor had diplomatically referred to as “an ambitious endeavor” and what his father had labeled “a patchy disgrace.” But it had filled in now, close-cropped and dark against his jaw, and it did make him look older.
But still notold enough.
He’d hoped his years away at university—a highly regarded human one, where none of the humans had ever known a dragon walked among them—would make him age, but alas. Here he was after six years of studying in Boston with only short visits home, and he looked exactly the same as before.
Nothing about him was regal, and everyone seemed to agree with his own assessment. They all whispered about him behind his back, about the boy who should’ve been the spare but was now the crown prince.
Fuck them. Fergal would show every last one of them what he could do.
He ran his fingers through his hair and gave up on it in the same breath. The black waves had a mind of their own, and no amount of wrestling would tame them into anything resembling respectability. He’d tried once, slicking it back with some product he’d ordered online, and Gregor had stared at him for three full seconds before asking, with the driest possible delivery, whether he’d lost a bet.
So the hair stayed wild. At least it was consistent. Unlike Fergal’s heartbeat, which had developed the deeply inconvenient habit of losing its rhythm whenever a certain silver-haired tutor slash royal guard walked into the room. When Fergal had returned home a few weeks prior, Gregor had started tutoring him again, preparing him for the royal duties he’d have to take on at some point—though his father, King Lorcan of the Fitzgeralds, had made clear he had no intentions of stepping down any time soon.
And he shouldn’t, if only because he was still relatively young and in excellent health, but the way he’d said it had made clear it was also a statement about his lack of confidence in Fergal’s abilities. Gregor seemed to be the only one who had at least some measure of faith in Fergal…which brought him right back to the topic of the silver-haired tutor.
Fergal pressed his forehead against the cold mirror and groaned.
This was getting ridiculous. He was the prince of the Fitzgerald clan, a man with a law degree and an IQ that put most in his clan to shame, yet here he was, standing in his bedroom, agonizing over his appearance like some lovesick teenager.
Then again, by dragon standards, he practicallywasa teenager, even if in human years, he’d reached the ripe age of twenty-five. But in reality, he felt much, much older, even if his body had only recently decided to catch up with his mind. The last few years had been…a lot. Shoulders broadening, jawsharpening, muscles filling in where there had been nothing but angles before. He’d shot up three inches in what felt like a single summer, and his voice had settled into a register that no longer cracked at inopportune moments.
He looked like a man now. Somewhat.
The question was whether Gregor had noticed.
Probably not, Fergal thought sourly as he pulled on a dark-green sweater that his valet had told him brought out his eyes. Gregor had the observational skills of a hawk when it came to security threats, but the awareness of a brick wall about anything connected to feelings.
No, that wasn’t entirely fair. Gregor noticed everything. That was what made him so good at his job as a royal guard and so maddeningly impossible to read. The man cataloged every detail, filed it away behind those calm gray eyes, and gave nothing back. Nothing Fergal could grab onto, anyway. Nothing he could use as evidence that Gregor felt it too.
Except…
Fergal straightened. Except for the time last month when he’d come in from a winter run, flushed and sweating despite the cold, and had pulled his shirt over his head in the hallway without thinking. Gregor had been coming around the corner, and for one unguarded second—barely a heartbeat—his eyes had dropped. Not to Fergal’s face. Lower.
Then the mask had slammed back into place so fast that Fergal might’ve imagined it. But he hadn’t. He was sure of it.
Almost sure.
