The conversation trailed into silence—not the empty kind but the productive kind, both of them processing, integrating, filingaway 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 thehands 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 goneto 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.
But tonight, in this cell, stripped of everything familiar, the ritual felt different. The words seemed to resonate against the walls, humming at a frequency just below hearing. The air warmed—barely, almost imperceptibly, but Duff had spent his life calibrating his senses to detect the faintest signals, and the change was real. The cold that had been seeping through the floor into his bones receded slightly. The oppressive weight of the magical dampening eased a fraction, as if something inside him had pushed back against it.
They’re not prayers. They’re protective spells. It’s magic you’re using.
Gregor’s words, delivered with the flat certainty of a man who had recognized something Duff couldn’t see. Because Gregor had been a Murphy. Gregor had grown up surrounded by dragon magic. And Gregor had listened to Duff recite those “prayers” and had gone pale because he’d heard them for what they actually were.
Duff opened his eyes and looked at his hands. The same hands that had strung tripwires and cleaned guns and carried his father’s hunting knife. Were these the hands of a dragon slayer? Or were they something else, something his father hadn’t known, or hadn’t wanted to know, or had known and kept secret behind the same wall of certainty that Duff was only now learning to see through?
The question was too big for tonight. He filed it away and focused on what he could control.
They would come for him. The Murphys would want to know why he’d been there in the first place, why he’d followed Fergal, whether anyone in the pack knew where they were, and whether Duff was a threat or merely an inconvenience. And when they came, Duff would give them exactly what they expected to see—the blunt instrument, the useful idiot, the simpleminded slayer too angry and too stupid to be dangerous.
He’d learned performance from the best. He’d spent years playing the role of the righteous hunter, the sacred warrior, the last of a noble line. How hard could it be to play one more part?
