Requires further investigation: Fergal had a suspicion about the actual reason for his kidnapping. Not evidence—not yet—but his instincts were screaming at him that there was a reasonthey’d taken him and not, say, Erwan or another Doyle dragon. He intended to find out more as soon as possible.
“They’ll come for me next,” Fergal said through the wall. “When they do, I need you to listen. Whatever you can hear through these walls, remember it.”
“I always listen,” Duff said. “Hunter’s habit.”
“Good. Because I’m going to make them talk, and they’re going to say more than they intend to.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I’ve faced them before, and their weakness is their arrogance. They think they’re the smartest men in every room. They’re not.”
The footsteps came two hours later, the click of dress shoes on wooden floors. Kerry then. The man dressed for every occasion as if he were attending a board meeting, even when the occasion was imprisoning a king in a farmhouse.
The door opened. Two guards flanked Kerry, both large, both armed, both wearing the blank expressions of men who’d been trained to follow orders without questioning them. Behind them, Alistair’s broad frame filled the corridor.
“King Fergal.” Kerry’s smile was exactly as Fergal remembered from the Dragon Council—sleek, practiced, never reaching his eyes. “I trust you’ve been comfortable.”
“The accommodations are lacking. I’d leave a negative review, but I seem to have misplaced my phone.”
Kerry’s smile thinned by a fraction. Good. The man enjoyed being in control but couldn’t stand being mocked. Fergal had noticed that weakness at the Council, watching Kerry’s composure crack every time Gregor or Fergal landed a verbal blow. Ego was a vulnerability, and Kerry’s ego was the size of the compound.
“Walk with me,” Kerry said in a tone that wasn’t a request.
Well, that meant Duff wouldn’t be able to listen in. Fuck.
They escorted him through the farmhouse, and while walking, Fergal took in everything. A central hallway, doors on both sides—some open but most closed. A kitchen where two omegas worked in silence, their eyes downcast like people who’d learned that being invisible was a survival strategy. A staircase leading up, guards posted at the bottom. Windows that showed the same flat, scrubby landscape he’d observed from his cell.
The room they brought him to had once been a dining room, judging by the proportions and the faded rectangular patch on the wall where a painting or mirror had hung. Now it contained a long table, several chairs, and the collected leadership of a clan that refused to acknowledge its demise.
Kerry took the head of the table. Alistair stood by the door. And at the far end, in chairs that had been positioned to suggest authority but only achieved a kind of shabby defiance, sat Cladhaire and Baoth.
Fergal hadn’t seen them since the Dragon Council, where they’d been publicly stripped of everything—their clan, their castle, their power, their legitimacy. They’d looked diminished then, two old men watching their world collapse. They looked worse now. Cladhaire’s face was gaunt, his eyes sunken, his hands—resting on the table with a deliberate casualness that didn’t quite mask their tremor—spotted with age. Baoth was a shadow beside him, smaller than Fergal remembered, his expression bitter.
These were the men who had murdered their own father. Who had probably killed their uncle and had definitely tried to murder their own son/nephew. Who had used dark magic to imprison a queen, torture a librarian, and terrorize their own clan into submission for two centuries. And now they sat at the end of someone else’s table, in someone else’s compound, clinging to the remnants of authority they’d forfeited through every conceivable violation of the Code.
Fergal felt nothing for them but contempt.
“Sit,” Kerry said, gesturing to a chair at the center of the table that was positioned, Fergal noted, so he’d be flanked on all sides. A classic interrogation setup. Kerry to his left, Alistair behind him, Cladhaire and Baoth at the far end. Nowhere to look that didn’t include an enemy.
Fergal sat. He crossed one leg over the other, leaned back, and adopted the expression of mild academic interest that had served him so well at the Council—the look of a man who was here to observe rather than to be observed.
“Let’s dispense with the posturing,” Kerry said, sliding a folder across the table. “We’ve prepared a set of demands that will be communicated to your allies.”
Fergal opened the folder. Four demands, neatly typed, precisely worded. He had to hold the paper a little farther away to be able to read it without his glasses, but he managed.
Erwan Doyle renounces his claim to the Doyle throne and cedes leadership to King Cladhaire.
All omegas who left the Murphy and O’Connor clans are returned to their original clans.
