“You’re not getting past me,” Cladhaire rasped.
Gregor didn’t slow down. He shifted his weight, preparing to go through both of them with the same brutal efficiency he’d used on every other obstacle in this building, when a hand landed on his shoulder.
Erwan. The White Dragon had followed him inside, and the power that radiated from him in the narrow corridor was almost unbearable—a heat and a light that pressed against the walls and made the dark magic in the air recoil like a living thing. Then Lidon stepped up beside him, still in that massive wolf form, and Cladhaire and Baoth actually did take a step back.
“Go,” Erwan said. His eyes were locked on his father and uncle. “They’re mine.”
Two words. A lifetime of pain and betrayal and unfinished business compressed into those simple words.
Gregor met Erwan’s eyes for one heartbeat. The moment was too vast for words, so he didn’t try. He just nodded and moved.
Behind him, he heard Erwan’s voice, quiet and immovable, “Hello, Father.”
Then Gregor was past them, in the corridor, at the door. The mate bond was a roar now, so loud it drowned out everything—the sounds of combat above, Erwan’s confrontation behind him, the pain in his ribs and his hands and his heart. Everything reduced to this door and what was behind it.
He hit it with everything he had. Dragon strength, centuries of combat power, the accumulated fury and terror and love of a man who had been separated from his mate for days that had felt like centuries. The magical seal resisted for a fraction of a second, then cracked, then shattered, and the door broke inward.
The cell was small. Bare walls, bare floor, a cot, a bucket. A window with magical sealing that let in gray morning light.
And Fergal.
Standing. Not cowering, not collapsed, not broken. Standing in the center of the cell in bare feet and Gregor’s shirt, his dark hair tangled, his face pale and thin, his brown eyes sharp and clear, looking at Gregor with an expression that contained no surprise at all.
As if he’d known. As if he’d never doubted, not for one single second, that Gregor would come.
The mate bond slammed back full force like a dam shattering, and the flood of connection—emotion, awareness, the overwhelming sensation of two halves of a single soul rejoining after being torn apart—hit Gregor so hard his knees buckled. The headache vanished. The cold vanished. The tremor stopped. Everything stopped except the man in front of him and the bond between them, blazing and whole and so fiercely alivethat Gregor could feel it rewriting the very architecture of his being.
Fergal’s eyes were bright. His chin was raised. He was the most beautiful thing Gregor had ever seen.
“Took you long enough,” Fergal whispered, and his voice cracked on the last word, the composure finally breaking, and Gregor crossed the cell in two strides and caught him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The farmhouse grew larger with every wingbeat, and Erwan’s dragon fire burned steady in his chest.
He wasn’t afraid. That realization had settled over him somewhere around the halfway point of their drive south, when the road had stretched endlessly in front of him and the mate bond between him and Rhene—his anchor, his true north—had hummed with a warmth that distance couldn’t diminish. Rhene was with the pack, safe, watching over Ainle and the others. Erwan could feel his mate’s presence like a hand pressed against his heart, steady and sure.
He had a family to return to. A mate. A son. And if the gods were willing, more children soon. The first attempt with Finlay hadn’t worked. The little omega dragon had been devastated, but Erwan hadn’t been. Somehow, he knew it would work out. They had to be patient, hard as it was.
The knowledge of what was waiting for him at home filled him with a deep sense of purpose. He knew what he was fighting for. Who he was fighting for. And he knew that he’d return to them, to his mate and his son and his as-of-yet unformed children.
So no, he wasn’t afraid of what waited at the farmhouse. He’d spent his childhood being afraid of Cladhaire and Baoth, had spent two centuries living under the shadow of their cruelty and their dark magic, had spent years unlearning the fear they’d planted in him like a poison that was meant to keep him small and silent and controllable.
That fear was gone. Burned away by the White Dragon’s fire, by Rhene’s love, by the clan he’d built and the family he’d found and the honor he’d chosen every single time the choice was offered.
What he was afraid of was himself.
Because underneath the honor and the discipline and the deep, soul-level commitment to justice that his mother had woven into him alongside her protective spells was rage. Old rage, patient rage, the kind that had been composting in his chest for two centuries, growing richer and darker and more potent with every new crime he discovered his father had committed.
The murder of his grandfather and great-uncle. The attempted murder of his brothers and himself. The imprisonment of his mother. The torture of Emma.
If he let that rage off its leash, he could kill Cladhaire and Baoth. The power was there—vast, blazing, more than sufficient to end two old men whose dark magic had been weakening for years. He could do it and claim justice. He could do it and be applauded. He could do it and no one in the clan or the pack would blame him because the list of crimes was long enough to justify a hundred executions.
But his mother hadn’t raised him for revenge. She’d raised him for honor.
May he find the courage and wisdom to sacrifice what must be given up to gain what must be won.
Maybe what that prophecy spoke of was that what had to be given up was the satisfaction of revenge. What had to be won was a future built on justice rather than violence, a future where the True Doyle clan’s honor was restored not by matching darkness with darkness but by proving that the White Dragon could look at evil and choose something better.
