Erwan made himself a promise as the farmhouse came into view below. He would not kill his father. He would not kill his uncle. No matter what they said, no matter what they did, no matter how deep the rage burned. He would choose honor, the way his mother had chosen it every night when she’d woven her spells around his bed, protecting him with love instead of destroying his enemies with power.
Always honor. That was the legacy worth carrying.
The wards shattered under the combined assault of his power and Fallon’s magic, amplified by Lidon’s presence in ways that made the air itself feel cleaner, and then the battle was joined. Erwan didn’t linger in the general assault—Fallon, Valdis, and the wolf alphas had the perimeter. He followed Gregor into the farmhouse, the red dragon cutting a path through guards with a breathtaking ferocity, and Erwan moved in his wake, his white dragon magic sweeping the corridors clean of the dark residue that clung to every surface like mold.
The basement stairs. A corridor lined with cells. And there, at the end of it, the two men who had haunted his nightmares for as long as he could remember.
Gregor was ahead of him, locked onto Fergal’s location with the single-minded intensity of a mate bond pulling a man toward his other half. Cladhaire and Baoth stepped into the corridor to block the path, and Erwan saw Gregor coil to fight through them.
“Go,” Erwan said, his hand on Gregor’s shoulder. “They’re mine.”
Gregor’s eyes met his for one heartbeat—gratitude too vast for words—and then the red dragon was past them, moving toward Fergal’s cell with the unstoppable momentum of a man who would not be denied.
Lidon moved to Erwan’s side, the massive gray wolf radiating a power that pulsed through Erwan. The True Alpha and the White Dragon, side by side in a basement corridor, facing two old men whose empire of cruelty had finally reached its end.
“Hello, Father,” Erwan said.
Cladhaire’s face contorted. The months since the Dragon Council had not been kind. He was gaunt, hollowed out, his skin papery and his hands trembling with something that might’ve been age or fury or both. But his eyes burned with the same cold, calculating hatred that Erwan remembered from his childhood, the look that had always preceded punishment or manipulation or the quiet deployment of dark magic designed to keep his son afraid.
“You have no right to be here,” Cladhaire spat. “This is my property. My land. My?—”
“Your prison,” Erwan said calmly. “Your illegal detention facility, where you’ve been holding seventeen members of your own former clan against their will. Along with omegas and a fifteen-year-old child, not to mention a king.”
“They’re under my protection.”
“They’re in cells.”
“Because of you!” Cladhaire’s voice cracked, and the dark magic that had been gathering at his fingertips flared with a pulse of black energy that shot toward Erwan with the vicious speed of a striking snake.
Erwan didn’t flinch. His White Dragon fire rose to meet the attack, absorbing the dark magic the way light absorbs shadow. It wasn’t fighting it but wiping it away by simply existing more powerfully, more fundamentally, until the darkness hadnowhere left to be. The spell dissolved against his defenses without so much as a ripple.
“Is that all you have?” Erwan asked. He didn’t even mean it as a taunt, but was genuinely curious.
“You ungrateful, worthless—” Cladhaire launched another attack, then another, dark magic pouring from his hands in waves that would’ve been lethal against an ordinary dragon. Against the White Dragon, amplified by the True Alpha’s presence, they were nothing. Each spell broke against Erwan’s fire and vanished, the dark energy ceasing to exist, as if the universe itself had decided that Cladhaire’s magic no longer had permission to function.
Beside Cladhaire, Baoth raised his own hands, his dark magic flickering to life, and Lidon growled. The sound was low and primal and carried a frequency that vibrated in the walls and the floor and the air itself, and Baoth’s magic guttered and died like a candle in a hurricane. The old dragon staggered, his face going gray, his hands dropping to his sides.
“You can’t do this,” Baoth rasped, his eyes darting between Erwan and the wolf. “We have rights. The Code?—”
“Don’t.” Erwan’s voice was quiet, but the power behind it made the word ring like a bell in the narrow corridor. “Don’t you dare invoke the Code. Not after what you’ve done. Not after the people you’ve killed, the lives you’ve destroyed, the sacred oaths you’ve broken.” He took a step forward. “You murdered my grandfather. You tried to murder me. You imprisoned my mother until the magic you used on her killed her. You tortured Emma.”
“Everything I did was for the clan!” Cladhaire’s voice broke on the last word, and for one brief, pathetic moment, Erwan saw something behind the fury that looked almost like conviction. The old king believed it. After everything, after all the bloodand cruelty and betrayal, Cladhaire genuinely believed that his actions had been justified.
It was the saddest thing Erwan had ever seen.
“No,” Erwan said. “Everything you did was for yourself. And the difference between us is that I know the distinction.”
“The difference between us,” Cladhaire snarled, “is that I’m not weak enough to let a wolf fuck me and call it love.”
The words landed in the corridor like a grenade, designed for maximum damage, aimed at the part of Erwan Cladhaire had always considered his greatest weakness—his relationship with Rhene, his submission to an alpha wolf, his willingness to love and be loved by someone his father considered beneath him.
Erwan waited for the pain. Waited for the old shame to surface, the childhood conditioning that had taught him to flinch at his father’s cruelty, to internalize it, to let it erode his sense of self from the inside out.
It didn’t come.
He felt nothing. Nothing but a profound, settled certainty that the man in front of him—this bitter, hollowed-out shell of a king—had no power over him anymore. Not his words, not his magic, not his approval or disapproval. Cladhaire had spent two centuries trying to make Erwan small, and he had failed, and the proof of that failure was standing in front of him in the form of a white dragon who had built a clan from the ashes of his father’s dishonor.
“Rhene sends his regards,” Erwan said mildly, and the look on Cladhaire’s face was almost worth two centuries of suffering. Almost.
