Baoth made a strangled sound that might have been intended as words but emerged as something closer to a snarl. “You’re an abomination. Both of you. A white dragon who submits to a wolf—your mother would be ashamed.”
“My mother,” Erwan said, and his voice dropped to something so quiet and so dangerous that Lidon’s ears flattened and even the dark magic residue in the air seemed to recoil, “loved me enough to die protecting me from you. Every night of my childhood, she wove spells around my bed to keep me safe from my own father and uncle. She sacrificed her freedom, her health, and ultimately her life so I could become exactly who I am. So don’t you ever speak her name again. As I will, so mote it be.”
Baoth opened his mouth. Closed it.
The corridor was silent except for the distant sounds of combat winding down above them and the steady, rhythmic drip of water from a pipe somewhere in the ceiling. Cladhaire stood before Erwan, his dark magic spent, his words exhausted, his cruelty finally meeting a wall it couldn’t breach.
He looked old. A man at the end of a long, dishonorable life, standing in a basement surrounded by the cells where he’d imprisoned his own people, facing the son he’d tried to destroy and finding that son immovable.
Erwan could kill him. The power was right there, singing in his veins, more than sufficient to end both of them with a thought. He could feel the temptation of it, the clean, decisive finality that would ensure Cladhaire and Baoth never hurt anyone again.
May he find the courage and wisdom to sacrifice what must be given up to gain what must be won.
The satisfaction of revenge. That was what had to be given up. And what had to be won was a future where the True Doyle clan’s honor was measured not by the enemies it destroyed but by the justice it upheld.
“Reo.”
The word left Erwan’s mouth with quiet certainty. The White Dragon’s magic wrapped around Cladhaire and Baothlike chains of light, sealing their bodies, their magic, their ability to move or speak or harm. They stood frozen—conscious, aware, their eyes still burning with hatred and fear, but utterly, permanently, immobilized.
Prisoners. Not corpses. Delivered to justice, not to vengeance.
Erwan held his father’s gaze for a long moment. The frozen eyes stared back at him with an impotent fury that would’ve terrified the boy Erwan had been. The man Erwan had become felt only a vast, exhausted sadness.
“You’ll be held until the clan can determine the appropriate legal proceedings,” Erwan said, knowing Cladhaire could hear him even if he couldn’t respond. “Every crime will be documented. Every victim will be heard. And the Code you violated will be the Code that judges you.” He paused. “That’s more than you gave your father. More than you gave your uncle and your wives. More than you gave any of the people in these cells. But it’s what honor demands, and unlike you, I answer to something higher than my own ambition.”
He looked past the two frozen men, and at the far end of the hallway, Gregor stood in the doorway of a broken cell, holding Fergal.
The sight stopped Erwan in his tracks.
Gregor—the most controlled, the most disciplined, the most impenetrable man Erwan had ever known—was holding Fergal with both arms wrapped around him so tightly that Erwan could see the strain in his shoulders from twenty feet away. His face was buried in Fergal’s dark hair, and his whole body was shaking. And Fergal was clinging to him with equal desperation, his face pressed against Gregor’s chest, his hands fisted in the back of Gregor’s shirt.
Erwan thought of Rhene. Of the night they’d been reunited after Rhene’s captivity in Sweden, when Erwan had fallen intohis arms and sobbed and felt the mate bond roar back to life like a fire finding fuel. He knew exactly what Gregor and Fergal were feeling right now, that overwhelming flood of reconnection, the physical relief of proximity after agonizing separation, the bone-deep certainty that nothing in the world mattered except the person in your arms.
He would not intrude on that moment. Some things were sacred, and the reunion of mates was the most sacred of all.
He turned his back to them, and Lidon stood beside him. They stood together in the corridor—the White Dragon and the True Alpha, side by side as the prophecies had foretold—while two men held each other in the ruins of a prison.
Love. Wasn’t that all that mattered in the end?
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The sound Fergal made when Gregor’s arms closed around him was not one he’d ever made before.
It came from somewhere below conscious thought—a raw, cracked, almost animalistic sound that bypassed his brain entirely and emerged from the place where the mate bond lived, the place that had been hollow and screaming for days and was now flooding with warmth so fast it hurt. Like blood rushing back into a frozen limb, like lungs filling after too long underwater, like every metaphor for resurrection that poets had ever written.
Except none of them were truly adequate because this was Gregor, this was hismate, this was the other half of his soul pressing against him so hard that Fergal couldn’t tell where his own heartbeat ended and Gregor’s began.
He was crying. The tears came from the same place as the sound, from his broken-open core. He had held himself together through kidnapping and captivity and interrogation and the agonizing silence of a severed bond, and now he could finally, finally stop.
Gregor was shaking. That was the thing that undid Fergal completely, the realization that the most controlled man alivewas trembling in his arms. Gregor’s face was buried in Fergal’s hair, his breathing ragged, his arms wrapped around Fergal with a ferocity that would leave bruises and that Fergal never wanted to end.
Through the bond—gods, the bond, blazing and whole and so fiercely alive—Fergal could feel everything. Gregor’s relief vast as an ocean. His fury still burning hot beneath the surface. His guilt—familiar, ever-present, but edged now with something sharper, something that tasted like a vow. And underneath it all, running through everything like a river through bedrock, the love. The love Gregor had never been able to say but the bond had made impossible to hide, enormous and terrifying and absolutely, unequivocally real.
I know,Fergal thought, pressing his face harder against Gregor’s chest.I can feel it. I’ve always known.
“Don’t ever do that again,” Gregor said against his hair, his voice wrecked. “Don’t ever walk away from me again.”
“They said they’d kill you.” Fergal’s voice was muffled against Gregor’s shirt. “They said they had men on your patrol route and if I didn’t come alone?—”
