Duff swallowed. Then he straightened. “If you’ll have me, I’d like to help make this right. All of it. Not because of the oath my father made me swear or the mission I was raised for. But because it’s what Maeve would’ve wanted.” His voice roughened on the name. “And because the people in these cells deserve better than what was done to them. Same as I did.”
Erwan extended his hand. “Welcome to the right side, Duff.”
Duff looked at the hand for a beat—the hand of a white dragon, offered in alliance to the last dragon slayer—and took it.
They moved through the basement, breaking open cells. Gregor’s hand stayed in Fergal’s, and Fergal cataloged everything even as his heart cracked with each door they opened.The seventeen Doyle dragons were in the worst condition—months of captivity had left them gaunt and disoriented. Some recognized Erwan and wept. Others stared blankly, unable to process what was happening. An older alpha asked about Queen Grian, and when Erwan told him she had passed, the man’s legs buckled and Lidon caught him before he hit the ground.
Fergal watched Erwan deliver the news to each group of prisoners—his mother’s death, his kingship, the rescue—and marveled at the young king’s composure. Every repetition cost him, Fergal could see that, but Erwan didn’t flinch, didn’t soften the truth, didn’t hide behind euphemism. His mother had raised him well, and Fergal’s respect for the late Queen Grian only rose.
The Murphy omegas were fewer—seven, held in cells on the far end of the corridor. Their condition made Fergal’s stomach turn. Thin, hollow-eyed, moving with mechanical stillness. One of them flinched when Fergal’s shadow fell across the doorway of her cell, pressing herself against the wall with a whimper that Fergal would hear in his nightmares for a long time.
And then, second corridor, third door on the left, the door Fergal had marked during his captivity, the door behind which he’d heard crying. The boy inside was perhaps fifteen, curled on a cot with his knees drawn to his chest and his face hidden in his arms. His sandy hair was matted, his frame painfully thin, and when the door opened, he flinched so violently the cot scraped against the floor.
“Hey,” Fergal said softly, crouching to make himself smaller, less threatening. “It’s over. You’re safe.”
The boy raised his head. His eyes—red-rimmed, exhausted, carrying a fear so deep it had become structural—found Fergal’s face and searched it with the desperate scrutiny of someone who had been lied to too many times to believe anything at face value.
“Who are you?” he whispered.
“My name is Fergal. We’re here to get you out.”
“All of us?”
“Every single one.”
A tremor ran through the boy’s thin frame. “My brother. Simon. Is he?—”
“Simon is safe,” Fergal said. “He’s with the Hightower pack. He’s been worried about you.”
The boy’s face crumpled, and Fergal caught him as the sobs came—huge, wracking, the kind that shook a body too small and too starved to contain them. He held the boy the way Gregor held him—fiercely, completely, with the unspoken promise that no one would hurt him again.
Over the boy’s shaking head, Fergal met Gregor’s eyes. His mate stood in the doorway, watching, his eyes endlessly soft.
They emerged into sunlight twenty minutes later—Fergal, Gregor, Duff, and a stream of freed prisoners blinking against the morning brightness like people surfacing from a long, dark dive. The compound yard was controlled chaos—Murphy alphas restrained and guarded, wolf fighters maintaining the perimeter, Fallon’s magic crackling as he maintained suppression wards on the captured dragons.
Kerry sat in the dirt with his hands zip-tied behind his back, his composure finally, thoroughly shattered. When his eyes found Fergal, the hatred in them was pure and impotent, and Fergal looked at the man who had interrogated him, who had tried to steal his clan, who had orchestrated the murder of his father, and felt nothing but the vast, tired satisfaction of a case closed.
“I did warn you,” Fergal said pleasantly as he passed. “Wrong side of the Code. Wrong side of history. Free legal assessment, as promised.”
Kerry said nothing. There was nothing left to say.
Hubert hadn’t made it. He’d attacked Fallon, and the little omega had stood his ground, but in the end, Fallon had no otherchoice but to kill him. Fergal could only hope Fallon wouldn’t lose a minute of sleep over it.
Fergal stood in the sun and let the warmth sink into his skin. Gregor’s hand was in his, solid and warm and real. Through the bond, he could feel his mate—the relief, the exhaustion, the guilt that hadn’t dissolved and wouldn’t until the truth was spoken, and the love that blazed beneath everything like a fire that had finally found enough air.
Around them, freed dragons took their first steps into sunlight. Wolf alphas offered water and blankets to prisoners who hadn’t known kindness in months. Duff stood apart, watching it all with a kind of wonder on his face. And somewhere above them, the morning sky stretched wide and blue and open.
They were going home. All of them—the freed prisoners, the rescued king, the reformed dragon slayer, the mate whose secrets were finally ready to be told. Home to the pack that had somehow become the place where wolves and dragons and a man who’d spent his life hunting dragons could all belong.
Fergal leaned into Gregor’s side and felt the arm that wrapped around his shoulders, automatic and fierce and unwilling to let go.
“Take me home,” he said.
Gregor pressed his lips to Fergal’s hair. “Anything you want.”
And when we get there, Fergal thought,you’re going to tell me everything.
He could wait a little longer. But not much.
