He stood in the kitchen, his hands wrapped around a mug of tea he’d made ten minutes ago and hadn’t sipped. The ceramic was cooling against his palms. Through the bond—blazing and whole and impossible to muffle—his anxiety was leaking into the room like smoke under a door, and he could feel Fergal’s awareness of it, the subtle shift in his mate’s attention from the book to the man who was radiating dread.
Fergal didn’t look up. He turned a page with deliberate casualness, giving Gregor space, giving him time.
The patience was unbearable. Gregor could’ve handled pressure, could’ve met demands or deflected questions or retreated behind the professional composure that had served him for three and a half centuries. But Fergal’s quiet, steady presence, his refusal to push, his absolute trust that Gregor would find his way to the words in his own time was the very thing that made the silence impossible to maintain.
Because the silence was a betrayal of that trust. Every second of it. Every minute Gregor stood in this kitchen, holding tea he wouldn’t drink, carrying a truth he hadn’t told, was another moment he was choosing the lie over the man who deserved better.
I will tell you everything. Every truth, every secret, every word I’ve been too afraid to say.
The vow he’d made in this kitchen, standing over a coffee mug and a pair of abandoned reading glasses, while the mate bond screamed about their separation. He’d meant it. He’d meant every word. And now the moment was here—no crisis to hide behind, no mission to prepare for, no enemies to fight—and the only obstacle between Gregor and the truth was the same obstacle that had always been there.
Fear.
Not fear of Fergal’s anger. Not fear of judgment or punishment, or the political consequences of a commander confessing to killing a crown prince. Fear of the look in Fergal’s eyes when he learned that the hands holding him every night were the hands that had killed his brother. Fear that that precious, hard-won, infinite trust would shatter, and nothing Gregor could do or say would put it back together. Fear that he would lose the one thing he couldn’t live without: Fergal.
He set the mug down. The sound of ceramic landing on the countertop was too loud in the quiet cabin, and Fergal’s gazeflickered toward the kitchen for a fraction of a second before returning to his book.
Gregor crossed the living room and sat on the couch, facing him, their knees almost touching, close enough to see every detail of Fergal’s face in the lamplight.
Fergal looked up from his book. His dark hair was loose around his shoulders, still damp from the shower. He was wearing one of Gregor’s shirts, and the domesticity of the image hit Gregor with a force that made his chest ache. This man. This impossible, brilliant, stubborn, brave man, who had walked into a trap to save Gregor’s life. Who had sat in a cell for days and never doubted. Who had said “I love you” over and over into a silence that must’ve felt like shouting into a void.
Fergal closed the book and set it on the side table. He removed his glasses and folded them carefully—the small, precise gesture that Gregor had watched a thousand times and that always made something tender twist behind his ribs. Then he turned to Gregor and waited.
No questions. No prompting. Just those sharp brown eyes, steady and clear.
“I need to tell you something,” Gregor said, his voice surprisingly steady. “Something I should’ve told you a long time ago.”
“I know,” Fergal said simply.
“You don’t know what it is.”
“I know it’s been eating you alive for years, and I know it’s the reason you couldn’t say three words that I could feel you wanting to say every single night.” Fergal’s voice was quiet, free of accusation. “So tell me. I’m not going anywhere.”
Gregor looked at his hands. “It’s about Peter.”
He felt the shift in Fergal through the bond—a spike of surprise, quickly controlled, followed by a focused attention that sharpened like a lens being adjusted. Of all the secrets Fergalmight have imagined, this one clearly hadn’t been at the top of his list.
“Okay,” Fergal said carefully. “Tell me.”
Gregor breathed. In through the nose, out through the mouth. The technique that had served him through three centuries of combat, through impossible situations, through moments that would have broken lesser men. None of those moments had been as hard as this one.
“Your brother didn’t die in a drunken accident,” Gregor said. “I killed him.”
The words left his mouth and hung in the air between them, suspended in the lamplight, irretrievable. Gregor watched them land on Fergal’s face—the shock, sharp and immediate, the brown eyes going wide, the parted lips, the color draining from his cheeks in a way that made Gregor’s stomach drop into his boots.
“What?” Fergal’s voice was barely a whisper.
“Peter tried to kill you. The first time, he pushed you down the stairs, and if a servant hadn’t been there by sheer coincidence to catch you, you would’ve broken every bone in your little body. I’d seen him stare at you with malevolence in his eyes, and I feared it hadn’t been an accident, so I set wards around you. The second time, he tried to drown you in the lake. You were ten. I pulled you out.”
“I remember the lake.” Fergal’s voice was faint, distant, as if he were hearing it from underwater. “You said the ice broke.”
“The ice did break, but it shouldn’t have. It wouldn’t have, except Peter was there, and he’d weakened the ice with magic. I couldn’t prove it at the time, but I knew.”
Fergal’s hand gripped the arm of the couch. His knuckles were white. “And the third time?”
“Three years later. You were thirteen. Peter came to your room in the middle of the night with a pillow.” Gregor kept hisvoice level, clinical, because if he let the emotion in, he would break, and Fergal needed him to finish this. “I had magical wards on you—proximity alarms tied to my consciousness. They woke me the moment he entered your room with harmful intent. I ran. I found him pressing the pillow over your face.”
Fergal’s breathing had gone shallow. Gregor could feel the tsunami of emotion building—shock, horror, confusion, grief—held in check by the same iron will that had kept Fergal functional through a kidnapping and captivity.
