“I pulled him off you,” Gregor continued. “We struggled. He was strong—stronger than you’d expect for his age—and he fought me. During the fight, he broke free and stumbled backward. His head struck the corner of the nightstand.”
The sound. The wet crack. The sudden stillness.
“He was unconscious, but he wasn’t dead.” Gregor’s voice didn’t waver. His hands, resting on his knees, trembled—sixth time in his life, or was it the seventh? He’d lost count. “With medical help, he might’ve survived. I’m not sure he would’ve, but he might’ve recovered.”
The cabin was so quiet that Gregor could hear the tick of the wall clock, the hum of the refrigerator, the whisper of wind against the windows.
“But?” Fergal’s voice was barely audible but controlled. The lawyer, holding himself together through training and will.
“But I made a decision.” This was the part that cost Gregor the most—not the decision, which had been instinctive, necessary, an act he would repeat without hesitation in any universe. But the cover-up. The deliberate, calculated lie that he’d constructed with ruthless precision. “I wiped your memories and made you go back to sleep. Once you were out again, I still didn’t alert anyone but instead, moved Peter’s body to his own room. I positioned him at the base of his nightstand to make it look like he’d fallen there and smeared some blood onthe corner. I placed a bottle of whiskey from his wardrobe on the table after splashing some of it on him so he’d reek of alcohol. He was known to drink heavily, so no one would question it. And then I left him there and walked away, knowing he’d be dead by the time anyone would find him. I cleaned your room of any evidence of the struggle, reinforced the wards on you while you were sleeping, and for good measure, added two more.”
“You staged it.” Fergal’s voice was flat. Not angry. Not anything, yet. Just processing.
“I calculated that the truth would destroy the clan. If it became known that the crown prince had tried to murder his brother and had been killed by his tutor in the process—a tutor who was a former Murphy, an outsider—the political consequences would have been catastrophic. Your father was already struggling to hold the clan together. The scandal would’ve finished him.”
“So you protected the clan.”
“I protected you.” The correction came out raw, stripped of the clinical detachment he’d been maintaining. “Everything else was secondary. The clan, the politics, your father’s reputation—none of it mattered. What mattered was that you were alive and that you would stay alive, and I calculated that the truth—a truth that would have destabilized your family and your clan and potentially put you at further risk—was more dangerous than the lie.”
“You calculated.” Fergal repeated the word with a precision Gregor recognized—the lawyer testing a term, weighing it, preparing to use it or discard it.
“Yes. In thirty seconds, standing over your brother’s body, I made a calculation that has governed every day of my life since. And I have revisited that calculation thousands of times, and I have never once found a different answer. The lie was the right tactical decision. It protected you. It preserved the clan.It allowed you to grow up without the trauma of knowing your brother tried to murder you.”
“But?”
Gregor swallowed. “But the lie also meant that every relationship I built with you afterward was built on a foundation I knew was false. Every time you trusted me, I was betraying that trust. Every time you looked at me with those eyes that see everything, I was hiding the one thing that mattered most. And every time you said ‘I love you’ and I couldn’t say it back—” His voice cracked, finally, the fissure running through his composure like the wards cracking under Erwan’s assault. “I couldn’t say it because saying those words while carrying this secret would have turned them into a lie, and you deserved better than that. You’ve always deserved better than that.”
Fergal was staring at him. His face was pale, his eyes bright with tears that hadn’t fallen yet, his expression holding so many things simultaneously that Gregor couldn’t parse them even with decades of experience reading this man.
“There’s one more thing, and the truth wouldn’t be complete if I omitted this. If Peter hadn’t hit his head that night, I would’ve eventually killed him. Maybe that night or the next time he’d tried to kill you, but at some point, I would’ve taken him out. I would’ve murdered him because it would’ve been the only way to keep you safe.”
Fergal swallowed thickly. “Why did he…?”
“Why did he want you dead?”
Fergal nodded.
“He was jealous of you. You were so much smarter than him, and he knew it. Everyone knew it. Even as a child, you showed how sharp your mind was. You could out-argue everyone, and he started to see you as a threat. I think he feared that over time, people would prefer you over him. You also made friends easily,so warm and kind. And he…wasn’t. But it got ten times worse after he spent some time with the Murphys.”
Fergal’s eyes widened again. “The Murphys? Why? How?”
“They hold these tournaments every so many years, like the Olympics, and pitch each clan’s best fighters against each other. It’s really a cunning strategy on their end to see who’s the strongest in each clan. One year, your father allowed Peter to attend. He spent six weeks with them and came back a changed man. He was repeating lines he’d clearly been fed about how omegas were only good for breeding, how the Fitzgeralds should start a breeding program too, and he was all about masculinity and power and strength. And the discontent he’d felt toward you turned into full-blown hate.”
“I didn’t know,” Fergal whispered. “Not consciously, though I knew deep down Peter didn’t like me. But I never realized the depth of his hate for me.”
Of course he hadn’t. Who would believe their own brother hated them enough to kill them?
“I made you a vow when you were taken,” Gregor said, and his voice was rough now, scraped raw. “I swore that if I got you back, I would tell you everything. Every truth, every secret, every word I’d been too afraid to say. And here it is. All of it. The truth about your brother. The truth about what I did and what I would have done for you.”
He looked at his hands. The hands that had killed Peter. The hands that had held Fergal through nightmares and grief and the impossible weight of a crown. They were trembling. Again.
“I’m not asking for forgiveness,” Gregor said. “I’m not sure what I did is forgivable—not the killing, which was necessary, but the decades of silence that followed. The years I stole from us by being too afraid to trust you with the truth. I was terrified that if you knew, you would never look at me the same way again.”
He raised his head and met Fergal’s eyes. The bond between them was a living thing—blazing, trembling, carrying every emotion Gregor had been suppressing for years, laid bare and undefended and more vulnerable than he had ever been in three hundred and fifty years of living.
“I love you,” Gregor said. “I have loved you for years. I love you so much it terrifies me, and I couldn’t say it until now because the words needed to be spoken on clean ground, without a lie underneath them. The ground is clean now. Every door is open. There is nothing left between us that you don’t know.”
He stopped. He’d said everything. Every truth, every secret, every word. The doors were open, all of them, including the heaviest one, the one with the deadbolts, the one he’d checked compulsively for decades.
