And now he waited.
Fergal sat motionless on the couch, his face carrying the weight of a revelation that had rewritten his childhood in the space of ten minutes. His hands were still in his lap, where the book had been. His eyes were fixed on Gregor’s, bright with unshed tears, and through the bond, Gregor could feel the storm—vast, complex, layered with emotions so tangled he couldn’t separate them.
The silence stretched.
The clock ticked.
And Gregor, who had survived the Murphys and killed a prince and carried a lie for decades and led armies and faced dark magic and breached compound walls to rescue his mate, sat on a couch in a small cabin and experienced the purest, most undiluted terror of his three-hundred-and-fifty-year life.
Because Fergal hadn’t spoken. And Gregor had no idea what he was going to say.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
The silence lasted seventeen seconds. Fergal knew because his mind counted them automatically.
Seventeen seconds to absorb the fact that his brother had tried to murder him. That the man sitting in front of him, trembling, had killed Peter to save his life. That the drunk accident everyone had accepted was a cover story constructed by Gregor to keep Fergal safe. That everything Gregor had done had been to protect Fergal.
Seventeen seconds to watch the terror in Gregor’s eyes deepen with every beat of silence, the mate bond screaming with a fear so absolute it made Fergal’s chest physically hurt.
On the eighteenth second, Fergal reached for Gregor’s hands. They were shaking so badly that when Fergal took them in his own, he could feel the vibration through his palms.
He looked at them. Turned them over, studying the calluses, the scars, the thick fingers that could kill a man in seconds and cup Fergal’s face with a tenderness that had always seemed impossible for their size. These hands had killed his brother. These hands had held him every night for months. The same hands. The same man.
Fergal raised his head and looked at Gregor’s face. The gray eyes were wide, pupils dilated with a terror that no amount of military discipline could mask. The scar on his cheek stood out white against skin that had gone pale. His jaw was clenched so hard the muscle was jumping visibly, the familiar tic Fergal had been reading for years, only now it wasn’t concealing irritation or desire or the effort of self-control. It was concealing the anticipation of devastation.
He was waiting for Fergal to destroy him. Waiting for the horror and the rejection and the door closing for the last time. Waiting with the resigned certainty of a man who had run the calculation a thousand times and always arrived at the same answer: if he knows, I lose him.
And that was what broke Fergal’s heart. Not the killing. Not the cover-up. Not even the revelation that his childhood had contained a murderous brother and a protector who’d carried the weight of both roles alone. What shattered something deep inside Fergal was the simple, devastating fact that Gregor had spent decades believing he was unforgivable.
That the man who had saved Fergal’s life, who had protected him since birth, who had sacrificed his own peace of mind for years to keep Fergal safe and whole and alive, believed that the truth of who he was would be too much for Fergal to love.
As if there existed, in this universe or any other, a version of the truth that could make Fergal stop loving this man.
“You absolute idiot,” Fergal whispered, and his voice cracked on the last word, and then he was crying. Crying for Gregor. For the years of silence. For the weight his mate had carried alone because he’d been too afraid and too proud and too goddamned noble to share it.
“Listen to me.” Fergal’s voice was rough with tears but firm. “Listen to me, Gregor, because I’m only going to say this once,and then I’m going to make you hear it every day for the rest of our very long lives.”
Gregor’s eyes were locked on his. Terrified. Hopeful. Both at once, in equal measure, the most vulnerable expression Fergal had ever seen on a face that had been trained to show nothing.
“You saved my life. You killed a man who was trying to murder me, and you did it without hesitation, and you would do it again. That’s not something I need to forgive. That’s something I need to thank you for.”
Gregor’s mouth opened. Fergal squeezed his hands hard enough to silence him.
“I’m not finished. The cover-up… Yes, I wish you’d told me sooner. I wish you’d trusted me with this years ago instead of carrying it alone until it almost destroyed us. But I also understand why you didn’t. I understand the calculation you made, and my legal mind—the one you trained, by the way—tells me it was sound. The political consequences would’ve been catastrophic. My father would’ve collapsed. The clan would’ve fractured. You made the right call.”
“The right call cost us,” Gregor said, his voice barely audible.
“Yes, it did. And that hurt. The silence hurt. Every time I said ‘I love you’ and heard ‘you are everything’ instead, it hurt. But, Gregor”—Fergal released one of his hands to cup Gregor’s scarred cheek, his thumb tracing the pale line from cheekbone to jaw—“the reason it hurt wasn’t that you were hiding something terrible. It hurt because I could feel how much you were suffering, and I couldn’t reach you.”
A sound escaped Gregor that Fergal had never heard before—something raw and broken and released, like a seal giving way on a pressure vessel that had been building for decades. His eyes were wet, tears tracking down the weathered cheeks, and the sight of Gregor crying—Gregor who never cried, whonever broke—was simultaneously the most heartbreaking and the most beautiful thing Fergal had ever witnessed.
“You were protecting me,” Fergal said softly. “It’s what you’ve always done. From the moment I was born, you have put yourself between me and everything that could hurt me. Including the truth about my own brother.” His voice wavered. “That’s not unforgivable, Gregor. That’s love. The most selfless, most devastating, most stubborn kind of love I’ve ever seen.”
“I should’ve told you.”
“And I should’ve pushed harder instead of giving you space. And we should’ve had this conversation years ago in a library on our compound instead of on a couch here after you broke down a door to rescue me from a cell. We both could’ve done things differently. That doesn’t change what matters.”
“What matters?”
