Gregor crossed the room and sat on the bed beside him, close enough that their shoulders touched, close enough that the heat of Fergal’s body bled through both their sleeves, close enough that he could smell coffee and woodsmoke and something underneath that was purely Fergal.
“The perimeter is secure,” he said because the briefing needed to happen, even if his voice had gone quiet and rough. “I’ve placed my own men on the royal wing. Duncan and Donovan are under surveillance in their quarters. They’ve already started telling anyone who’ll listen that it was dragon slayers.”
Fergal’s laugh was a hollow, bitter thing. “Of course they have.”
“I’ve documented everything from the crime scene. When you’re ready, we’ll go through it together. Not tonight.”
Fergal nodded slowly. His thumb traced the Celtic knots on his mother’s journal in a repetitive motion that Gregor recognized as self-soothing. “He wasn’t a good king.”
Gregor said nothing. This wasn’t a moment that required his opinion.
“He wasn’t a good father either. He was selfish and stubborn and willfully blind, and he let his advisors run his clan into the ground while he drank and hunted and pretended everything was fine.” Fergal’s voice was steady, almost clinical, as if he were presenting a legal argument rather than eulogizing his father. “He let omegas get beaten. He let Duncan and Donovan take root like a cancer. He ignored every warning I gave him, and he looked at me like I was an inconvenience rather than his son.” His hands stilled on the journal. “And I wanted him to be proud of me anyway. How pathetic is that?”
“It’s not pathetic. It’s human.”
Fergal turned his head. They were close enough that Gregor could see the exact moment the steel cracked. Not a dramatic collapse. Just a fracture, hairline-thin, running through the composure Fergal had maintained for sixteen hours, and behind it, the raw, unprocessed grief of a man who had lost the last chance to fix something that had been broken his entire life.
“He never said he was proud of me.” Fergal’s voice was barely a whisper. “Not once. My mother said it all the time. She’d tell me every day, multiple times a day. But after she died, no one ever…” He stopped. Swallowed. “Is it stupid to grieve for something you never had?”
“No.” Gregor’s throat was tight. “That might be the worst kind of grief there is.”
The fracture widened. Fergal’s face crumpled—not all at once, but in stages, like a building losing its structural supports one by one. First, the jaw unclenched. Then the brow furrowed. Then the eyes, those sharp brown eyes that had been holding back a flood all day, overflowed.
He didn’t sob. The tears came silently, sliding down his cheeks and into his beard with a quietness that was somehow more heartbreaking than any sound could have been. His shoulders shook once, twice, then stilled as he fought for control.
Gregor pulled him in. His arms moved the way they had at the frozen lake—on instinct, driven by a force older and more powerful than discipline. One arm around Fergal’s shoulders, the other hand cradling the back of his head, pulling him close until Fergal’s face was pressed against Gregor’s neck and his tears were hot against Gregor’s skin.
Fergal grabbed fistfuls of Gregor’s shirt and held on.
They stayed like that for a long time. Gregor didn’t count the minutes. For possibly the first time in his life, he wasn’t tracking time, wasn’t calculating, wasn’t running scenarios in the back of his mind. He was just here, holding Fergal while the grief poured out of him in waves, each one smaller than the last, until the shaking subsided and Fergal’s breathing evened into the deep, ragged rhythm of someone who had emptied himself of everything.
“I’m sorry,” Fergal murmured against his neck. “I told myself I wasn’t going to do this.”
“Shut up,” Gregor said with a gentleness that robbed the words of any sting.
The sound Fergal made might’ve been a laugh or another sob. Or maybe it was something in between that didn’t have a name. He didn’t let go of Gregor’s shirt.
“You should eat,” Gregor said after a while.
“I can’t.”
“Then sleep.”
“I can’t do that either.”
Gregor’s hand moved in slow circles on Fergal’s back, tracing patterns that had no meaning beyond the simple language of comfort. “Try.”
“Only if you stay.”
This wasn’t the provocative “make me” of the training room, nor the carefully planned invasion of the workshop. This wasthe raw, undefended truth of a man who couldn’t face the dark alone.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Gregor said.
Fergal pulled back just enough to look at him. His face was a wreck—eyes swollen, cheeks wet, nose red—yet he was the most beautiful thing Gregor had ever seen, and that thought no longer terrified him the way it should’ve. Something about this day had burned through the terror, leaving behind what he felt for Fergal, bedrock-solid and impossible to deny.
“Boots,” Gregor said because someone had to be practical.
Fergal blinked. “What?”
