“Everyone is treating me like a child!” The words exploded out of him with a force that surprised them both. Fergal shoved back from the desk, his chair screeching against the floor. “The alphas think I’m too young. The omegas think I’m too naive. Dick and Dicker think I’m too stupid to see what they’re doing. And you…” He jabbed a finger at Gregor. “You stand there being patient and reasonable and calm while everything falls apart, and I don’t know how you do it because I am hanging on by my fingernails and nobody seems to notice or care.”
Gregor stood very still, absorbing the tirade with the same composure he brought to everything, and something about that stillness—that unshakable, infuriating, goddamned stillness—cracked something loose inside Fergal that he’d been trying to hold together for weeks.
“You know what the worst part is?” His voice dropped, turning ugly in a way he’d hate himself for later. “You spent a hundred and fifty years with the Murphys, and you couldn’t even figure out what they were doing. You were right there, Gregor. Right there in their clan, and you didn’t see what they were until it was too late. So maybe your instincts aren’t as sharp as you think they are.”
The words hung in the air like a blade suspended mid-swing. Fergal heard them echo and felt sick. That was a low blow. The lowest possible blow, aimed at the one wound he knew Gregor carried from his Murphy years—the guilt of not acting sooner, of not seeing the truth clearly enough, of leaving too late.
Gregor’s expression didn’t change, but something shifted behind his eyes—a flash of pain, quickly contained, like a door closing on a wound. When he spoke, his voice was quiet. “Are you done?”
He sounded clinical, assessing—like someone who’d absorbed the worst possible punch and was now calculating the appropriate response.
Fergal’s throat tightened. “Gregor, I didn’t?—”
“Are you done?” Gregor repeated, and this time there was something underneath the calm. Not anger. Something more deliberate, something Fergal recognized from the training room—the moment the teacher receded and something older and more authoritative took its place.
Fergal’s mouth opened to say yes, but the word that came out was a whispered, desperate, “No.”
Because he wasn’t done. The frustration was still there, churning and toxic and eating him alive, and the fact that he’d just hurt the one person who didn’t deserve it only made it worse. He could feel himself spiraling, and he didn’t know how to stop. The blowjob had helped, but only a little. And only for a day or so.
Gregor studied him for three heartbeats, his eyes steady and clear, reading everything Fergal was trying and failing to hide—the exhaustion, the frustration, the self-loathing that was already rising to replace the anger, and underneath all of it, the thing Fergal couldn’t say aloud because his pride wouldn’t let him.
Help me. I can’t do this by myself. I don’t know how to stop.
Gregor crossed the room in four strides. He pulled the wooden chair from the corner—a straight-backed, armless chair that had been in Fergal’s quarters since before he was born—and set it in the center of the room. He sat down.
“Come here.”
Two words. Spoken without heat, without judgment, without hesitation. A command so simple and so absolute that it cut through the noise in Fergal’s head like an axe through a twig.
Fergal went.
He crossed the room on legs that felt like they belonged to someone else, his heart hammering, his throat tight. Gregor looked up at him with an expression that held no anger, no punishment, no disappointment. Just certainty and the steady, unwavering acceptance of a man who saw what was needed and wasn’t going to let pride or propriety prevent him from providing it.
Gregor took his wrist. Guided him forward. And Fergal let himself be pulled down across Gregor’s lap.
His face burned. His whole body burned, shame and relief and something else tangling into a knot he couldn’t unravel. The position was vulnerable—his torso draped across Gregor’s thighs, his hands braced against the floor, his ass raised and exposed. He was a king. A grown man with a law degree and a crown and a hundred dragons under his command. And he was lying across another man’s lap, shaking, waiting.
Gregor’s left hand settled on the small of his back, firm and warm, anchoring him in place. His right hand rested on Fergal’s ass, the weight of it warm through the thin fabric of his trousers.
“This isn’t punishment,” Gregor said quietly. “You know that.”
Fergal squeezed his eyes shut. “I know.”
“This is because you’ve been carrying too much for too long and you don’t know how to put it down. This is because you need someone to take the weight, and you can’t ask for it, so you tried to provoke me into taking it. Am I wrong?”
A sound escaped Fergal’s throat—half laugh, half sob. “You’re never wrong. It’s infuriating.”
Gregor’s hand moved in a slow circle on his lower back. “I’m going to give you what you need, and then you’re going to sleep. And tomorrow, we’ll talk about what you said. Not because I’m angry, but because you’ll want to apologize. But not tonight. Tonight, you just need to let go. Can you do that?”
Fergal nodded, his fingers curling against the floor.
Gregor’s hand lifted from his ass.
The first strike landed with a sharp crack that echoed off the stone walls. Gregor’s hand connected with his right cheek through the fabric with exactly enough force to sting, exactly enough impact to cut through the static in Fergal’s mind like a signal breaking through interference.
Fergal gasped. His body tensed, instinct fighting against vulnerability, pride rearing up one last time to insist that he didn’t need this, that he was fine, that a king didn’t?—
The second strike landed on his left cheek, same force, same precision, and the thought dissolved before it could finish forming.
