Silence. The lamp cast warm light across the bed, across their naked bodies, across the space between them that suddenly felt like a canyon. Fergal could hear his own heartbeat, still too fast from the sex and now accelerating for entirely different reasons.
“What did you do, Gregor?”
The question landed like a gunshot. Gregor’s face drained of color—visibly, unmistakably. Fergal had hit something vital. “What?”
“You heard me. What did you do?” Fergal’s voice was steady despite the trembling in his hands. “I’ve been piecing this together for months. You’re not hiding something that was done to you. You carry that differently. You’re hiding something you did. Something specific, something that happened a long time ago, something you believe is unforgivable. What is it?”
Gregor’s eyes were wild for a fraction of a second, the same look Fergal had seen once before, that night in the library when he’d touched Gregor’s mind and caught a flash of something vast and anguished before the walls slammed shut. Then the control returned, but it was brittle now, a thin shell over something enormous.
“If you knew everything about me…” Gregor started, his voice barely above a whisper.
“I would, what? Stop loving you?” The incredulity in Fergal’s voice shifted into something harder. “Is that what you think? That there’s something about you that would make me stop loving you?”
“Yes.” The word was barely audible. “That’s exactly what I think.”
The honesty of it knocked the wind out of Fergal. Not the answer since he’d suspected as much, but the raw, unvarnished certainty behind it. Gregor genuinely believed this. Not as apossibility but as a fact. Whatever he was hiding, he had calculated that the truth would cost him Fergal. And he’d chosen the secret over the risk.
“You don’t get to make that decision for me.” Fergal’s anger was rising now, hot and righteous, fueled by the sting of being judged unworthy of the truth by the person he trusted most. “You don’t get to decide what I can and can’t handle. You don’t get to look at me and say ‘he wouldn’t love me if he knew’ without giving me the chance to prove you wrong.”
“Some things can’t be proven wrong.”
“Everything can be proven wrong! That’s how the law works! You present evidence, you challenge assumptions, you test conclusions against facts. But you won’t even give me the evidence. You’ve tried and convicted yourself without ever letting the defense make its case.”
“This isn’t a courtroom, Fergal.”
“No, it’s a relationship. Which should have higher standards of honesty, not lower ones.”
Gregor stood. The movement was abrupt—for a man who did everything with deliberate control, the jerkiness of it betrayed how close to the edge he was. He pulled on his pants, his back to Fergal, and every line of his body radiated the tension of a man holding something in by force.
Fergal watched him. The anger was still there, but underneath it, a grief was forming—the grief of realizing that the man he loved would rather lose him slowly through silence than risk losing him quickly through truth.
“I promised I wouldn’t use my abilities on you,” Fergal said quietly. “And I won’t. I keep my promises, Gregor. But I need you to hear this.” He waited until Gregor turned, until those gray eyes met his. “If you can’t trust me with whatever this is, then what are we building here? Because I can’t spend the rest of mylife loving a man who won’t let me all the way in. I won’t. I deserve better than that.”
The words hit their target. Fergal saw the impact, the flinch, the crack in the foundation that had been forming for months and was now threatening to become a ravine. Gregor’s mouth opened, and for one breathless, crystalline moment, Fergal thought he was going to tell him. The truth was right there, pressing against Gregor’s lips, fighting to get out.
Then the jaw clenched. The deadbolt slid home. The heaviest door in Gregor’s mind sealed shut with an almost audible click. “I can’t tell you. Not yet. I’m asking you to trust me.”
“You’re asking me to trust you while you don’t trust me. Do you hear yourself?”
Gregor flinched again. “I hear myself. And I know how it sounds. And I’m asking anyway.”
The silence between them stretched until it hurt. Fergal sat naked on the bed they shared, in the home they’d built, looking at the man who had given him everything except the one thing that mattered most.
“Fine,” Fergal said at last, and the word tasted like ash. “Keep your secret. But know this—every day you hold back is a day you’re choosing a lie over me. And I won’t wait forever, Gregor. I can’t.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The crack in the ceiling above their bed was shaped like a river delta.
Gregor had mapped it during the sleepless hours that had become his nightly ritual since the fight—lying on his back in the dark, Fergal’s warmth beside him but no longer against him, tracing the branching fissure in the plaster with his eyes while his mind ran the same loops it had been running for three days.
What did you do, Gregor?
If you can’t trust me with whatever this is, then what are we building here?
Every day you hold back is a day you’re choosing a lie over me.
Three days since the fight, and Fergal’s words had taken up permanent residence in Gregor’s skull, playing on a loop that no amount of tactical analysis or threat assessment could silence. Because Fergal was right. He was right about all of it. Itwasunfair. Itwashypocritical. And it would corrode their relationship over time. But being right made it worse, not better, because it left Gregor with no defense except the truth he couldn’t speak.
