Beside him, Fergal slept. Or pretended to sleep—Gregor couldn’t always tell anymore, which was a failure of observation that would’ve been unthinkable a week ago. Before the fight, he’d known Fergal’s sleep patterns the way he knew patrol routes: the depth of each breath, the subtle shifts that signaled dreams versus wakefulness, the exact moment consciousness returned in the morning.
Now there was static in the signal. Fergal still slept in his arms—their bodies too accustomed to each other’s warmth to survive separation—but the surrender was gone. The boneless, trusting collapse onto Gregor’s chest that had been the purest expression of Fergal’s faith in him had been replaced by something more guarded, a body that was present but held in reserve.
Gregor had done that. Not the Murphys, not Duncan and Donovan, not the weight of the crown or the pressure of kingship. Gregor. With his locked doors and his careful omissions and his cowardice dressed up as protection.
He should tell him. The thought surfaced every night, persistent as a heartbeat. And every night, the deadbolt held.
Dawn crept through the curtains. Gregor extracted himself from bed with practiced silence. He dressed in the dim light, lacing his boots with fingers that moved on autopilot, strapping his dagger to his belt, holstering his gun.
He paused at the bedroom door. Fergal had shifted in his absence, rolling into the warm space Gregor had left behind, his face half-buried in Gregor’s pillow. His dark hair fanned across the white cotton, and one hand rested on the sheet where Gregor’s body had been, fingers loosely curled as if holding on to something that was no longer there.
The sight hit Gregor like a crossbow bolt to the sternum.
Tell him. Tell him now. Wake him up and sit on the edge of this bed and open every door and say every word and let him decide. He deserves that.
But he didn’t. He turned and walked out, closing the bedroom door behind him with the quiet click that had become the soundtrack of his cowardice.
He left a pot of coffee on for Fergal and headed out.
The morning unfolded with the almost mundane normalcy that characterized their weeks at the pack land. The perimeter was secure, the wards were stable, and the night watch reported nothing unusual as they handed off to the day shift. A quick meeting with Fallon about some improvements for the wards Gregor wanted to suggest. A conversation with Erwan and Emma about the ongoing intelligence analysis and whether they’d made progress identifying the Murphy alphas’ new location.
He saw Fergal once during the morning—crossing the yard with Zack, deep in conversation about something administrative, his hands gesturing in the animated way they did when his mind was fully engaged. He’d looked up when Gregor passed, and their eyes had met, and the complex negotiation that passed between them in that half-second—love, hurt, longing, frustration, the desperate wish that things were different—was more exhausting than any combat Gregor had ever experienced.
Neither of them stopped walking.
By early afternoon, Gregor had completed his circuit of the extended perimeter—the wider route that took him along the tree line and up to the ridge that overlooked both pack territories. It was a ninety-minute walk that he’d stretched to two hours, partly out of thoroughness and partly, if he were honest, because returning to the cabin meant navigating another evening of loaded silences and careful distances.
The cowardice of that admission sat bitter on his tongue as he headed back.
He knew something was wrong before he reached the cabin door. The door was closed, the windows intact, and there were no signs of disturbance from the outside. It was something subtler. A prickle at the base of his skull, a dissonance in the air, the instinctive awareness of a man who had spent three and a half centuries calibrating his senses to detect threats before they materialized.
He opened the door and stepped inside. “Fergal?”
Silence.
The kitchen was empty. On the table, Fergal’s reading glasses sat next to a mug of coffee. Gregor touched the ceramic—warm. Not hot, not room temperature. Warm. Recently poured, recently abandoned.
He’d missed him by minutes.
“Fergal?” Louder now, though the cabin was small enough that the first call should have reached every corner. Bedroom—empty, the bed made, Fergal’s boots gone from their usual spot by the door. Bathroom—empty. Living area—empty.
His jacket was gone. His boots were gone. His reading glasses were on the table, which meant he’d left in a hurry—Fergal never went anywhere without those glasses unless he was moving too fast to remember them.
Then he saw the note.
A piece of paper on the kitchen table, half-hidden under the reading glasses. Torn from one of Fergal’s notebooks, the handwriting was hasty—Fergal’s usual precise script degraded into something rushed and uneven, the pen pressed hard enough to score the paper.
Had to handle something. Back soon. Don’t worry.
Gregor read it three times, and each reading drove the spike of ice deeper into his gut.
This was wrong. Everything about it was wrong. Fergal didn’t write vague notes. Fergal was constitutionally incapable of vagueness—the man who specified his coffee preferences to the gram, who cited Code subsections from memory, who described his emotions with the precision of a legal filing. If Fergal needed to go somewhere, he’d say where, why, and how long. The only reason for this vagueness was that the truth likely would’ve stopped Gregor from letting him go.
Letting him go. As if Gregor would have let him go anywhere by himself without?—
The connection hit him like a hammer blow.
It wasn’t words. It wasn’t images. It was pure emotion—Fergal’s fear, bright and sharp and overwhelming, slamming into Gregor’s consciousness. Terror so acute it tasted like metal on Gregor’s tongue. And underneath it, threaded through the fear like a dark current, the unmistakable signature of Murphy magic—that oily, invasive resonance Gregor would recognize until the day he died.
