If you still want me after that, I’m yours. Completely, without walls, without doors, without a single secret between us.
And if you don’t, if the truth is too much, if what I did is unforgivable, I’ll accept it. I’ll let you go.
I swear on everything I am.
He opened his eyes, picked up Fergal’s reading glasses that he’d put on the table, folded them carefully, and put them back in his breast pocket.
Then the commander took over, and Gregor went to war.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The first thing Fergal noticed when he woke up was the silence.
Not the absence of sound because he could hear plenty of noises. Footsteps in a corridor beyond the locked door. Muffled voices, too distant to make out words. The creak of old wood settling. The low, persistent hum of magical wards pressed so thick against the walls they were almost audible.
No, the silence was inside him. The place where Gregor should’ve been—that constant, warm presence at the edge of his awareness that he’d stopped noticing the way you stopped noticing your own heartbeat—was empty. Hollow. A frequency gone dead, leaving behind nothing.
He didn’t know when that connection had become a part of him, couldn’t pinpoint the moment it had shifted from something he felt to something he was. But its absence was devastating in a way that went beyond emotion into something physical—a phantom limb sensation, his consciousness reaching for something that had been amputated and finding only the echo of where it used to be.
Gregor.
Nothing. Not even static. Just the flat, featureless silence of a wall that no amount of reaching could penetrate.
Fergal opened his eyes, then slowly sat up, taking inventory.
The room was small—twelve feet by ten, he estimated from his position on a narrow cot against the far wall. Bare wooden floors, faded wallpaper, and a single window that admitted gray afternoon light through glass that shimmered faintly with the telltale iridescence of magical sealing. A door, solid wood, no handle on the inside but otherwise not fortified, other than by magic, he assumed. A bucket in the corner that he chose not to think about. And his single cot with a flimsy mattress and an even thinner excuse for a blanket. It was scratchy and it smelled.
No other furniture. No other features.
His body was intact—no injuries, no restraints, no lingering pain beyond a dull headache that was probably a side effect of whatever dampening magic they’d used on him. He was still wearing the same clothes, though they’d taken off his boots. No reading glasses because he’d left those on the kitchen table next to a cup of coffee that was probably still warm when Gregor found it.
Because he would’ve found it by now. He would know Fergal was gone.
The thought was simultaneously comforting and agonizing. Gregor would’ve come home from patrol, found the empty cabin, the note, the warm coffee, and the reading glasses sitting on the table like a fucking monument to everything Fergal had left behind. And he would’ve blamed himself. Immediately, completely, with the same ruthless self-judgment he applied to every perceived failure.
Fergal pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes and breathed through the wave of grief that crashed over him. Not for himself—he was alive, uninjured, and his mind was working. Grief for what he’d done to Gregor. For the note that said nothing. For the silence where their connection should be. For the fact that the last real conversation they’d had was a fightabout secrets, and now Fergal was the one who’d left without telling the truth.
The irony was enough to choke on.
He’d been sitting at the kitchen table, nursing his second coffee and pretending to read a legal brief while actually composing imaginary speeches to Gregor in his head. Apologies. Demands. Pleas. The same rotating script he’d been writing and discarding for three days, none of them right, none of them sufficient to bridge the gap between “I need to know your secret” and “I love you regardless.”
Then Simon had knocked on the door.
The omega’s face had told Fergal everything before a single word was spoken. White as paper, eyes red-rimmed, hands shaking so badly he could barely hold the small stone clutched in his right fist—the same stone Fergal had occasionally seen him turning over in his fingers, which he’d assumed was a comfort object. A trauma survivor’s talisman.
It wasn’t a talisman. It was a communication device.
“They’re going to kill Gregor.” Simon’s voice had been barely a whisper, raw with terror. “They know his patrol route. They have men positioned along the perimeter. If you don’t come to the eastern tree line alone within fifteen minutes, they’ll ambush him.”
Fifteen minutes. Fergal’s mind had started running scenarios before Simon finished the sentence. The public coms were out. Those would be monitored. So would phone calls to Gregor, he figured.
He could call Blair, but it would take Blair at least ten minutes to reach Gregor’s position on the extended route, assuming Blair was even in the compound and not on his own patrol. Another option was to mobilize the pack’s security, but the visible movement would alert whoever was watching, potentially triggering an early ambush. Should he try to findGregor himself? The extended route covered miles of terrain through forest and along ridge lines, and Fergal didn’t know which section Gregor was on right now.
Fifteen minutes. Not enough time for any of it.
“What do they want?” Fergal had asked, his voice steady despite the ice forming in his chest.
“You. Just you. They said if you come alone, they’ll let him live.”
