Chapter 153: Chapter 153: Eight

“You seem distressed.”

Dean looked at him with the hollow fury of a man who had suffered too much to tolerate that sentence.

“Don’t you think,” he demanded, “that the past twenty-four hours gave me the right to be?”

Arion said nothing.

Dean sat up a little more on the pillows, coffee abandoned somewhere near his thigh, and spread one hand in offended emphasis. “I still have a bite mark on my butthole, Arion.”

Silence.

Complete, immaculate silence.

Arion blinked once.

Then, with the composure of a man who should have been arrested on principle, he said, “That is a very specific grievance.”

Dean made a strangled sound. “Because it is a very specific injury.”

Arion grinned, shameless enough that Dean could actually see the pride in him, and that alone was offensive.

“Now,” Dean said, pointing at him with deep suspicion, “leave Nero and his emotional war crimes aside and tell me about your… sigma thing.”

Arion’s grin stayed. “You’ll receive the official—”

“Not administrative and military shit. I can’t take it right now.” Dean cut him off flatly. “You tell me.”

That took some of the brightness out of Arion’s expression. Not all of it, because apparently the man was still pleased with himself on some primal level, but enough for the grin to fade into something quieter.

“It happened when I was eight,” he said.

Dean stilled.

Arion leaned back a little, one arm resting over the chair, posture loose in a way that didn’t match the story at all. “There had been a routine pushback at one of the mutant zones. Soldiers came back injured, some exposed. At first everyone thought it was contained. It wasn’t.”

Dean said nothing.

“One of the soldiers came back intentionally infected,” Arion went on. “A woman. A dominant omega. We found out later she’d wanted revenge on the imperial house for years. Father chose Minerva as his second wife, and she was married off to another dominant alpha instead. She blamed Minerva for all of it. For the life she thought she should have had. For what she became after.”

Dean’s mouth tightened. “She came for Minerva?”

“For Gregoriana, first.” Arion’s voice stayed even, but there was something colder under it now. “Minerva’s first child. But the mutation was moving through her faster than expected, and I was closer when she got inside.”

Dean’s fingers tightened around the coffee cup without him realizing it.

“Killian stepped between us,” Arion said.

Dean looked up sharply.

“I got the scar.” Arion touched his face without thinking, fingertips near the old mark. “He took the rest.”

Dean swallowed. “Killian… Windstone’s friend?”

Arion nodded once. “Yes. He died a few seconds later. In Uncle Dax’s arms.”

The room went quiet.

Dean had heard the name before, the kind of name that people said with caution because it represented old grief, old loyalty, and the kind of sacrifice that never stopped resonating through a family.

Arion looked away for a moment, not evasive, just elsewhere. “I was infected. The physicians in the capital couldn’t stabilize it fast enough, so they sent me to Saha.”

Dean frowned. “For how long?”

“Four months.”

Dean stared. “At eight years old?”

Arion nodded.

“For most of it,” he said, “I was sedated.”

That hit Dean harder than he expected.

Arion’s voice stayed calm, but not distant. More like he had said these facts enough times to survive them. “I don’t remember all of it clearly. I remember waking up in pieces. Heat. People holding me down. Then nothing. Then another room. Another voice. Another needle. They kept me asleep because every time I woke fully, the mutation reacted. Fever, aggression, pheromones, pain… my body stopped acting like a child’s.”

Dean felt something tight settle in his chest.

“My parents couldn’t stay the whole time,” Arion said. “They came when they could, but they still had the empire, the court, the rest of my siblings, and the fallout from the attack. If both of them disappeared into Saha for months, the capital would’ve torn itself apart.”

Dean’s voice came quieter. “So who stayed?”

Arion looked at him then.

“Dax,” he said. “And Chris.”

Dean blinked.

Arion’s mouth moved faintly, not a smile, just something softer around the edges. “They were there when my parents couldn’t be. Dax because once he decided I wasn’t dying, he turned it into a personal war. Chris because he is a lot better with children than he wants to admit. They sat with me. Signed off on treatments when Father couldn’t get there in time. Stayed through the bad nights.” His gaze dropped for a second. “When I woke up frightened, it was usually one of them there.”

Dean looked down at his coffee.

Of course it had been them. Of course.

Arion exhaled slowly. “The treatment saved me. But it also changed me.”

Dean lifted his head again.

“The mutation forced my first rut at eight.”

Dean went very still. “What?”

Arion held his gaze.

“It was the only chance they had,” he said quietly. “There was nothing else left to do.”

Dean stared at him.

Arion looked away for a moment, jaw shifting once before he continued. “You know Dax’s physicians. You know how they think. Full dominant individuals are immune to the mutations and to the pheromonal corruption that comes with them. Their logic was simple: if my body could be pushed hard enough, fast enough, into full dominance, it might survive.”

Dean’s mouth parted, but no words came out.

“They didn’t know if it would work,” Arion said. “Only that if they did nothing, I would die.”

The silence that followed felt heavier than anything before it.

Dean’s fingers tightened around the coffee cup. “So they forced your body into a rut at eight years old.”

“Yes.”

His answer came too calmly.

Dean looked at him like he wanted to be angry at someone, anyone, but the target had lived too long in the past to touch.

“That’s…” Dean stopped, because ’horrible’ felt too small and ’monstrous’ felt too theatrical, and neither one came close enough to what it did to him hearing it. “For fuck sake, Arion.”

Arion’s eyes dropped briefly to the floor, then back to him. “It kept me alive.”

Dean swallowed hard.

That was the problem, wasn’t it? It had worked. It had been brutal and wrong and probably the only available answer all at once. There was no clean place to put that kind of truth.

“So that was it,” Dean said more quietly now. “They forced the shift. And after that your body just… kept going.”

Arion nodded once. “After that, it never really stopped being part of me.”

Dean looked at him for a long second, then said, with the kind of careful disbelief that only made it sadder, “You were eight.”

This time Arion didn’t answer right away.

When he did, his voice was softer. “Yes.

Dean looked away first because there was suddenly something unbearable in holding eye contact through that. He took a breath and then another, and when he spoke again, his voice had lost some of its bite.

“Do you remember the attack?”

“Every second of it.”

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