Chapter 164: Chapter 164: Ask differently

“Yes,” Arion said.

There was not even the courtesy of denial.

Dean, already rearranging his expression into the cool disdain appropriate for a censored citizen, stopped for one offended beat and stared up at him. “You admit that with alarming ease.”

Arion’s hand remained at the back of his neck, broad and warm and entirely too poised for a man who had just interrupted an important and necessary speech with his mouth. “You were saying something stupid.”

Dean drew in a breath. “That is not how free expression works.”

“It is here.”

“That,” Dean informed him, “is monarchy talking.”

Arion’s gaze did not shift. “Yes.”

Dean’s outrage sharpened into something almost pure. “God. Incredible. No shame. No pretense. No attempt at democratic theater.”

“No.”

Dean stared.

Arion stared back, golden-eyed and impossible, his pheromones still settled through the corridor like the afterimage of a command. There was no apology in him. No embarrassment. No effort to soften the fact that he had kissed Dean silent because he had disliked the direction of the sentence.

Which, Dean thought furiously, would have been easier to resist if it had not been so catastrophically effective.

He hated effectiveness.

Especially in other people.

“You are a tyrant,” Dean said.

Arion considered that. “Sometimes.”

Dean let out a breath that was almost a laugh and much too close to surrender for his comfort. “At least you’re honest.”

Arion hummed, and with the calm inevitability of a natural disaster selecting a coastline, he bent, slid one arm under Dean’s knees, the other around his back, and lifted him cleanly off the floor.

Dean made a sound of pure betrayal.

“Arion.”

The prince had the audacity to look unsurprised by the protest.

He looked down at Arion with deeply injured dignity. “Put me down.”

“No.”

“You keep doing that.”

“Yes.”

Dean folded his arms as much as the position allowed, which was not enough to be elegant but had to do. “I would like the official record to show that I could have walked.”

“I know.”

“Then why am I in the air?”

Arion’s answer came without visible strain, his voice as calm as if he were discussing weather. “You are where I can control your damaged filter.”

“Are you regretting insisting that I be your mate?” Dean asked with a wide grin.

“No.”

Dean looked at him for a long, offended second.

Then his grin widened.

It was a dangerous grin. Entirely too pretty for the amount of trouble packed into it. The sort of expression that should have come with legal warnings and a physician on standby.

“Ah,” Dean said softly, with the pleased clarity of a man discovering exactly where to press. “So that’s what this is.”

Arion kept walking.

Dean, now comfortably installed in his arms like a hostage who had decided to become verbally decorative, tilted his head. “Not lust. Concern for my damaged filter.”

“Yes.”

Dean’s eyes brightened with immediate delight. “That is almost tender.”

Arion did not take the bait. “No.”

“It is,” Dean insisted. “You heard me threatening academic celibacy and structural separation, and now here you are, carrying me off because apparently my mouth can no longer be trusted unsupervised.”

“It couldn’t be trusted before.”

Dean sighed theatrically and let his head tip back against Arion’s arm with the graceful suffering of a prince’s greatest burden. “You know, in healthier relationships, people discuss boundaries.”

“In healthier relationships,” Arion said, “people don’t smile like that before announcing punitive abstinence.” He paused for a moment and continued. “But yes, we should talk about more important things.”

“Like my academic life under the limelight?” Dean tried to jab Arion again.

“Like the date for our marriage.”

Dean went completely still in his arms.

For one brief second, even his face forgot how to be expressive.

Then he blinked.

And slowly looked up at Arion as if checking whether the prince had, in fact, just detonated the corridor on purpose.

“The date,” Dean repeated.

“Yes.”

Arion said it with the same maddening calm he used for logistics, warfare, weather, and other equally ruinous forces.

Dean stared.

Then, because he was Dean and recovery from shock in him often took the form of immediate theatrical offense, he said, “That is not how one introduces a subject like that.”

Arion kept walking.

“That,” Dean continued, “is how one announces troop movement or tax reform. Not marriage.”

“It seemed efficient.”

Dean looked appalled. “Marriage is not an efficiency problem. Where is my ring first? Or the romance before it?”

Arion sighed, turned his shoulder, and opened the door to their suite and let Dean down carefully. “Dean, we are engaged and mated. You could be pregnant if I were not careful.”

Dean stopped in the doorway and stared at him.

Then he pointed with slow, wounded precision. “That is not romance. That is biology delivered like a threat.”

“It’s reality.”

“It’s a deeply unhelpful reality.”

Arion moved aside to let him in, then closed the door behind them with the finality of a man who knew this conversation would go on for a while.

The suite was warm, private, and offensively calm compared to Dean’s internal state. Late light spilled across the sitting room. Their rooms – their rooms, which was still an irritating phrase for how right it sounded – held the soft disorder of habitation rather than display. Dean turned to continue the argument with the force it deserved.

“Also,” he said, arms folding over his shirt, “we have already had two engagement ceremonies. Two. One in Palatine, so my empire could confirm I had not been stolen by a suspiciously tall Alaminian with terrible communication habits, and one here because apparently your court also required official proof that this disaster was now publicly encouraged.”

Arion set his phone and keys on the console by the door. “Yes.”

Dean stared. “You keep answering yes to things as if that counts as emotional participation.”

“It usually does.”

“No, it does not.” Dean followed him farther into the sitting room, his shirt slightly rumpled from being carried and his expression arranged into refined outrage. “You cannot bring up the date for our marriage like a scheduling update when we are already publicly engaged twice over.”

Arion glanced at him. “That sounds like a formatting objection, not a real one.”

Dean looked appalled. “Of course it is a real objection. Delivery matters. Atmosphere matters. Symbolism matters. We are royals. Half our lives are made of dangerously curated symbolism.”

Arion’s mouth moved faintly. “You seem to be handling yours well.”

Dean ignored that because it sounded perilously close to flirtation and he was trying to maintain structural offense. The suite wore the quiet disorder of actual living now instead of formal staging. A jacket hung over the back of a chair. A tablet sat charging beside a stack of reports. One of Dean’s university books lay open on the low table with a page marked halfway through.

He gestured at the room with increasing eloquence. “This is exactly my point. We are living together. We are engaged. We are mated. There have been ceremonies. Witnesses. Public statements. And yet somehow I am still expected to tolerate you announcing marriage logistics like we’re revising a meeting calendar.”

Arion, infuriating creature that he was, looked untroubled. “Would you like me to ask differently?”

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