Chapter 166: Chapter 166: Romantic Deficiencies

Dean looked at him.

Then he looked at him harder, because Arion had just said something so possessive and so confident that objecting to it with the proper force required at least a full second of recalibration.

“It already was,” Dean repeated.

“Yes.”

Dean’s eyes narrowed. “That is exactly the sort of sentence that makes me understand why entire parliaments want constitutional restraints on people like you.”

Arion did not seem especially moved by the criticism. His hand remained at the side of Dean’s neck, warm against the pearls, thumb resting just below the hidden mark, like the sentence had not been outrageous at all, merely factual.

Dean hated facts when Arion had them.

Mostly.

The suite had gone quiet around them. Late light stretched long across the floor. The city beyond the windows had softened into evening glass and a pale winter sky.

Dean finally lifted his own hand and touched the front of the collar again. “You do realize,” he said, “that if I keep accepting things from you in this tone, people will mistake it for tolerance.”

Arion’s mouth moved faintly. “It is tolerance.”

“No,” Dean said. “It is being selectively overwhelmed by quality.”

“That sounds expensive.”

“It is expensive.” Dean looked up at him. “Everything about you is expensive.”

Arion considered that. “You don’t seem to mind.”

“That,” Dean replied with injured dignity, “is not the point.”

A beat passed.

Then Arion said, more quietly now, “Set the date with me.”

Dean’s eyes lifted to his.

There was no teasing in Arion now. No smugness. No princely satisfaction at having maneuvered the conversation into place. Just that same annoying, unending certainty that this needed to be said clearly.

“Arion,” Dean said, and to his own annoyance it came out softer than intended.

Arion waited.

Dean let his hand fall from the collar and folded his arms instead, because he needed at least some physical expression of resistance if he was going to survive this with any sense of personal continuity.

“You want the date set because we’re already mated,” he said.

“Yes.”

Dean’s mouth twisted. “That is a terrible foundation for romance.”

“It’s a foundation for reality.”

Dean looked at him in disbelief. “You really do not have a single romantic bone in your giant body.”

That one landed.

Not painfully. Arion was too self-aware for pain over that, but it hit enough to make him pause.

Then, to Dean’s slight surprise, he said, “I know.”

Dean blinked.

Arion’s gaze did not shift. “I understand that you expected something else.”

That, more than any clever answer, made Dean still.

He had expected denial, perhaps. Or the usual calm insistence that what Arion did counted as romance simply because it was honest, possessive, and efficient enough to survive daylight. Which, aggravatingly, was often true.

Instead, Arion continued, still watching him in that direct, impossible way of his.

“I know you were hoping for something else…” A small pause. “Softer, maybe. Something that sounded less like planning and more like wanting.”

Dean stared.

Because of course the worst thing Arion could do in a moment like this was prove that he understood the criticism exactly and had simply chosen not to disguise himself on the way to it.

Dean’s expression narrowed, then softened, then settled somewhere between them in an expression of profound irritation.

“That,” he said, “was almost perceptive enough to qualify as courtship.”

Arion’s mouth moved faintly. “I’ve been courting you for months.”

Dean gasped softly. “No. Absolutely not. You have been surrounding me with power, solving practical problems, carrying me around like a stolen constitutional amendment, and occasionally kissing me into silence. That is not the same thing.”

“You don’t have to decide today,” Arion said, “or this month. But it should be set.”

Dean folded his arms tighter, less for emphasis now than to keep himself from doing something structurally compromising like reaching for the collar again while Arion was looking at him like that.

“You are a menace,” Dean said, frowning. “Give me at least a few months of actually dating you before you crown my neck with a pheromone-locked collar and start circling dates for a state wedding.”

Arion looked at him steadily. “Why?”

The fact that it was a real question made Dean more annoyed.

“Oh, for the love of—”

He turned as if to leave, dramatic by instinct, but Arion caught him before he made it more than two steps. One strong hand settled over Dean’s stomach, and the prince drew him back enough to stop the retreat without turning it into a struggle.

“Talk to me,” Arion said, his voice low enough to send an entirely traitorous line of shivers down Dean’s spine.

He stood there for a moment with Arion’s hand at his middle and the new collar still warm at his throat and gathered himself the way one gathered paper before setting it on fire deliberately.

Then he said, more quietly than before, “That is what I asked for from the very beginning.”

Arion didn’t move.

Dean went on, forcing himself not to turn this into theater just because it was easier when everything hurt. “Time. I asked you for time.” He turned in Arion’s hold then, enough to face him properly. “Not because I don’t want this. Not because I don’t want you. I do. I want the mark, I want the bond, I want…” He made a frustrated sound and gestured vaguely between them. “All of it. But wanting all of it does not mean I want to speed-run my life because you’re built like inevitability and think in straight lines.”

Arion’s hand stayed where it was, but his face showed that he understood.

Dean’s expression tightened. “You’re older than me. You’ve been Crown Prince longer than I’ve been alive. You don’t feel the need to take your time because you already know who you are in all this.” He was trying to say it as simply as possible, but his voice got tighter. “I’m nineteen, Arion.”

Silence.

Dean held his gaze. “Nineteen. That is not a minor technical inconvenience in your path to certainty. That is my actual age, and I would like the right to move through some of this at a pace that doesn’t feel like I’m being absorbed by your confidence.”

Arion’s jaw shifted once.

Dean saw it and pressed on, because if he stopped now, he would lose the nerve to say the rest.

“I understood the first collar in Palatine. I understood why.” His fingers lifted to the pearls at his throat. “This one… I don’t love that you locked it to your pheromones without asking me first.”

Dean watched that land too. “I was willing to overlook it,” he said. “I was. Because I know you. Because I understand what you meant by it. Because I know this,” his fingertips brushed the pearls once, “wasn’t done to control me.”

Arion said nothing.

Dean’s mouth flattened. “But now, with marriage dangling in front of me too, I don’t want to just let it pass. Not this time.”

A beat stretched.

Then Arion said, very evenly, “Dean.”

“No.” Dean shook his head once. “You don’t get to ’Dean’ me through this.” His fingers went to the front of the collar again. “You don’t get to continue presenting certainty as if it negates my need to arrive at it properly.”

Arion’s hand finally left Dean’s stomach.

Dean almost regretted that immediately, which was humiliating, but not enough to stop.

“I want a relationship with you,” Dean said. “An actual one. Not just the bond, not just the title, not just everyone else rearranging the world around what we are. I want the part in between too. I want to date you. I want to choose things with you.” His eyes narrowed. “And I would very much like to choose what closes around my throat.”

That, at last, drew visible stillness out of Arion.

Not the calm, princely kind.

The more dangerous one. The kind that meant something had finally reached the exact place it needed to.

Dean held his gaze for one second longer.

Then he reached for the clasp.

Arion moved at once. “Dean—”

The clasp clicked open.

Both of them went still.

The pearls loosened. Dean caught the collar before it could slip fully and lowered it slowly into his own hand.

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