Chapter 172: Chapter 172: The Problem With Distance [Win-Win]

The problem with distance, Sebastian thought, was that people lied about it constantly.

They spoke of it as if distance brought clarity. As if leaving one court for another, one capital for another, and one set of duties for another automatically thinned whatever had been left unresolved. As if travel itself performed some elegant internal correction and turned discomfort into perspective.

It did not.

It simply removed distractions, leaving a man alone with the exact shape of what he had said.

Sebastian sat in his office at Fitzgeralt Manor with three open documents before him and absorbed none of them.

The room, like most of the manor, was built with wealth that no longer needed to announce itself. Dark wood. Tall windows. Stone framed in old elegance and threaded with modern security so discreetly embedded it became part of the architecture rather than an addition to it. Beyond the glass, the Fitzgeralt grounds spread out in winter restraint, as in north of Palatine, winter was staying more than anywhere. The house itself was less a manor than a private estate complex wearing the face of old nobility.

Usually Sebastian liked that about it.

There was enough space here to make silence feel intentional.

Today it felt punitive.

He looked again at the briefing in front of him, saw that his eyes had passed over the same paragraph four times, and let the tablet fall flat onto the desk with more irritation than the object deserved.

Nero’s voice came back at once.

’You don’t get to do that.’

Sebastian leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling for a moment, jaw set.

It had been two weeks.

Two weeks since the confession, the fracture, and the exact point at which Sebastian had realized, too late and with growing dissatisfaction, that he had made a very dumb mistake.

No, the problem was the way he had done it.

The way Nero had looked at him after the word outgrow.

Sebastian shut his eyes briefly.

That part had not improved with repetition.

At the time, he had told himself he was managing a difficult situation. De-escalating.

Drawing a clean line before a younger man’s intensity could turn into something worse, something that would contaminate work, family, logistics, political structure, and all the things that actually mattered once people stopped being romantic about desire and began dealing with the damage it caused.

He groaned audibly and let his head fall backwards onto the headrest of his chair.

Which, naturally, was the exact moment someone knocked.

Sebastian did not move.

The knock came again, measured and entirely too patient.

“I’m dead,” Sebastian said to the ceiling. “Come back tomorrow.”

The door opened anyway.

Lucas stepped in with the calm inevitability of a man who had birthed children, survived political marriage, and therefore no longer recognized lesser forms of resistance as meaningful. He carried a slim stack of folders under one arm and a tablet in the other hand, all of it arranged with the neat precision of someone arriving to ruin another person’s evening in an organized fashion.

Sebastian lifted his head just enough to look at him and immediately frowned. “No.”

Lucas shut the door behind him. “What an emotional greeting.”

“I mean it,” Sebastian said, straightening a little in his chair. “Take those back.”

Lucas glanced down at the folders as if noticing them for the first time. “These?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

Sebastian looked at him flatly. “I appreciate that you’ve built a life around elegance and menace, but in this case I need you to choose compassion.”

Lucas crossed the room at an unhurried pace and set the folders on the desk anyway.

The sound they made against the wood was offensively final.

Sebastian stared at them like they were an assassination attempt in administrative form.

“Lucas.”

Lucas ignored the tone with the indifference of a parent who had long ago learned which forms of offense deserved respect and which were merely decorative. “It isn’t much. Two of them are summaries. One is only waiting for your signature. The tablet has the revised route approvals Trevor asked to be sent through your office because apparently the world enjoys using three levels of nobility where one competent person would do.”

Sebastian dragged one hand down his face. “I liked you better before you sat down with Trevor and became domesticated by bureaucracy.”

Lucas arched a brow and moved toward the chair opposite the desk, sitting without invitation. “You have always lied badly under stress.”

“That is slander.”

“Are you going to tell me what happened in Alamina,” Lucas asked, sitting in one of the chairs in front of Sebastian’s desk, “or will you continue to sulk and brood by yourself?”

Sebastian gave him a flat look from across the desk. “I am not sulking.”

Lucas crossed one leg over the other with the calm of a man who had raised children and therefore no longer found denial especially persuasive. “You are in a dim office, rejecting paperwork on instinct, and staring at the wall like a widowed duke in a prestige drama.”

Sebastian’s mouth twitched despite himself. “That is a very hostile description.”

“It is also accurate.” Lucas adjusted the folder on his knee, then added, before Sebastian could attempt a cleaner escape, “And before you try to say nothing, know that we talked with Dean. He is fine. Which means something happened on your part.”

For one long second Sebastian said nothing.

Then he leaned back into his chair and exhaled through his nose. “You two spoke to Dean?”

Lucas watched him over the rim of his calm, unreadable expression. “Trevor did first. I was present for the version after that.”

“And he told you he was fine.”

“He is fine,” Lucas said. “Annoying, dramatic, still too quick with his mouth, and entirely capable of complaining about Arion with full energy. So yes. Fine.”

Sebastian looked away toward the windows.

Outside, evening had settled properly over Fitzgeralt Manor. The long panes reflected the office back at itself now – gold from the lamps, deep shadow in the corners, and the faint outline of his own posture thrown back at him in dark glass.

Lucas remained patient for exactly one breath more.

“Sebastian.”

He hated that tone. Not because it was sharp. It was not. Lucas rarely required sharpness when he chose the quieter register. It carried the full weight of ’I already know enough to wait comfortably.’

Sebastian rubbed a hand over his face. “It was not about Dean.”

Lucas’s brows rose slightly. “No. I assumed as much the moment you started looking offended by furniture.”

“That is a ridiculous sentence.”

“And yet here we are.”

Lucas let the silence sit between them without crowding it, which was somehow worse than pushing. He knew exactly when not to press and exactly how that made refusal feel increasingly childish.

Sebastian looked down at the desk, at the folders Lucas had brought as camouflage for concern, and found, with some irritation, that there was no elegant way around this anymore.

“It was Nero,” he said.

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