Chapter 184: Chapter 184: Pacing

Nero was, to his enormous personal offense, sent to the hospital.

An actual hospital wing under guarded transfer, because once the medic learned that the puncture wound had involved ring-floor metal, scorched debris, and ’some uncertainty’ about what exactly had passed through Nero’s shoulder before he had kept fighting anyway, the conversation had ceased being academic and become administrative.

Nero had objected to this with the full dignity of a prince being loaded into a medical transport against his better judgment.

Arion had ignored him.

Sylvia, once released from the university after extracting a promise from Dean that he would not ’do anything else deranged before dinner,’ was sent home with a palace car and enough delight in her eyes to make it clear that she intended to remember every second of the afternoon forever.

That left Dean.

Which was, Arion had discovered, both the central problem and the thing he wanted in front of him most.

Now Dean was in their suite.

Freshly showered. Clean. Medicated for nothing, because he had argued his way out of anything stronger than antiseptic and a nasal pack and had then glared his way through the rest. He wore a dark bathrobe loosely tied at the waist and sat on the couch in the sitting room with one leg folded under him, the other stretched out, fingers wrapped around a mug so hot it was probably offensive to human skin.

He looked calmer.

Arion paced.

The suite was quiet around them in the expensive, insulated way of royal residences. Evening had already settled outside the tall windows. The lights were low. Dinner had been delayed on Arion’s order and then forgotten because he was too busy being furious and Dean was too busy pretending not to notice.

The mug clicked softly against porcelain when Dean set it down on the table.

“You are making the floor nervous,” he said.

Arion did not stop pacing.

“That floor has survived military briefings, three ministers, and my father,” he replied. “It can survive me.”

Dean watched him cross from one end of the room to the other and back again. “I’m beginning to think this is not about the floor.”

“No?”

“No.”

Arion turned at the far end of the room and came back again with the same measured violence he had been carrying since the ring. He had showered too, changing out of the tactical uniform into dark trousers and a black shirt, sleeves rolled once at the forearms, collar open. It only made the anger cleaner.

“You’ve looked calmer while discussing contamination response budgets,” Dean said.

“That is because contamination response budgets do not usually bleed on me.”

Dean’s brows lifted slightly. “That feels accusatory.”

“It is accusatory.”

Dean leaned back into the couch, mug reclaimed, as if settling in for a conversation he had not wanted but was determined to survive in style alone. “You are still overreacting.”

Arion stopped.

He stood at the edge of the rug and looked at Dean in a silence sharp enough to draw blood.

Dean, infuriatingly, held his gaze.

“You think,” Arion said at last, very evenly, “that I am overreacting.”

“Yes.”

“You were in a combat ring with Nero.”

“Yes.”

“You had a nosebleed, a split lip, bruised ribs, and enough adrenaline in your bloodstream to make your pupils look like a tactical concern.”

Dean considered that. “The tactical concern part feels complimentary.”

Arion stared at him.

Dean lifted the mug and took a careful sip.

Arion resumed pacing because sitting down now might have been murder.

“This is not,” he said, crossing the room again, “about whether you can fight.”

“I’m glad you know that, because I can.”

“I know you can.”

“That sounded annoyed.”

“It was.”

Dean made a small face into the rim of the mug. “You continue to make skill sound like a personal insult.”

Arion turned again, slower this time. “What I am finding personally insulting is the discovery that you and Nero used to do that often enough to classify it as normal.”

Dean’s fingers tightened once around the mug as realization finally landed. “You are jealous.”

The room went still.

As the statement was right in a way, Arion would have preferred to discover it privately and at a less humiliating speed.

He did not answer at once, which was answer enough.

Dean stared at him over the rim of the mug, bruised, clean from the shower, still wrapped in a robe and somehow more dangerous like this than he had been bleeding in the ring.

“Oh,” Dean said again, softer now, and far more interested. “You actually are.”

Arion resumed his walking, this time turning to Dean and crossing the room until he was close enough to place his hands on each side of the omega. He tilted his head, his breath brushing Dean’s neck. “And if I am, what are you going to do?”

Dean did not answer immediately.

Which, for him, was answer enough to become interesting.

His fingers tightened once around the mug. His throat moved when he swallowed, and Arion, already too close and in too poor a mood for restraint to feel natural, watched that small motion with a concentration he did not bother to hide.

Then Dean set the mug down carefully on the low table beside him.

A good decision.

A necessary one.

Because his hands were no longer steady enough for hot liquid.

“That,” Dean said at last, and his voice had gone lower too, sharpened by the same curiosity now bright in his eyes, “depends.”

“On what?”

Dean leaned back slightly into the couch, though not away. If anything, the motion only exposed more of the clean line of his throat above the robe collar, more of the bruising beginning to darken there and lower at the clavicle, traces of the day laid out under lamplight like evidence Arion had already taken too personally.

“On what are you going to do next,” Dean corrected, smiling brightly now that he had found the exact edge of Arion’s composure and was clearly considering whether to lean on it harder.

Arion chuckled, low and dark, and raised a hand. He barely touched one of the bruises on Dean’s ribs.

Dean hissed.

That alone sobered something in Arion’s face.

“Nothing,” he said.

Dean’s brows lifted. “Nothing?”

“You’re hurt.”

“Well,” Dean said, voice dry despite the heat still between them, “that is deeply disappointing.”

Arion’s thumb brushed once, lighter now, over the darkening mark. “Not nothing,” he amended. “I will put a ban on you training with Nero.”

Dean stared at him.

Then laughed. A sharp, incredulous sound escaped him that ended in a wince when his ribs reminded him they had, in fact, been part of today.

“You cannot be serious.”

“I am entirely serious.”

Dean leaned back against the couch, looking at him as if he had become a particularly elegant administrative catastrophe. “You are trying to regulate my violence because you’re jealous.”

“I am trying,” Arion said, “to prevent you and my cousin from turning controlled combat into a blood ritual every time one of you has a difficult week.”

Dean’s mouth twitched. “Blood ritual is dramatic.”

“You will train with me.” Arion said, and there was no room left for comments from Dean.

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