Chapter 187: Chapter 187: Deal

Dean blinked, as if that had not been the question he expected after all the rest.

“I did,” he said.

Arion’s expression did not move.

Dean pressed on anyway, visibly aware that this answer needed better scaffolding than the first one. “When I broke the pheromonal lock on the collar. I told you I could neutralize things. I just…” He grimaced. “I just didn’t say it worked in combat too.”

Arion held his gaze. “You forgot.”

Dean, to his own evident irritation, had the decency to look ashamed again. “With everything that happened between us, I just… forgot I could do it.” His mouth twisted faintly. “I remembered when you pissed me off with the collar.”

There was a beat of silence.

Then another.

The office stayed very still around them.

Arion looked at him.

Dean looked back.

And because the universe had apparently committed itself to making this conversation progressively more absurd, Arion heard himself say, “You rediscovered a strategically useful combat ability because I made you angry.”

Dean lifted one shoulder weakly. “That is one interpretation.”

“It is the most offensive interpretation.”

“It is also, unfortunately, accurate.”

Arion laughed once.

This time there was a little humor in it, edged and dark and dangerous.

Dean’s brows rose a fraction. “You are taking this better than expected.”

“No,” Arion said. “I’m taking this exactly as badly as expected. I’m simply running out of categories.”

Dean looked down at the report in his hand and muttered, “That feels fair.”

Arion stepped closer, close enough that the office desk, the screens, and the secure doors, all of it began losing its institutional look again.

“So let me understand the sequence properly,” he said. “You learned you could shut Nero down at close range because you were angry at losing.”

“Yes.”

“You did not report it because neither of you thought it through.”

“Yes.”

“You later demonstrated a version of the same ability by breaking the pheromonal lock on your collar.”

“Yes.”

“And then, with everything else happening between us, you forgot the combat implications until I made you angry enough for your body to remember.”

Dean looked like he wanted to object to the emotional framing and could not, on technical grounds, find a lie fast enough.

“Yes,” he admitted.

Arion took that in.

Then he nodded slowly, as if the final piece of the architecture had fallen into place.

“That,” he said, “is the most ’Dean’ explanation I have ever heard in my life.”

Dean stared. “That was not complimentary.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

Dean huffed a short breath that almost became a laugh and died halfway. “Look, I know it sounds irresponsible…”

“I’m sorry,” Arion said.

That alone made Dean look up properly.

Arion reached out with his right hand. “For making you angry about the collar. You said in Palatine that you wanted collars if they came from me.”

Dean looked at the hand for one beat, then took it.

That was apparently permission enough for Arion, because the next second Dean was pulled clean out of his own space and into the broad heat of his mate’s chest with an efficiency that made protest structurally difficult.

Dean caught himself against him on instinct, one hand flattening at Arion’s side. “I wasn’t angry about the collar itself,” he said, voice rougher now from proximity as much as honesty. “I was angry that you didn’t ask about the pheromone lock.”

Arion’s arm tightened around him once, not trapping, just keeping him there as if he had no intention of letting distance reassert itself now that he had chosen contact. “You were clear enough about that.”

Dean huffed. “You like when I order you around.”

Arion wisely said nothing.

Dean narrowed his eyes at once. “That silence was incriminating.”

“It was tactical.”

“That is not a denial.”

“No.”

Dean looked up at him from where Arion still had him folded against that infuriatingly broad chest, one hand splayed at his side as if he had not just been pulled in by a man who was supposed to be discussing contamination logistics and not quietly proving that honesty and physical force were compatible management styles.

“You are impossible,” Dean said.

Arion hummed. “Yes, we established that the first time we met.”

Then his voice lowered in a tone that Dean resented with all his might. Calm and entirely too intimate for a man about to hand him something weighty and irreversible.

“And now,” Arion said, “you are going to help me understand exactly how far this ability goes.”

Dean went still.

Not in an obvious way, at least not to most people. But Arion felt it anyway, in the brief tightening of the hand at his side, in the fractional shift of Dean’s breath where it met the front of his shirt.

“There it is,” Dean muttered. “That tone.”

Arion looked down at him. “What tone?”

“The one that says you’ve decided I’m useful in a way that is going to become my problem for the rest of my natural life.”

Arion considered that. “That does sound like me.”

“It does,” Dean said darkly. “I hate that you know it.”

“I don’t think you hate it.”

“I think you should be careful making claims while I’m close enough to test whether your own nervous system can be neutralized.”

That, unfortunately, made Arion smile.

Dean saw it and looked offended on principle. “Stop reacting like that. You are not supposed to enjoy being threatened in the middle of a strategic conversation.”

“I enjoy competent people telling me difficult truths,” Arion said.

“That is an infuriatingly flattering way to describe what just happened.”

“It is also accurate.”

Dean made a face, but it lacked its usual force. Some of the fight had already left him, blunted by proximity and Arion’s more dangerous words.

Arion looked at him for one beat longer, then said, with what might generously have been called shame and more accurately qualified as strategic moral collapse, “You could take your exams at the university only if you help me.”

The silence that followed was extraordinary.

Dean blinked.

Then blinked again.

Not because he had misheard him.

Because he had heard him perfectly and now needed a second to appreciate the full indecency of the sentence.

“You,” he said slowly, “are trying to bribe me with remote exam access.”

Arion’s expression did not move. “I’m negotiating.”

“No,” Dean said. “You’re offering me the holy grail after denying it on principle.”

“That principle has become flexible.”

Dean stared.

Because this was not a vague concession. This was the thing. The exact thing. The one he had wanted the moment he found out Nero treated university like a seasonal inconvenience while Dean had been marched into physical attendance under speeches about structure, integration, and the moral duty of existing in hallways.

Arion had refused then.

And now he was standing here, in his office, using it as leverage.

Dean wanted to help without benefits; he was genuinely curious about the limits of his ability, but he wasn’t stupid.

“I accept.”

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