Chapter 194: Chapter 194: I should’ve stopped.

The silence that followed was not hospital silence.

Machines still breathed in their soft mechanical rhythm. A monitor somewhere to Dean’s left gave a steady pulse. Filtered air still moved through the vents with antiseptic indifference. But the room itself changed once the last person left.

Dean watched Arion in offended disbelief as Arion rose fully from the bed.

The movement was controlled, but not painless. Dean saw that too. The slight tightening at the mouth. The fractionally careful set of his shoulders. The pull at the ribs under the fresh bandaging. The shoulder dressing had already begun to stain through again in a narrow crescent of red.

“You are bleeding through your shirt,” Dean said.

Arion ignored that and crossed the space between the beds.

Dean hated how quickly the room reorganized around that fact.

“You sent everyone out,” Dean said, because apparently if he kept talking long enough, he could avoid the more dangerous parts of this. “Which usually means one of two things. Either you’re about to say something emotionally catastrophic, or you’ve finally decided to murder me privately, which honestly feels logistically cleaner than doing it in front of hospital staff.”

Arion stopped beside the bed.

Dean looked up at him.

Arion looked down.

It was deeply unfair, Dean thought, that a man could look that composed while visibly injured.

The cut beneath Arion’s jaw had been sealed, but Dean remembered exactly where it had split, how the blood had tracked hot and bright down his throat.

The bruising at the ribs was darker now under the thin hospital fabric. His collarbone had been dressed. His forearm had been cleaned. He looked less ruined than Dean felt, which was indecent, but much more hurt than Arion was willing to admit, which was somehow worse.

Dean shifted a fraction in the bed and immediately met the sharp edge of his own ribs.

He hissed.

Arion’s hand moved at once, flattening lightly against the mattress near Dean’s shoulder, there in case Dean chose to make another bad choice.

“Don’t,” Arion said.

Dean stared at the ceiling. “That word is doing offensive amounts of labor today.”

“You’re making it work.”

“That’s because everyone around me has become authoritarian.”

Arion’s eyes did not leave his face. “I’m sorry. You should not have been this wounded. I…”

He stopped there.

Because Arion was not a man who often failed to finish his own sentences. He cut them short on purpose. He chose silence when silence served him better than speech. But this felt different.

Dean turned his head a fraction from the ceiling and immediately regretted it with every vertebra. “That sounded alarmingly human.”

Arion did not take the exit.

For one second he simply stood there, one hand still on the bed rail, the other hanging loose at his side, the dressing at his shoulder faintly darkening again where the wound had started to bleed through.

When he spoke again, his voice was quieter.

“In that moment,” he said, “I lost control.”

He took a long breath.

“For the last months I was…” Arion’s mouth flattened slightly, as if he disliked even the idea of the admission. “I forgot how bad it was before you. I forgot how the backlash from the pheromones felt. I forgot how close I was to going berserk all the time.”

Dean went still.

Arion looked at him, not away. That made it worse.

“After the bond settled,” he said, “it became quieter. Then normal. Then distant enough that I stopped measuring myself against it every hour.” His fingers tightened once around the rail. “I stopped expecting it.”

Dean stared at him.

Because yes, that tracked. Of course it did. Stabilization that lasted long enough would become structure. A structure that held long enough became an assumption. Bodies adapted fastest to relief; that was one of their more offensive habits. If you stay away from pain long enough, even the memory of it starts to fade.

Arion’s gaze did not leave him. “When you hit the gland and the bond dropped, it all returned at once.”

Dean swallowed.

Arion went on, and the lack of dramatics in his tone made it sharper. “The backlash…” He paused only briefly. “Every part of me you have been holding steady came back at full force, and it came back before I could think.”

Dean looked away first, to the sterile wall, then the too-white ceiling, because it was easier to be irritated at architecture than at that truth.

After a second, he said, “That is an aggressively bad review of your pre-me condition.”

“Yes.”

“That yes is doing offensive amounts of work.”

“It is accurate.”

Dean let out a careful breath through his nose. “You really mean you forgot.”

“Yes.”

Arion’s voice stayed low. “Not completely. I remembered it abstractly. Like an old injury you know should ache when it rains.” His jaw shifted once. “I did not remember it in my body anymore.”

That one went through Dean cleanly enough to hurt.

He looked back at him.

Arion had not moved. He was still standing there like the room was holding him upright through discipline alone, too visibly in control for a man confessing that for one second his entire nervous system had remembered the worst version of itself.

Dean’s mouth twisted. “That feels like information I should have had before I weaponized your neck.”

“You should have.”

The answer came without hesitation.

Dean blinked once.

That was not what he had expected. He had expected resistance, perhaps. A cleaner redirection. Some version of this changes nothing. Instead, Arion had simply accepted the point like a man cataloging damage correctly.

“You’re making that worse,” Dean muttered.

“I know.”

“No,” Dean said. “You don’t. If you knew, you’d stop saying the truthful things in that tone.”

Arion’s expression barely shifted. “I doubt it.”

“That,” Dean said bitterly, “is because you’re unbearable.”

“Yes.”

Dean stared at the ceiling again for one beat too long and then asked, because apparently he had no instinct for leaving wounds covered, “How close?”

Arion understood at once.

“How close to berserk,” Dean said.

A quieter beat followed.

Then Arion answered, “Close enough that if it had lasted longer, I don’t know what the next thirty seconds would have looked like.”

Dean’s hand curled once against the blanket.

Arion’s gaze dropped briefly to that hand, then lifted again. “That is why there will be no repetition of it.”

Dean exhaled slowly. “You’re very committed to turning everything into a decree.”

“I’m committed to keeping my mate safe and unhurt,” Arion said. His voice stayed level, but there was nothing light in it now. “I banned you from training with Nero because it was dangerous.” His jaw tightened once. “It seems I wasn’t better than him at controlling myself.”

That hit harder than Dean expected.

Not because the comparison was fair.

Because Arion clearly believed, at least in this moment, that it might be.

Dean turned his head on the pillow and looked at him properly, irritation cutting through some of the fatigue. “No.”

Arion’s eyes stayed on him. “Dean—”

“No,” Dean repeated, rougher now. “Absolutely not. I am not letting you say something that stupid while standing there bleeding through your own dressing like a cautionary diagram.”

For one beat, Arion said nothing.

Dean pushed on anyway, because apparently broken ribs had done absolutely nothing to improve his restraint. “Nero loses control because he’s Nero. It’s an event category. A personality feature. A weather pattern. You…” He paused to drag in a careful breath and immediately hated the mechanics of lungs. “You reacted to the bond dropping and all the backlash coming back at once. That is not the same.”

Arion’s expression did not change, which Dean was beginning to suspect was simply another way of being difficult.

“It still ended with you injured,” Arion said.

“Yes,” Dean snapped. “Because I targeted the largest pheromone gland in your body with an ability neither of us fully understood after accidentally shutting off the biological structure stabilizing you. That sequence matters.”

Arion held his gaze.

Dean frowned harder. “Do not look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re preparing to argue with a technical explanation because guilt is currently making you unreasonable.”

A quiet beat passed.

Then, to Dean’s annoyance, Arion said, “That is a very specific accusation.”

“It is also accurate.”

That earned him the faintest shift at the corner of Arion’s mouth.

Dean saw it and narrowed his eyes. “You do not get to become minimally human and think that fixes anything.”

“It doesn’t.”

“Good.”

Arion looked down briefly, checking the line of his own thoughts before he let them out. “I still should have stopped faster.”

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