Chapter 198: Chapter 198: Hurt

Trevor held his gaze. “Why?”

Dean exhaled slowly. “Because at first it was one ugly incident in training, and I told myself that didn’t mean I had identified a stable, named ability. Then I broke Arion’s pheromone lock on the collar and—” He stopped, his mouth tightening. “And after that I couldn’t really lie to myself about it anymore.”

Lucas leaned back in the chair. “So that was the point where you remembered.”

Dean nodded once. “Yes. Around two months ago.”

“And you still kept it to yourself.”

Dean looked down again. “Yes.”

Lucas laughed once under his breath, the sound short and tired and carrying no humor at all. “God.”

Trevor remained quieter, which somehow made him worse to face. “You understand how this sounds from our side.”

Dean looked up. “Yes.”

Trevor’s brow lifted slightly. “Say it.”

Dean hated that.

He hated even more that Trevor was right to ask.

So he forced himself through it. “It sounds like I had something dangerous and important for over a year; got proof a year ago that it could affect other dominants directly; got proof two months ago that it was absolutely separate and real; and still said nothing until another capital had to inform you after it turned into a medical and political incident.”

The silence afterward was immediate.

Lucas looked at him for a long moment. “Good. Keep that version.”

“That version is awful.”

“Yes,” Lucas said. “That’s why it’s accurate.”

Dean let out one low breath through his nose. “This family is violently committed to precision.”

Trevor’s mouth almost moved.

Lucas, however, was still too hurt for that to become anything like softness. “And Nero.”

Dean looked at him.

Lucas’s expression sharpened again. “You shut down his pheromones in training, and neither of you thought perhaps that was a sentence other people should hear.”

Dean rubbed once at his wrist. “We didn’t think it through.”

Lucas stared. “That is not helping either of you.”

“I know.”

Trevor spoke then, cutting through the room with that same measured calm. “I’m disappointed in both of you.”

Dean watched the quiet summer outside and realized that he was expecting this, but it didn’t mean he was feeling better about it.

“We knew the moment Arion found out…” Dean said, and stopped.

The sentence broke there.

Not because he did not know how to continue. Because he did, too precisely, and the words had reached the part of him that the rest of the conversation had only been circling.

He kept looking at the summer gardens outside the window. Pale light over clipped paths. The flowers were too orderly to be comforting. Everything beyond the glass looked arranged, deliberate, and held in place by design.

Inside the room, Dean’s throat tightened.

Not from the old bruising. Not from healing tissue. Not from any of the physical damage that had already been named, scanned, and repaired.

This was worse because it had no clean medical term.

Lucas saw it first.

His posture shifted slightly, sharpness giving way to alert stillness. Trevor noticed a beat later, his expression altering in that very quiet way only fathers seemed to manage when something in the room ceased being an argument and became something more dangerous.

Dean looked down at his hands.

Then away.

Then back down again.

“We knew the moment Arion found out,” he said once more, voice rougher now. “We both knew, I think. Or I did. At least partly.”

Trevor did not interrupt.

Lucas, to his credit, did not either.

Dean swallowed and hated how difficult that had suddenly become. “The problem wasn’t just that I used it,” he said. “It wasn’t even just that I hid it. It was that when I finally did use it properly, I used it badly.”

Lucas’s brow drew together. “Dean—”

“No.” Dean shook his head once. “No, let me finish it correctly.”

That silenced the room.

He stared at the edge of the table as though the grain of the wood might offer structure if he looked hard enough. “I didn’t reach for it because I was calm. I didn’t test it because I was thinking clearly. I did it because I was angry. Because I was losing. Because my temper got there first, and my intelligence showed up later and called it research.”

Trevor’s face changed.

Dean laughed once under his breath, and the sound was wrong. “That’s the ugliest part, actually. Not that I didn’t know. That I did know enough in that moment to understand I was reaching for something I shouldn’t, and I did it anyway.”

His voice had started thinning without his permission.

That annoyed him.

He blinked once, hard, and looked away toward the window again.

The first tear fell before he had fully processed that his eyes had gone hot.

It slid down his face in humiliating, silent clarity.

Lucas went still.

Trevor looked genuinely shocked.

That, more than anything, made it worse.

Because Dean was not a crier. He didn’t want to cry in rooms with summer light and tea and parents already disappointed in him. If he had been given a choice, he would have selected almost any other form of collapse.

Unfortunately, the body was often a traitor precisely when dignity mattered most.

Dean wiped at his face too late, as though speed alone might reclassify what had already happened.

It did not.

He laughed once again, quieter this time and full of self-disgust. “Excellent. That’s new.”

Neither Lucas nor Trevor said anything immediately.

That was worse than if they had.

Dean looked down, blinking again, and another tear dropped onto the back of his hand.

“Dean,” Trevor said at last.

Very gently.

That made it so much harder.

Dean shook his head once. “I’m not crying because you’re disappointed.”

That was not, technically, the right way to begin clarifying tears to one’s parents, but apparently the day was committed to poor openings.

Lucas, still more startled than Dean had seen him in years, said carefully, “Then why are you crying?”

Dean’s mouth twisted.

Because the answer was humiliating too.

Because he had been the one physically hurt. The one with broken ribs, with the bruised throat, the split lip, the shoulder reset, the blood on the mat, and the body that had taken the worst of the visible damage. And yet that was not what kept catching his attention now.

He looked up at them, eyes bright in a way he hated, and said quietly, “Because I hurt him.”

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