Chapter 200: Chapter 200: No Room for Distance [Win-Win]

Dean stayed where he was for a second longer, staring at Lucas with the awful sensation of something inside him clicking into place with far more force than he wanted.

People would use him.

And would not be the way Arion or anyone else did until now.

His stomach turned.

Trevor, who had apparently decided Dean had reached his daily quota of emotional collapse for one afternoon, stood first. “You do not need to solve every implication tonight.”

Dean looked at him flatly. “That has never once stopped my brain.”

“No,” Trevor said. “Unfortunately, we’re all aware.”

Lucas rose more slowly. The sharpness in his face had not disappeared, but it had changed shape again, moving away from reprimand and into something more controlled, more precise. “Sit with it. Then talk to Arion before you invent six disasters worse than the real one.”

Dean opened his mouth.

Lucas pointed at him. “Before.”

Dean shut it again.

Trevor gave the back of Dean’s shoulder one firm squeeze as he passed. “Try not to become a state problem before morning.”

“That sounds less like encouragement and more like a historical pattern.”

“It is both,” Trevor said.

And then they were gone.

The door shut behind them with infuriating softness.

Dean stayed in the chair for a while after that, elbows on his knees, hands hanging uselessly between them. The room had the polished temporary comfort of guest quarters prepared by people who knew exactly how to make somewhere feel expensive, calm, and impossible to actually inhabit. The lights were low. Summer evening pressed faint gold against the windows. Somewhere beyond the walls, the palace moved on with its usual layers of security, protocol, and people doing their jobs while Dean sat in the middle of one more private disaster and tried not to choke on the scale of it.

A recent discovery.

He understood why they were doing it. He hated that he understood.

Because once the truth left the restricted circle, it would stop being medical and start becoming strategic, and once it became strategic, it would become public in all the ways that mattered even if no one said a word in public at all. Analysts. Foreign offices, internal factions, and researchers with clean hands and filthy ambitions. Dominants who would look at him and wonder whether he was a solution or a threat. Institutions that would call it oversight while building rooms around him with nicer furniture and worse intent.

And beneath all of that, uglier because it was smaller and more personal, sat the part that would not stop replaying.

The bond dropping.

The second where Arion’s body had reacted in a way Dean had not fully understood until afterward, when understanding had arrived too late to be useful and right on time to hurt.

Dean dragged a hand down his face and breathed out through his nose. It did not help. He stood too fast anyway, restless energy burning under his skin now that he no longer had anyone in the room to perform coherence for.

He crossed toward the window, stopped halfway, turned back, then kept moving for no reason at all except that stillness felt unbearable. His ribs still hurt. His shoulder still ached in the deep, infuriating way of injuries that had been treated properly but refused to become irrelevant just because he wanted them to. He welcomed the pain a little. It made the rest of it easier to sort.

He had hurt Arion.

Arion had hurt him.

Neither of those truths cancelled the other. That was perhaps the most irritating part. Dean would have preferred a cleaner arrangement. Villain, victim, idiot, aggressor, something with enough structure to file away and resent properly.

Instead, he had a mate who had lost control under provocation, a bond that had reacted like something living and newly made, and a second ability that had just crossed the line from concerning to politically catastrophic.

Wonderful.

Dean braced one hand on the window ledge and let his forehead rest briefly against the cool glass.

He could still feel Arion.

Not in the dramatic way poets and unstable adolescents liked to imply. Nothing mystical and glowing. The bond was there, clear as day now that he had no one else in front of him to take his mind off of it. A live current running through his skin.

And beneath that… hesitation.

Dean went very still.

It was faint, filtered through distance and restraint and all the barriers Arion would be shoving into place right now with military-grade discipline, but Dean felt it anyway.

Careful hesitation.

As if Arion was close enough to approach and had stopped himself from doing it too quickly.

Dean closed his eyes.

The first reaction that rose in him was ugly enough to make him hate himself on contact.

Of course he’s hesitating. Of course he should.

’You hit him where it hurt.’

’You made the bond fall.’

’You made him feel it break.’

Dean’s hand curled hard against the ledge.

’No.’

’No, absolutely not.’

He was not doing that tonight. He was not going to sit alone in a beautifully furnished room and let his own brain turn his mate into someone who had to step around him like unexploded ordnance. He was not going to let hesitation become distance simply because both of them had enough guilt to build a second palace out of it.

’His mate.’

The thought rushed through him with enough force to sharpen everything else.

’Mine,’ some rude and possessive part of his nervous system supplied at once, which was unbearable and inconvenient and, at the moment, emotionally correct.

Dean pushed away from the window just as the door opened.

Arion stood there on the threshold.

For one suspended second neither of them spoke.

Arion had clearly ignored at least three excellent medical recommendations to be here.

He had changed – dark trousers, a black shirt open slightly at the throat, and sleeves rolled carelessly enough to suggest he had either dressed himself in a temper or frightened someone else into silence while they watched him do it.

His eyes found Dean’s immediately.

And there it was again.

That pause.

That measured moment before movement.

Not because Arion did not want to come closer. Dean could feel too much for that lie to survive. If anything, the pull toward him hit so hard through the bond that it made Dean’s chest tighten.

But Arion was checking himself first.

Checking Dean.

Giving him space.

Dean almost laughed from sheer irritation.

’No.’

’Absolutely not.’

He crossed the room before Arion could say a word.

Arion had time for one visible shift of surprise, barely more than a breath, before Dean reached him, caught a fistful of dark fabric, and threw himself bodily into his arms.

Arion made a sound low in his chest that might have been pain, warning, or Dean’s name torn apart halfway through, and then his arms were around him with a force that answered everything. One hand caught the back of Dean’s neck. The other locked around his waist. Instinct, need, relief, possession, all of it arriving at once and with no interest in pretending otherwise.

Dean pressed in harder.

He felt Arion inhale against his hair like someone surfacing after too long underwater.

For a second neither of them said anything at all.

That, more than words, broke something open in Dean’s chest.

Because the hesitation was gone.

The distance was gone.

There was only this: Arion holding him like he had been cut loose and found again; Dean half crushing himself against a wounded man he should probably have approached with more intelligence; and the bond between them pulling taut and hot and alive as if it had also been waiting for someone to stop behaving carefully and choose honesty instead.

Dean shut his eyes hard.

“Don’t,” he said, voice rough against Arion’s shoulder.

Arion’s hand tightened at the back of his neck. “Don’t what?”

“Don’t do that thing.”

There was the slightest pause. “You’ll need to be more specific.”

Dean pulled back only enough to glare at him from humiliatingly close range. “The careful thing.”

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