Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Eight weeks of being king, and all Fergal had managed was to raise more questions than answers. If this was leadership, someone should’ve warned him it was ninety percent futility and ten percent paperwork. He was tired. So fucking tired.
He blinked hard, willing his eyes to focus.
When was the last time he’d slept more than four hours?
Of course, the night Gregor had given him that absolutely amazing, completely unexpected blowjob.
The one Fergal had vowed to return but never had because…
Well, because that required having time and energy and the consciousness to do more than drag himself to bed every night, only to wake up in the middle of the night again with his head spinning with worry.
Even with Gregor beside him, his mind wouldn’t stop running scenarios, wouldn’t stop circling the same unanswerable questions, wouldn’t stop cataloging his own failures in meticulous, unforgiving detail.
They weren’t getting anywhere. All they had were theories, but no evidence. They had rumors and speculation, but no concrete facts. The Murphys were working on something, on a bigger plan, and they couldn’t unravel the plot enough to prevent it from happening.
“Let’s call it a day,” Gregor said, his tone kind.
Fergal eyed the stack of paperwork. “I have to finish these before we leave for the Council, and in case you missed it, that’s two days from now.”
“Fergal.”
“Don’t ‘Fergal’ me. I have a hundred things that need to be done and zero hours to do them in. I can’t show up to the Council unprepared because that’s exactly what the Murphys are counting on.”
Gregor’s hand settled on his shoulder, warm and heavy. “You’re exhausted. You can’t make good decisions when you’re this tired, and pushing through will only make it worse.”
It was reasonable. It was measured. It was exactly the kind of calm, rational advice that Gregor delivered when he was in full commander-caretaker mode, and tonight, for reasons Fergal couldn’t fully articulate, it made him want to scream.
He shrugged off Gregor’s hand. “I don’t need you to manage me.”
A beat of silence. Gregor’s voice, when it came, was carefully neutral. “I’m not managing you. I’m telling you that you need rest.”
Of course Gregor was managing him. Fergal wasn’t stupid.
He’d noticed the tomato soup and grilled cheese, the mac and cheese, the comfort foods he managed to eat even when not hungry.
He drank the damn chamomile tea and the glasses of water.
He did what Gregor told him to do, didn’t he? Most of the time anyway.
“And I’m telling you I’m fine.” Fergal’s voice came out sharper than he intended, a blade when he’d meant to use a shield.
“I’ve been running a clan for almost eight weeks while two enemy operatives sit in my council chamber smiling at me, and I have exactly zero progress to show for it.
So forgive me if I don’t feel like being tucked into bed like a child. ”
“No one is treating you like a child.”
“Everyone is treating me like a child!” The words exploded out of him with a force that surprised them both.
Fergal shoved back from the desk, his chair screeching against the floor.
“The alphas think I’m too young. The omegas think I’m too naive.
Dick and Dicker think I’m too stupid to see what they’re doing.
And you…” He jabbed a finger at Gregor. “You stand there being patient and reasonable and calm while everything falls apart, and I don’t know how you do it because I am hanging on by my fingernails and nobody seems to notice or care. ”
Gregor stood very still, absorbing the tirade with the same composure he brought to everything, and something about that stillness—that unshakable, infuriating, goddamned stillness—cracked something loose inside Fergal that he’d been trying to hold together for weeks.
“You know what the worst part is?” His voice dropped, turning ugly in a way he’d hate himself for later.
“You spent a hundred and fifty years with the Murphys, and you couldn’t even figure out what they were doing.
You were right there, Gregor. Right there in their clan, and you didn’t see what they were until it was too late.
So maybe your instincts aren’t as sharp as you think they are. ”
The words hung in the air like a blade suspended mid-swing.
Fergal heard them echo and felt sick. That was a low blow.
The lowest possible blow, aimed at the one wound he knew Gregor carried from his Murphy years—the guilt of not acting sooner, of not seeing the truth clearly enough, of leaving too late.
Gregor’s expression didn’t change, but something shifted behind his eyes—a flash of pain, quickly contained, like a door closing on a wound. When he spoke, his voice was quiet. “Are you done?”
He sounded clinical, assessing—like someone who’d absorbed the worst possible punch and was now calculating the appropriate response.
Fergal’s throat tightened. “Gregor, I didn’t—”
“Are you done?” Gregor repeated, and this time there was something underneath the calm. Not anger. Something more deliberate, something Fergal recognized from the training room—the moment the teacher receded and something older and more authoritative took its place.
Fergal’s mouth opened to say yes, but the word that came out was a whispered, desperate, “No.”
Because he wasn’t done. The frustration was still there, churning and toxic and eating him alive, and the fact that he’d just hurt the one person who didn’t deserve it only made it worse.
He could feel himself spiraling, and he didn’t know how to stop.
The blowjob had helped, but only a little. And only for a day or so.
Gregor studied him for three heartbeats, his eyes steady and clear, reading everything Fergal was trying and failing to hide—the exhaustion, the frustration, the self-loathing that was already rising to replace the anger, and underneath all of it, the thing Fergal couldn’t say aloud because his pride wouldn’t let him.
Help me. I can’t do this by myself. I don’t know how to stop.
Gregor crossed the room in four strides. He pulled the wooden chair from the corner—a straight-backed, armless chair that had been in Fergal’s quarters since before he was born—and set it in the center of the room. He sat down.
“Come here.”
Two words. Spoken without heat, without judgment, without hesitation. A command so simple and so absolute that it cut through the noise in Fergal’s head like an axe through a twig.
Fergal went.
He crossed the room on legs that felt like they belonged to someone else, his heart hammering, his throat tight.
Gregor looked up at him with an expression that held no anger, no punishment, no disappointment.
Just certainty and the steady, unwavering acceptance of a man who saw what was needed and wasn’t going to let pride or propriety prevent him from providing it.
Gregor took his wrist. Guided him forward. And Fergal let himself be pulled down across Gregor’s lap.
His face burned. His whole body burned, shame and relief and something else tangling into a knot he couldn’t unravel.
The position was vulnerable—his torso draped across Gregor’s thighs, his hands braced against the floor, his ass raised and exposed.
He was a king. A grown man with a law degree and a crown and a hundred dragons under his command.
And he was lying across another man’s lap, shaking, waiting.
Gregor’s left hand settled on the small of his back, firm and warm, anchoring him in place. His right hand rested on Fergal’s ass, the weight of it warm through the thin fabric of his trousers.
“This isn’t punishment,” Gregor said quietly. “You know that.”
Fergal squeezed his eyes shut. “I know.”
“This is because you’ve been carrying too much for too long and you don’t know how to put it down. This is because you need someone to take the weight, and you can’t ask for it, so you tried to provoke me into taking it. Am I wrong?”
A sound escaped Fergal’s throat—half laugh, half sob. “You’re never wrong. It’s infuriating.”
Gregor’s hand moved in a slow circle on his lower back.
“I’m going to give you what you need, and then you’re going to sleep.
And tomorrow, we’ll talk about what you said.
Not because I’m angry, but because you’ll want to apologize.
But not tonight. Tonight, you just need to let go. Can you do that?”
Fergal nodded, his fingers curling against the floor.
Gregor’s hand lifted from his ass.
The first strike landed with a sharp crack that echoed off the stone walls. Gregor’s hand connected with his right cheek through the fabric with exactly enough force to sting, exactly enough impact to cut through the static in Fergal’s mind like a signal breaking through interference.
Fergal gasped. His body tensed, instinct fighting against vulnerability, pride rearing up one last time to insist that he didn’t need this, that he was fine, that a king didn’t—
The second strike landed on his left cheek, same force, same precision, and the thought dissolved before it could finish forming.
Gregor established a steady, unhurried rhythm, alternating sides with methodical consistency. Each strike landed in a slightly different spot, spreading the heat evenly across Fergal’s ass, building from a sting to a glow to a burn that radiated through him in waves.
Fergal’s resistance broke on the sixth strike.
His body went limp across Gregor’s lap, the tension that had been coiling in his muscles for weeks unwinding like a spring released.
His breathing changed from the shallow, rapid pattern of anxiety to something deeper, slower, each exhale carrying out a little more of the poison he’d been accumulating.
Seven. Eight. Nine. The rhythm was hypnotic and Gregor’s hand was an anchor in a sea of noise, each impact pulling Fergal further from the churning thoughts and closer to something quiet.
Something still. The burn in his ass was grounding—real, physical, undeniable—and his mind latched onto it gratefully, finally having something concrete to focus on instead of the endless loop of failure and frustration and fear.
Ten. Eleven. Gregor’s free hand rubbed slow circles on his lower back between strikes, soothing and steadying, the tenderness woven so seamlessly into the discipline that Fergal couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.
On the twelfth strike, the tears came.
Not because of pain. Yes, the strikes hurt, but they were measured, never brutal, never more than Fergal could handle.
The tears came from somewhere deeper, somewhere that had been sealed shut since the night of the assassination, since the moment he’d stood in the library and learned his father and uncle were dead and felt the weight of an entire clan land on his shoulders.
Eight weeks of holding it together. Eight weeks of being king when he didn’t know how.
Eight weeks of making decisions and attending meetings and signing documents and lying awake at night wondering if he was doing any of it right.
Eight weeks of being the strong one, the steady one, the one everyone looked to for answers he didn’t have.
It all came pouring out. Fergal’s tears soaked the fabric of Gregor’s pants while Gregor’s hand continued its steady rhythm, gentler now, the strikes softening into something that was more caress than correction, easing Fergal through the release rather than driving it.
Endless, relentless tears that fell until Fergal had nothing more to give, to release. Until he was completely empty.
The rhythm slowed. Stopped. Gregor’s right hand settled on Fergal’s ass, palm flat against the heat he’d created, not rubbing, just holding.
His left hand continued its slow circles on Fergal’s lower back.
Both points of contact were warm and steady and undemanding, asking nothing, offering everything.
“There you are,” Gregor murmured. The same words he’d said in the library the day the world changed. The same voice—low, rough, stripped of everything but tenderness.
Fergal lay across his lap, wrung out, empty in the best possible way. The noise in his head was gone. The hamster wheel had stopped. For the first time in weeks, his mind was quiet—genuinely, blissfully quiet—and the relief of it was so profound it made him dizzy.
“Up,” Gregor said softly, and his hands guided Fergal upright, steadying him when his legs wobbled. Fergal stood, swaying slightly, his face a mess of snot and tears, and his ass throbbing with a heat that felt like it would last for days.
Gregor stood too and cupped Fergal’s face in both hands, thumbs wiping the tears from his cheeks. His gray eyes searched Fergal’s face, checking, assessing, making sure the storm had passed. “Bed.”
Not a suggestion.
“Okay,” Fergal whispered, and the fact that he didn’t argue, didn’t make a joke, didn’t deflect with sarcasm, told them both how thoroughly he’d been undone.
Gregor walked him to the bedroom. Sat Fergal on the edge of the bed and knelt to unlace his boots, pulling them off one at a time with a gentleness that made Fergal’s eyes sting again.
Belt next, slid from the loops with practiced ease.
Then the formal shirt, unbuttoned slowly, Gregor’s fingers working each button with a steady patience.
Fergal sat in his T-shirt and pants, shivering slightly from the emotional aftermath, his nervous system still recalibrating after the release.
Gregor pulled the covers back, guided him down, and drew them up to his chin, tucking the edges around him the way Fergal’s mother used to do when he was small.
The memory hit him without warning—his mom, sitting on the edge of his bed, smoothing his hair back from his forehead, whispering “spine first, then the rest follows,” and a fresh wave of tears slid down his temples into his hair.
Gregor sat on the edge of the bed. His hand found Fergal’s hair, fingers carding through the dark waves in slow, repetitive strokes that asked for nothing and gave everything.
“I’m sorry,” Fergal murmured, his voice wrecked, his eyes already heavy. “What I said about the Murphys. About you not seeing. That was—”
“Tomorrow,” Gregor said quietly. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
“I didn’t mean it.”
“I know.”
“You’re the best man I’ve ever known, and I said the worst thing I could think of, and I—”
“Fergal.” Gregor’s hand stilled in his hair, then resumed its steady rhythm. “Sleep.”
The command was gentle, absolute, and irresistible. Fergal’s eyes closed. The warmth of the bed, the weight of the covers, the steady motion of Gregor’s hand in his hair all conspired to pull him under, and for once, he didn’t fight it.
The last thing he felt before sleep claimed him completely was Gregor’s lips pressing against his forehead—soft, warm, lingering—and the last thing he heard, barely a whisper in the quiet room, was, “I’ve got you, baby boy.”