Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The crack in the ceiling above their bed was shaped like a river delta.
Gregor had mapped it during the sleepless hours that had become his nightly ritual since the fight—lying on his back in the dark, Fergal’s warmth beside him but no longer against him, tracing the branching fissure in the plaster with his eyes while his mind ran the same loops it had been running for three days.
What did you do, Gregor?
If you can’t trust me with whatever this is, then what are we building here?
Every day you hold back is a day you’re choosing a lie over me.
Three days since the fight, and Fergal’s words had taken up permanent residence in Gregor’s skull, playing on a loop that no amount of tactical analysis or threat assessment could silence.
Because Fergal was right. He was right about all of it.
It was unfair. It was hypocritical. And it would corrode their relationship over time.
But being right made it worse, not better, because it left Gregor with no defense except the truth he couldn’t speak.
Beside him, Fergal slept. Or pretended to sleep—Gregor couldn’t always tell anymore, which was a failure of observation that would’ve been unthinkable a week ago.
Before the fight, he’d known Fergal’s sleep patterns the way he knew patrol routes: the depth of each breath, the subtle shifts that signaled dreams versus wakefulness, the exact moment consciousness returned in the morning.
Now there was static in the signal. Fergal still slept in his arms—their bodies too accustomed to each other’s warmth to survive separation—but the surrender was gone.
The boneless, trusting collapse onto Gregor’s chest that had been the purest expression of Fergal’s faith in him had been replaced by something more guarded, a body that was present but held in reserve.
Gregor had done that. Not the Murphys, not Duncan and Donovan, not the weight of the crown or the pressure of kingship. Gregor. With his locked doors and his careful omissions and his cowardice dressed up as protection.
He should tell him. The thought surfaced every night, persistent as a heartbeat. And every night, the deadbolt held.
Dawn crept through the curtains. Gregor extracted himself from bed with practiced silence. He dressed in the dim light, lacing his boots with fingers that moved on autopilot, strapping his dagger to his belt, holstering his gun.
He paused at the bedroom door. Fergal had shifted in his absence, rolling into the warm space Gregor had left behind, his face half-buried in Gregor’s pillow.
His dark hair fanned across the white cotton, and one hand rested on the sheet where Gregor’s body had been, fingers loosely curled as if holding on to something that was no longer there.
The sight hit Gregor like a crossbow bolt to the sternum.
Tell him. Tell him now. Wake him up and sit on the edge of this bed and open every door and say every word and let him decide. He deserves that.
But he didn’t. He turned and walked out, closing the bedroom door behind him with the quiet click that had become the soundtrack of his cowardice.
He left a pot of coffee on for Fergal and headed out.
The morning unfolded with the almost mundane normalcy that characterized their weeks at the pack land.
The perimeter was secure, the wards were stable, and the night watch reported nothing unusual as they handed off to the day shift.
A quick meeting with Fallon about some improvements for the wards Gregor wanted to suggest. A conversation with Erwan and Emma about the ongoing intelligence analysis and whether they’d made progress identifying the Murphy alphas’ new location.
He saw Fergal once during the morning—crossing the yard with Zack, deep in conversation about something administrative, his hands gesturing in the animated way they did when his mind was fully engaged.
He’d looked up when Gregor passed, and their eyes had met, and the complex negotiation that passed between them in that half-second—love, hurt, longing, frustration, the desperate wish that things were different—was more exhausting than any combat Gregor had ever experienced.
Neither of them stopped walking.
By early afternoon, Gregor had completed his circuit of the extended perimeter—the wider route that took him along the tree line and up to the ridge that overlooked both pack territories.
It was a ninety-minute walk that he’d stretched to two hours, partly out of thoroughness and partly, if he were honest, because returning to the cabin meant navigating another evening of loaded silences and careful distances.
The cowardice of that admission sat bitter on his tongue as he headed back.
He knew something was wrong before he reached the cabin door.
The door was closed, the windows intact, and there were no signs of disturbance from the outside.
It was something subtler. A prickle at the base of his skull, a dissonance in the air, the instinctive awareness of a man who had spent three and a half centuries calibrating his senses to detect threats before they materialized.
He opened the door and stepped inside. “Fergal?”
Silence.
The kitchen was empty. On the table, Fergal’s reading glasses sat next to a mug of coffee. Gregor touched the ceramic—warm. Not hot, not room temperature. Warm. Recently poured, recently abandoned.
He’d missed him by minutes.
“Fergal?” Louder now, though the cabin was small enough that the first call should have reached every corner. Bedroom—empty, the bed made, Fergal’s boots gone from their usual spot by the door. Bathroom—empty. Living area—empty.
His jacket was gone. His boots were gone. His reading glasses were on the table, which meant he’d left in a hurry—Fergal never went anywhere without those glasses unless he was moving too fast to remember them.
Then he saw the note.
A piece of paper on the kitchen table, half-hidden under the reading glasses. Torn from one of Fergal’s notebooks, the handwriting was hasty—Fergal’s usual precise script degraded into something rushed and uneven, the pen pressed hard enough to score the paper.
Had to handle something. Back soon. Don’t worry.
Gregor read it three times, and each reading drove the spike of ice deeper into his gut.
This was wrong. Everything about it was wrong.
Fergal didn’t write vague notes. Fergal was constitutionally incapable of vagueness—the man who specified his coffee preferences to the gram, who cited Code subsections from memory, who described his emotions with the precision of a legal filing.
If Fergal needed to go somewhere, he’d say where, why, and how long.
The only reason for this vagueness was that the truth likely would’ve stopped Gregor from letting him go.
Letting him go. As if Gregor would have let him go anywhere by himself without—
The connection hit him like a hammer blow.
It wasn’t words. It wasn’t images. It was pure emotion—Fergal’s fear, bright and sharp and overwhelming, slamming into Gregor’s consciousness.
Terror so acute it tasted like metal on Gregor’s tongue.
And underneath it, threaded through the fear like a dark current, the unmistakable signature of Murphy magic—that oily, invasive resonance Gregor would recognize until the day he died.
Then something closed around their connection like a fist, and it went dead.
Silence. Complete, absolute silence where Fergal’s presence should’ve been.
Gregor stood in the kitchen of their cabin, holding a torn piece of notebook paper, and felt something inside him break that he had not known could break.
Not his composure, though that was gone too, shattered like glass.
Something deeper. Something structural. The load-bearing wall that had held up the architecture of his entire life—the belief that his vigilance, his discipline, his relentless, obsessive dedication to Fergal’s safety could keep the man he loved from harm.
Fergal was gone. Someone had taken him.
And Gregor. Hadn’t. Been. There.
He’d been walking the perimeter. Two hours of checking wards and scanning tree lines and running threat scenarios in his head while the actual threat walked through the front door of their cabin and took everything that mattered.
Two hours during which he could’ve been here, should’ve been here, would’ve been here if he hadn’t been using the extended patrol as an excuse to avoid the uncomfortable silence of their shared space.
Then again, he’d lost Fergal three days ago, in the fight, when Fergal had begged him for the truth and Gregor had slammed the door in his face.
If they hadn’t been fighting, if the silence between them hadn’t created the conditions for Fergal to leave without telling him, without trusting that Gregor would handle whatever threat had drawn him out, this wouldn’t have happened.
And underneath even that, the deeper fault line.
Years. He’d been failing Fergal for years, holding the Peter secret like a shield between them, using it as justification for every wall, every omission, every moment he’d chosen caution over honesty.
The fight hadn’t created the distance between them.
The distance had always been there—a locked door that Gregor maintained with obsessive care, keeping Fergal on one side and the truth on the other, telling himself it was protection when it was cowardice.
His hands were shaking for the fourth time in his life. The night he’d killed Peter. The night Fergal had touched his mind with magic. The night of the over-the-knee scene when Fergal had cried. And now.
He put the note down and put Fergal’s glasses in his breast pocket.
Then the training took over because three and a half centuries of military discipline would always overrule everything else.
He called Blair. “Code Orange. King Fergal is missing. Lock down the compound. No one enters or leaves. Full security sweep, every building, every cabin. I want every guard accounted for in the next five minutes.”