Dex locked the door behind him. The bolt sliding home was the loudest sound in the room, and it said everything his mouth hadn’t yet.

This conversation had one exit, and he was standing in front of it.

Gav didn’t look up, sharpening his blade.

"What. Happened." Dex’s voice was quiet. Controlled. The voice he used before battles, when the stakes were high enough that emotion was a liability.

Gav’s hand stopped. His throat moved and the cocky, irreverent, untouchable Gamma of Drakenfell looked at his Alpha and his best friend and did the thing that Gavriel Sterling almost never did.

He told the truth without a joke wrapped around it.

"I kissed Serena."

The words hit the air and the air rejected them. The room got smaller. Dex’s vision tunneled to a single point, which was Gav’s face. Hearing it from his best friend’s mouth was worse than hearing it behind a tapestry.

"You kissed her."

"Yes. And she pushed me away."

"She pushed you away because she loves me, Gav. Because she has a matebond with me. You didn’t stop yourself. She stopped you. Do you understand the difference?"

Gav flinched. The flinch was small, almost invisible, but Dex saw.

"How long?"

"What?"

"How long have you been in love with my mate?"

Gav’s breathing changed. His chest expanded and held.

"Since the day I met her, Dex. I wanted her first, and I was courting her. I was the one who showed up. And you marked her without telling me. Your best friend. After you watched me walk her into the ball and carry her."

His voice cracked. "You had a fated matebond and a crown and every advantage the gods could hand a man, and you still let her get poisoned at your table and terrorized by your mother and your fiancée while you stood fifteen feet away pretending it was complicated. She deserved better than what you gave her. You know it. And I know it."

The words landed like a blade finding the gap in armor. Dex’s nostrils flared. His jaw locked so hard the tendons in his neck jumped, and his eyes went full molten gold.

"You bought her a dress and walked her into a ballroom on your arm and looked at her the way I should have been looking at her, because I was too busy standing next to a woman I despised while my fated mate walked in wearing your gift. You think I forgot that? You think that image doesn’t live in my skull on a permanent fucking loop?"

His chest heaved. Aegon was howling inside his skull, a continuous, furious sound that had no words and no end.

Gav looked at him, eyes red. "I think I was there for her when you weren’t. Consistently. Relentlessly. Every time she fell, every time she bled, every time she was treated like glass by everyone in this castle including you, I was the one who treated her like a person. I let her make her own choices."

"I held her when you broke the matebond. I was the one she cried on. I was the one lying next to her while she shook so hard I thought she was going to come apart, and I kept my hands where they belonged and I swallowed everything I felt, and I did that for you. Because you are my Alpha and my brother and I would rather bleed out than hurt you."

"But you did hurt me."

"I know."

"Then why? How could you..." Dex’s voice trailed off. "You were the one person in the world I trusted fully."

"I know, Dex. I love her. If I could stop, I would. I can’t."

"And you think that all of that earns you the right to put your mouth on her? Careful, Gav."

"I’m past careful. You wanted the truth? Here it is." Gav’s voice was raw. "She kissed me back, Dex."

Dex’s chest caved like the air had been punched out of it. His eyes widened, and for one fraction of a second, before the fury sealed it over, there was hurt. Pure, naked hurt.

"For three seconds, she kissed me back. Her hand was in my hair and her mouth was open and she made a sound that told me she felt something. I didn’t imagine it. She felt it."

Dex moved. Fast. His hand closed around the front of Gav’s shirt and he slammed him back into the wall hard enough to crack the stone.

"Shut. Your. Mouth."

"She stopped it. Because she will always love you. She will always choose you. But those three seconds happened and I am not going to pretend they meant nothing."

Dex’s grip on his shirt tightened until his knuckles went white. His breathing was ragged and his eyes were glowing molten gold and Aegon was screaming inside his skull, a continuous howl of fury and grief that had no off switch.

"They meant nothing. Don’t forget it."

Silence. Long and bleeding and too honest for the room.

Dex’s fist connected with his jaw. The crack was wet and immediate. Gav’s head whipped sideways, blood spraying from his mouth onto the stone wall.

"I know about you and my fucking mother. My mate. My mother. You were supposed to be my best friend."

Gav’s face changed. The color that had drained earlier found a new depth of absence. His lips parted and no sound came out.

"I know all of it. Every disgusting second."

"Dex, that was before... How?"

"Wrong answer."

"No one knew about that."

"You moaned Serena’s name while fucking my mother."

The words dropped into the room and detonated.

Gav closed his eyes. His head was still against the wall where Dex had put it, and his hands were still at his sides, and he closed his eyes and his face twisted into something that was half agony and half the specific shame of a man confronted with the single worst moment of his life by the one person who should never have known about it.

Dex hit him again. Same side. Harder. Gav went down this time, one knee on the floor, blood stringing from his lower lip to the stone.

"That one is for putting my mate’s name in your mouth while inside my MOTHER."

Gav pushed himself up. Slowly. His lip was split, his jaw was already swelling, and blood was running down his chin and dripping onto his shirt. He straightened and looked Dex in the eye.

"Hit me again if you need to."

"Don’t tell me what I need."

"I’m telling you what I deserve."

"What you deserve is for me to strip your rank and put you in a cell. What you deserve is worse than anything my fists can do, because you didn’t just betray your Alpha, Gav. You betrayed your brother." Dex’s voice faltered.

"I know."

"Then why."

He didn’t answer. It was the quietest Dex had spoken in the entire conversation, and it was the word that finally broke Gavriel Sterling.

"You’re done."

Gav’s chest hitched.

"You are done being near her. Done making her laugh. Done being the man she turns to when I’m too much or too little or too anything. That is over. Effective now."

"Dex."

Dex stared at Gav, who was wearing the same look Dex had seen in the mirror the night Serena was carried away in Fin’s arms. The look of a man watching the thing he loved most in the world belong to another person.

"If you want to keep your rank, you stay the fuck away from her."

The words landed on Gav’s chest and pressed down. His breathing went shallow. His swollen jaw trembled once.

"She’ll ask why."

"That’s my problem. You don’t get to worry about her anymore."

"I never wanted to hurt you," Gav said. "You are the closest thing to a real family I have ever had."

Dex’s eyes stung. He blinked once, hard, and his jaw flexed again, and for one second the fury broke and something underneath it surfaced. Grief. Raw and shapeless and too large for the room.

"That’s the part that hurts the most, Gav. You were mine too."

He turned for the door. Stopped. Didn’t look back.

"If you ever touch her again, I will kill you."

He opened the door and walked out.

Behind him, Gavriel Sterling slid down the wall and sat on the floor in the exact same position Dex had been sitting in outside the infirmary the day prior. Head between his knees, hands in his hair, blood dripping from his jaw onto the stone between his boots.

Dex made it eleven steps before his back hit the wall and his legs gave out and he sat down on the cold stone floor and pressed both hands over his face.

Two men. Two sides of one hallway. One woman between them who would never know that the floor of Drakenfell held the weight of both their grief tonight, and that neither of them had the strength to stand.