Page 22 of Laundering Down the Legions
The coffee had gone warm and watery when Grayson appeared in the doorway, and I knew right away this wasn't a check-in. He moved with the focus that meant he'd beenreflecting on data for hours and hit a conclusion he didn't like. His attention ticked from me to Kearan to the grimoire like he was taking inventory of what I'd discovered.
He stepped in and shut the door behind him, the kind of careful that said privacy mattered. His attention settled on Kearan.
"Trux is declining faster than we expected." Grayson said it without preamble, not to me, to Kearan, but in a way that folded me into the circle of people allowed to hear it. "The Hesolga's progression will make him unreasonable and dangerous before it fully drives him insane. He's got maybe a week before the deterioration passes the point where we can manage it any other way."
Kearan's shoulders shifted. Barely. A small adjustment most people would've missed, but I'd learned the language his body spoke. He knew. We'd all known what was coming, but something about Kearan's reaction screamed that he'd seen this happen before.
"Which means the bond has to complete." Grayson didn't soften it. "Kearan. You need to stop treating this like a death sentence. I appreciate that both of you are nervous and want everything to be perfect. The bonds aren't done. And we're out of time."
Kearan didn't argue.
That was the thing. If he'd pushed back, thrown out one of his careful counters, floated some other plan… we could have adjusted. He didn't. Because there were no other opinions. He stood there with two people waiting on him, and the not-answering was worse than anything he could've picked.
The silence stretched long enough that I could count my own heartbeat pulsing through my ear drums and feel the bonds pulling at me to finish the bond.
Then Kearan opened his mouth.
"I know."
Two words. Not a rebuttal. Just the admission that he'd known the timeline the whole time, aware of exactly what was coming.
Grayson didn't flinch. He'd expected the admission without the action. "Knowing isn't enough," he said. "You know it, I know it, Parker knows it. What we need is for you to do something about it."
Kearan's jaw tightened, his hands curling into fists on his thighs, knuckles going white. I watched the choice present itself to him, the moment where he could cross the line or stand exactly where he was.
"I can't." Barely above a whisper, the raw honesty of it cut clean through the room. "If I bond with her and something happens, if we lose someone, if the math doesn't land the way we're calculating it, I carry that. All of it, straight into my own nervous system, and there's no putting it down. I know what that feels like. I did it with Maren, and it nearly killed me."
My stomach dropped. Not because he was wrong. Because it meant he still hadn't pried his past trauma loose from what he thought he could survive, that he wasn't ready for what a fated mate could be like, and he'd endanger all of us before he'd risk that particular kind of pain again.
"She's not Maren," Grayson said, and there was something in his voice I'd never heard from him, not anger exactly, more like a cutting disappointment, the sound of a man watching someone wreck himself and unable to stop it. "You keep lining them up like they're the same thing. They're not. Parker isn't a mission that went sideways. Parker is a Tsigo. You know the difference."
"I know the difference." The words came out bitter enough that I could nearly taste them across the table. "I know it perfectly. That's why I can't. If I take that bond and something breaks… It'll be catastrophic."
He finally looked at me, those amber eyes that never gave anything away suddenly full of something so raw I had to look away.
"I can't afford to love her that much," he said.
And I understood exactly what he was telling me. Not that he didn't love me. The opposite actually. Loving me was the whole problem, and the bond would crank it to a level that would end him if anything went wrong.
Not that we had any other options. Not bonding would drive them all insane, whereas bonding and then all of us would die if one did. We'd already committed to this.
Grayson's face shifted, recalibrating, catching the thing Kearan had just admitted without meaning to.
"Then I guess we're counting on luck." Flat now. "Because Trux can't wait for you to untangle your fear, and neither can the rest of us. The Hesolga's accelerating. And regardless of what you're hung up on, I can't think of anything worse than dying to protect Parker from Trux when he's fully consumed and tries to kill anyone around him. Including Parker."
He turned to me, steady. "We move forward with what we have. If Kearan can't choose, we work around him. But you need to understand what that means, Parker. The bonds won't complete without him. The order doesn't matter. Both Ryker and Kearan must claim you."
I nodded, because what else was there. Argue? Beg Kearan to feel his way through it? I'd watched him carry other people's breaking points long enough to know that handing him mine was handing him the one thing that would finally break him.
I didn't know how to respond to that.
So I held the silence and let it stretch into the conversation we weren't having. I watched Kearan stand at the edge of the line with his hands clenched and his eyes full of everything hewouldn't say, because saying it meant admitting his fear was bigger than his love.
It was. We both knew it.
Grayson gave him one more moment, one last chance to step across. When Kearan didn't move, when he just stood there with his arms wrapped around himself like he was holding something in, Grayson turned and left. The door shut behind him with a soft click.
And I was left at the table with the watery coffee, the open grimoire, the wrapped dagger, and the man I was falling for holding the distance he'd picked, knowing what it cost everyone to let him keep it.
