Chapter 389 I Miss My Best Friend (Don’t Tell Anyone)
DRAKENFELL — GAMMA QUARTERS
Dexmon Drakenfell entered Gavriel Sterling’s chambers at two in the morning, carrying two glasses and a bottle of whiskey.
The room was dim. Fire low. Gav was in his bed, breathing steadily, color returned, the dark veins gone.
His eyes were closed. His chest rose and fell. The bandage on his shoulder was still in place, and Dex didn’t know what was under it and didn’t look, because he was here to drink, and drinking required a focus he was unwilling to split.
He sat in the chair beside the bed. Set both glasses on the nightstand. Poured one. Poured the other.
He placed Gav’s glass beside the bed within arm’s reach, which was a gesture of optimism given that the arm in question belonged to a man who hadn’t moved voluntarily in over twelve hours.
Dex picked up his own glass. Held it up.
“To the Gamma.” He drank. Set the glass down. Poured another.
“I am glad you are going to be okay,” Dex said to the unconscious body. “Genuinely. Because finding another Gamma would require interviewing people, and I hate interviewing people, and you have ruined me for the position because every candidate would have to be compared to you, and the comparison would be unfair, and I would reject all of them, and then my father would lecture me about standards, and the whole thing would be exhausting.”
He drank.
“Also, you are the only person in this castle who laughs at my jokes without checking to see if it is safe first. Everyone else looks at my face before they decide whether to laugh, like they are reading the room for political landmines. You just laugh. You have always just laughed. I never told you how much that matters, and I am telling you now while you are unconscious because doing it while you are awake would require eye contact, and I am a Drakenfell, and Drakenfells do feelings reluctantly, painfully, and with the full understanding that it is necessary and the full intention of never doing it again.”
He took another drink.
“I need to tell you some things, because you have missed a truly spectacular amount of chaos and you deserve the summary.”
He settled deeper into the chair.
“Your ex-fated mate is insane. I realize you already knew that. I certainly already knew that. But there is a difference between knowing it intellectually and watching a woman on an execution block roast every person in the courtyard, including me, including Fin, including my father, while her head was literally on the block.”
He drank.
“Then a dragon fell out of the sky and bonded with her. So she is back in a cell.”
He looked at Gav’s glass. Still full. Still untouched. Still waiting.
“You would have loved it. You would have stood there and said something that made the whole thing feel manageable, because that is what you do, Gavriel. You stand in the middle of catastrophic situations and make them survivable by being the person who says the thing nobody else is brave enough to say, and I have been in three catastrophic situations in the last twelve hours and you were in a bed for all of them and the absence was, frankly, noticeable.”
His voice dropped.
“The truth is I miss my best friend.”
He picked up the glass. The whiskey caught the firelight and held it.
“I have been a dick. I know it. You know it. Everyone in this castle knows it. The situation with Serena, everything that happened, the way I handled it, the things I said, the weeks of silence between us.” He exhaled. “I was angry, and the anger was easier than the alternative, and the alternative was admitting that my best friend was in love with my mate and the situation was more complicated than any of us were equipped to handle.”
He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
“I am sorry, Gav. I am sorry for the silence and the distance and the specific way I looked through you in corridors like you weren’t there. You were always there. You have been there since we were kids. And I let a situation that could have been a conversation become a war. I chose the tool I was trained on instead of the one the moment required.”
He drank. Set the glass down. Picked up Gav’s glass.
“You are clearly not going to drink this.” He drank it. Set it down. “Waste of good whiskey. Alaric is going to kill me for stealing it regardless, so one of us should enjoy the full bottle.”
He looked at his friend’s face. Still. Peaceful. His mind was somewhere else entirely, somewhere Dex couldn’t follow.
“Finnick Shadowclaw approached me with a schedule.” He let the sentence sit. “A schedule, Gavriel. For Serena. He walked into a room, sat across from me, and proposed, with the clinical efficiency of a man brokering a treaty, a rotational system for our shared mate. Days at Shadowclaw. Days at Drakenfell. Holidays negotiated on a case-by-case basis.”
He poured another glass. The situation warranted it.
“The fucked thing is I agreed with it. The schedule makes sense. She has been drowning in the guilt of choosing one room over the other, and taking the navigation out of her hands gives her permission to stop feeling like she is abandoning whichever one of us she isn’t sleeping beside that night.” He drank. “It sucks because it is correct, and I have to share a woman I love with a man I punched, and the man I punched is now proposing logistics with the energy of an accountant, and I agreed.”
He finished the glass.
“Oh, and Agnes Viremont is being celebrated by our alliance.” His voice shifted into a register that carried equal parts disbelief and irritation. “Agnes. The woman who poisoned Serena. Who drugged me. Who ran a spy operation inside Darkhowler for months. She escaped a compound, rode a wolf, freed a child, and now Garrett is treating her like the hero of the western front. My father gave a speech about how people are capable of both good and terrible things.”
He looked at the ceiling.
“I cannot deal with it, Gav. I am a man who holds grudges the way other men hold titles, and the grudge I am holding against Agnes Viremont is load-bearing, and every person in my life is telling me to set it down, and I am telling you, an unconscious man who cannot argue with me, that I am keeping it. The grudge stays.”
He poured the last of the bottle into his glass. Finished it. Set both glasses on the nightstand side by side: his empty, Gav’s empty, the only drinking partners in the room being the man who drank and the man who didn’t and the bottle that was gone.
“Wake up soon, buddy.” His voice was quiet. The voice that was left was the voice of a boy who had grown up beside another boy and had never learned how to miss him because the other boy had always been there. “I need you back. The castle is too quiet without you, and I am too loud without you, and the balance only works when both of us are in the same room being the wrong volume.”
He reached out and patted Gav’s arm once.
Gav’s body started glowing gold.
Dex froze. He pulled his hand away and the gold vanished.
He stared at his hand. Stared at Gav’s arm.
He touched it again. Gold. Pulled his hand away. Gone. The cycle continued for four more rounds.
“If you haven’t figured out the pattern yet, he glows when you touch him.”
Dex jumped, spinning around. “Fuck.”
Hyran Thornfell was leaning against the doorframe.