Chapter 271: Chapter 271: What Thomas Knew

Three hours after Andrea left his office, Arion was still seated behind the same desk, the investigation folder open before him, though he had long stopped pretending he needed to read it again.

He knew the contents by now. The clean reports. The missing stabilization windows. Nero’s relayed observations. Otto’s signed restriction. Hendrik’s pending order. Every line had the polished cruelty of something technically correct and morally rotten.

Arion disliked perfect reports more with every passing year.

The knock came just after sunset, when the light through the tall office windows had shifted from gold to bronze and the palace gardens outside were already softening into evening shadow.

"Enter," Arion said.

The door opened, and Thomas Lancaster stepped inside.

The room seemed to shrink around him, as rooms often did when Thomas entered them. He was seven feet tall, broad, and strongly built in the way of a man who had grown into both battlefield work and noble expectation without letting either make him clumsy. His short brown hair was neatly combed back, still damp at the temples as if he had come from training or a too-brief shower, and his soft brown eyes settled on Arion with the calm intelligence that had misled idiots for years.

People saw Thomas’s size first.

Arion had known him too long to make that mistake.

They had grown up near the same training fields, bled through the same containment drills, and learned the same ugly lessons about pheromone restraint before either of them was old enough to fully understand why their instructors’ voices went so hard during overload simulations. Thomas had been there when Arion first learned how much damage a dominant alpha could do if he let instinct outrun discipline, and Arion had been there when Thomas broke his first training dummy in half by accident and spent the next hour apologizing to the weapons master as if the dummy had surviving relatives.

They had been boys once.

Then soldiers.

Then heirs, commanders, and political necessities.

But before all of that, they had been friends.

That was why Arion had called him here himself.

Thomas closed the door behind him and crossed the office with measured steps, stopping in front of the chair Andrea had knocked over earlier. The servants had righted it, of course, but the faint scuff remained on the polished floor.

Thomas noticed it.

His gaze stayed there for half a second before returning to Arion. "Andrea was angry when he left."

"Yes."

"At you?"

"At consequences," Arion said. "I was merely the person explaining them."

Thomas gave a quiet breath that might have been a laugh under different circumstances. "That sounds like him."

"Sit."

Thomas sat.

For a moment, neither of them spoke. They did not need to fill the silence with formalities. They had stood shoulder to shoulder through too many field exercises and real breaches for that.

Then Arion pushed the folder across the desk.

Thomas looked down at it but did not touch it immediately. "You asked me here because of Andrea."

"Yes."

"And because of Central."

"Yes."

Thomas’s eyes lifted to him. They were tired, Arion realized. Not in the obvious way battlefield fatigue showed itself. Not with trembling hands or frayed pheromones or a body pushed beyond recovery. Thomas’s exhaustion sat deeper, where disappointment had been pressed down for too long and mistaken for patience.

"I wondered when someone would ask," Thomas said quietly.

Arion went still.

"You knew," Arion said.

Thomas’s mouth curved faintly, without humor. "I knew he was distant."

"That is not the same thing."

"No," Thomas agreed. "It isn’t."

Arion leaned back slightly. "Then tell me what you knew."

Thomas looked toward the folder again. "I knew he kept his field contained more than he should have. I knew he did not answer when I reached him during the strain. I knew the second line came out of the last breach colder than it should have, considering he was positioned as a stabilizing anchor."

Arion’s jaw tightened. "And you did not report it."

Thomas’s gaze returned to him. "Central held."

"That is not an answer."

"It is the answer I gave myself."

The honesty made Arion angrier than denial would have.

Thomas saw it and did not flinch. He had known Arion too long for that too.

"If I had reported it," Thomas continued, "what would it have sounded like? A dominant alpha complaining that his assigned omega was not warm enough under pressure? Rohan cannot afford that kind of ridicule right now, not from Alamina, not from Saha, and not from its own houses."

"To me," Arion said, voice hardening, "it would have sounded like a battlefield concern."

"I know."

"To Hendrik too."

"I know."

"To Otto."

"Yes," Thomas said quietly. "I know."

That was the ugliest part. He did know. He had known and chosen silence anyway, not because he was stupid, not because he was blind, but because he had tried to carry the humiliation privately rather than turn it into a diplomatic weakness.

Arion hated it.

Thomas folded his hands loosely together, the gesture too controlled for a man his size. "Andrea told me you spoke."

"What did he say?"

"That you were interfering in private matters you did not understand." Thomas’s expression did not change. "That Nero turned battlefield instinct into Sahan gossip because destabilizing people is a hobby in that family. That Alamina had no right to threaten him over something that never caused casualties."

Arion’s eyes went cold.

Thomas added, "Then I asked him whether Nero was wrong."

Silence settled between them.

Thomas looked down at his hands. "He did not answer."

This was the line between what Thomas had suspected and what Andrea had confirmed by omission.

Arion pushed the folder closer. "Read."

Thomas picked it up.

He read without rushing, eyes moving steadily across the annotated reports, the timestamps, the strain fluctuations, Nero’s observations, and the independent relay data. When he reached Otto’s restriction order, his thumb paused over the imperial signature.

"Andrea is banned from Alaminan-recognized battlefield deployment," Thomas said.

"Yes."

"If Rohan places him beside me anyway?"

"Alamina will file an objection with supporting evidence. Saha has retained copies of the relay data."

"Nero," Thomas said.

"Nero," Arion confirmed.

Thomas closed the folder with care, as if violence would have been easier but less useful. "He noticed."

"He did."

"Of course he did."

There was something in Thomas’s voice then that was not only irritation.

Arion watched him more closely. "You are angry."

"Yes."

"At Nero?"

Thomas gave him a tired look. "At myself. At Andrea. At the fact that an eighteen-year-old Sahan prince looked across a battlefield and named something I spent months trying not to make visible."

Arion considered that and chose, for once, not to touch the Nero part. "Andrea has been ignoring you since you were paired."

Thomas did not deny it.

The silence between them held years now, not merely reports.

"At first," Thomas said at last, "I thought it was adjustment. Andrea had wanted something else. Someone else, perhaps." His gaze moved briefly to Arion, without accusation. "I knew that."

Arion’s expression remained still.

"I thought time would make me real to him," Thomas continued.

Arion said nothing because there was nothing kind enough to say and nothing cruel enough that Thomas had not already told himself.

"But he looked at me," Thomas said, voice still calm, "like I was the result of a negotiation he had lost."

That was perhaps the worst description of a future mate Arion had heard in years.

"And you still wanted him," Arion said.

Thomas gave a quiet laugh. "Want is not famous for intelligence."

"No."

"You should know."

Arion stared at him.

Thomas’s mouth curved faintly. "Dean."

"Dean is extremely intelligent."

"That was not the part I meant."

For a moment, despite everything, Arion smiled.

Then the office settled again under the weight of what had not yet been decided.

"What do you want to do?" Arion asked.

Thomas looked toward the windows, where the last of the daylight was sliding off the garden paths. "I do not know yet."

Arion respected that more than a dramatic answer.

"I told Andrea to speak to you before departure," he said. "Plainly. Whether he wants the bond, the mark, Rohan, or the duties attached to standing beside you."

Thomas’s face went still. "And if he does not?"

"Then he does not leave Alamina as your mate."

Thomas absorbed that without visible surprise.

That, too, told Arion too much.

"You already thought of ending it," Arion said.