CHAPTER 427: CHAPTER 421: THINKING IN CIRCLES.

The palace had finally settled into that rare, fleeting quiet that came after a long lunch and before the next crisis. The kind of silence that only came when half the staff had been reassigned, the wine had been cleared, and Edward had decided that both emperors were someone else’s problem for the rest of the day.

Gabriel closed the nursery door with the same care he might use to disarm a trap. The lights had been dimmed to a soft amber glow, the curtains drawn against the afternoon sun. Arik, finally asleep, was curled into the folds of Gabriel’s robe with one tiny hand still latched around the edge of the fabric, unwilling to let go even in dreams.

It had taken nearly an hour of quiet rocking and whispered nonsense to settle him. A bottle. A song. A low hum in the back of Gabriel’s throat that wasn’t quite a lullaby, just rhythm and memory and scent.

The moment Gabriel had walked in earlier, Arik had reached for him. He hadn’t let go. Not while eating. Not while changing. Not even while yawning so hard he nearly fell over.

Possessive little thing. Just like his father.

Gabriel rubbed at the back of his neck, exhaling slowly. His limbs ached in the familiar, dull way they always did after a day of sitting too long, standing too much, and thinking too hard.

And now, finally, he had ten minutes of utterly quiet time.

Maybe fifteen.

He slipped into the bathroom, locking the door behind him more out of instinct than need. The tiles were warm underfoot. The lighting soft. No harsh sconces, no ceremonial marble, and no etched imperial crests here, just clean lines, muted stone, and the faint scent of something herbal rising from the tap.

He ran the bath hot.

Steam curled upward as he undressed, dropping the robe into the woven basket near the wall. His skin prickled with the shift in temperature. The faint scent of Arik still clung to his collarbone, warm and sweet and milk-soft.

He slid into the water slowly, breath hitching only once at the heat, then settling as it lapped over his shoulders. The silence wrapped around him like silk. No voices. No council. No Damian. No Edward, thank the gods.

Just water, warmth, and the faint ache that sat low in his spine, coiled like a thing that hadn’t quite left him since Arik’s birth.

He leaned back, letting his head rest against the edge of the tub.

The heat soothed. The scent of rosemary and green tea rose from the surface in soft waves. His fingers drifted along the rim absently, trailing rivulets behind them.

Arik had known.

He’d known the moment Gabriel returned that something had been wrong.

Children didn’t understand absence in political terms. They didn’t read intelligence reports or know what it meant to reroute a supply line to a crumbling border station. But they knew when warmth left. When the scent faded. When someone who belonged close had been too far away for too long.

He’d clung. Still was.

Gabriel let his eyes fall shut for a moment, letting the heat creep into his bones. In two days, Damian would stop suppressing. The bond would shift again, and if Gabriel was honest with himself, he was curious to see how it would play out.

He chuckled quietly, remembering that over a year ago, he’d been marked by Damian in the height of his suppressed rut.

Goliath coming back was something he hadn’t expected. A sense tickled at the back of his mind, a thread he couldn’t quite unravel. He wondered if Goliath had been the one who gave Olivier the idea to trap him inside the shard.

The entire thing felt... incomplete.

’Why did Olivier have my old room in there? Why would he include my old PC? And why the fuck would he send the message to a replica of Damian if there was no world outside the manor and the palace? What was the point?’

He was so deep in thought he didn’t hear the door unlock.

Didn’t feel the shift in air until it was already too late.

Damian was leaning against the bathroom doorway now, watching him, dressed in nothing but a black bathrobe, the belt loose around his waist, skin still faintly damp from his own shower. There was something familiar in the way he stood there: quiet, steady, and faintly amused, like watching Gabriel’s thoughts tick behind his eyes was more interesting than interrupting them.

Steam curled between them, softening the space, but it didn’t dull the way Damian’s presence pressed into the room. His arms were crossed loosely over his chest, posture relaxed, but Gabriel knew that stance too well. That was how Damian stood when he was calculating.

"Enjoying the view?" Gabriel asked without opening his eyes.

Damian’s voice was a quiet drawl. "I was wondering how long it would take you to ask."

Gabriel cracked one eye open, water slipping along his collarbone as he shifted slightly in the tub. "You’re not very subtle when you’re amused."

"You’re not very subtle when you’re unraveling," Damian replied. His gaze flicked downward to the slight tension in Gabriel’s jaw and the way his hand gripped the rim of the tub a second too long before relaxing. "You’ve been thinking in circles again."

"Well, if you read the report about the shard world, you will too."

"Hmm... Goliath? Or the fact that the world seemed complete when you got there, but it started to fray after you met Goliath?"

Gabriel’s fingers flexed once against the rim of the tub, the water shifting with the movement. He didn’t answer right away, but Damian could see it in the way his throat moved with the swallow he tried to hide and the flicker behind his eyes that always came before something important.

"Both," Gabriel said finally. "The world was stable. Scripted to the point of borderline obsession. My room, my old files, and the desk I broke during training were all there. It only started cracking after I found him."

Damian’s brow furrowed slightly, but he didn’t speak. He leaned in, elbows resting on the edge of the tub now, the sleeve of his robe falling back just enough to expose the curve of his scarred forearm. The heat rising from the bath kissed the skin between them, but he didn’t move closer.

"I thought it was Olivier pulling the strings," Gabriel continued, voice quieter now, as if saying it aloud might make it clearer. "But that place... it felt like me. Like something I built without knowing I did. And Goliath was in the center, waiting. Not really trapped. Not even angry. Just... waiting."

Damian’s voice was low. "For what?"