Chapter 667: Since The Day I Saw Her

Lucian found him on the east terrace. Alone. Which was becoming a pattern that worried him more than the dark veins.

Tristan was leaning against the stone balustrade, staring at nothing, the wind pulling at his shirt. He looked thinner. Harder in the wrong places. The fated tie to Vesper was eating him from the inside out, and the man standing on that terrace was a stripped-down version of the one Lucian had grown up beside. Same frame. Same jaw. Less life behind the eyes.

Silence wasn’t protecting anyone anymore. It was just a coffin Lucian had been building around himself, and he was running out of air.

"I need to tell you something." He kept his voice steady, which cost him more than Tristan would ever know. "And you’re going to hate me for it."

Tristan turned his head. "That’s a hell of an opener."

"It’s a hell of a thing."

Tristan searched his face. Whatever he found there made the half-smile die on arrival.

Silence. The wind filled it. Lucian’s hands were shaking at his sides and he locked them into fists because if Tristan saw the tremor, he’d know this was worse than bad. He’d know this was the kind of confession that splits a friendship into the version that existed before it and the wreckage that comes after.

"It’s about River," Tristan said after a moment.

"Yes," Lucian replied.

Tristan shook his head.

"I don’t understand it," he said, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. "How I love someone this deeply, and the tie isn’t blessed by fate. How the Goddess paired me with a woman poisoning me."

Lucian listened. Tristan was standing in front of him being honest, being open, being the man he’d always been, and Lucian was about to repay that openness with the worst sentence he’d ever constructed.

"Fated or not, it is powerful," he said. "It is the most real love I have seen. You know it. She knows it. Father knows it. The rest of us saw it every damn day since you were ten years old."

Tristan exhaled and it shuddered out of him, the kind of breath that a body releases when it’s been holding itself rigid for hours.

"You’re my brother and oldest friend," Lucian continued. "And you know I would do anything for you, right?"

"Yes. And I’d do the same for you," Tristan replied, voice cracking.

The sentence landed like a hand on a bruise because Tristan meant it. Meant it completely, without reservation, without conditions, the way Tristan meant everything, because Tristan didn’t know how to love at half-volume and never had. And Lucian was three sentences away from teaching him why he should have.

Lucian’s throat bobbed once. His vision blurred. He blinked it clear because he owed Tristan eye contact for this. He owed him that much.

"There’s something I need to tell you. Long overdue. The last few weeks have been absolute hell because my brother, the best man I know, married my fated mate and she didn’t even know she was mine."

Tristan froze against the railing. His grip tightened until his knuckles went the color of the stone beneath them. His breathing changed. Shorter. Faster. The breathing of a man whose body was trying to process information his mind was refusing to accept.

"Everything I have, and everything I am, is because your father took me in and you called me brother."

The sentence burned coming out. Because it was true. Atlas had given Lucian a name, a crown, a home, a brother. And the brother was standing in front of him, cracking apart at the seams, and the man Atlas had raised was about to take everything Atlas built between them and put a fracture through the center of it, and the fracture was shaped like a truth he should have said long ago.

His throat bobbed and his voice splintered. "This isn’t how I wanted to tell you."

The words left his mouth and the world between them ended. The terrace was the same. The wind was the same. The stone under their hands was the same. Everything was identical to thirty seconds ago and nothing would ever be the same again, and Lucian could feel the before and after splitting like a bone.

Tristan’s knuckles went white, then past white, into something closer to bone.

"How. Long."

"I found out on your wedding day." Lucian wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. "My wolf told me. But I already knew because I could feel her. It functions similarly to fated ties." he paused, taking a steadying breath. "But the truth is, I’ve loved her since the day I first laid eyes on her and I have never stopped."

Tristan pushed off the railing. Turned. The look on his face wasn’t anger yet. It was the thing that comes before anger, when the entire architecture of a man’s reality shifts and he’s standing in the rubble trying to remember which walls were load-bearing.

"You’re telling me." His voice shook. "That my best friend. Has been in love with my wife. And said NOTHING."

Lucian absorbed it. He deserved that. NOTHING. The word was accurate. The word was an indictment. The word was a summary of every choice he’d made over and over again.

"You’re right. I said nothing," he said. "Fate handed me a matebond to a woman I have loved silently my entire life and I said nothing before the matebond and I said nothing after it. Because that woman belonged to the man I’d die for. I chose silence because you were the better man out of us. Because you and her were supposed to be happy. And I would have done it until the day I died, but you were handed a fated tie that isn’t her. I can’t stand idle here while she is grieving while you tear yourself apart."

"You are a LIAR," Tristan roared, and the sound came back off the stone uglier than it left.

Lucian didn’t deny it or step back.

"Yes. I lied to you. I’m sorry."

"You were supposed to be my brother." Tristan’s voice broke. Dark veins crawled up the side of his neck, branching beneath his skin like fractures in glass, the fated tie to Vesper feeding on his rage, pulling him closer to the thing he was trying to outrun.