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Chris kept his face still. “I’m fine.”

“Do you sleep?”

Chris laughed at this. “No. I haven’t slept since… the announcement.”

Viktor didn’t smile. He stood with his hands at his sides, his weight evenly distributed, looking at Chris with an expression that was stripped of its usual professional distance. Chris had seen this face before. Viktor wore it rarely, only in rooms where the number of people present could be counted on one hand.

“Chris.”

“I’m fine, Viktor. The wards are the priority. I can sleep when we’ve figured out how a sixty-year-old exile is ghosting past a dual-source matrix.”

“The wards are being addressed. I’m asking about you.”

Chris looked at the training yard. A sparrow landed on the fence post, pecked at the wood, and flew off.

“I got paired with a woman who tried to destroy my sister. Her father is sneaking onto Beaumont territory to finish what he started when she was six years old. I can feel her through the bond every time she’s afraid, which is often, because she’s been afraid for years. I can’t chase the man because I don’t know where he is. I can’t fix the wards because I’m not a witch. I can’t talk to her because she looks at me like I’m going to use every word she says to me against her.” He paused. “So yeah. I’m great.”

Viktor absorbed it. He didn’t rush to fill the space after Chris finished. He let the words settle into the air between them, gave them room to exist without commentary.

“I don’t know what to tell you about the bond,” Viktor said. “My experience with it was not uncomplicated.”

Chris laughed. A real one, short, surprised out of him. “Viktor, your experience with the bond involved marrying Kahn’s sister under threat of war. I think ‘not uncomplicated’ might be the understatement of the decade.”

Viktor’s mouth twitched. The closest thing to a grin Chris had seen on him in weeks.

“The point,” Viktor said, “is that I didn’t know what I was doing, either. With Olivia. With any of it. I had no framework for wanting someone I was supposed to protect. It went against every operational principle I’d built my life around.”

“How did you figure it out?”

“I didn’t. She did. I just stopped getting in the way.”

Chris looked at him. Viktor held his gaze, steady, unblinking, offering the admission with quiet deliberateness, aware of what it cost to say it.

“I’m here,” Viktor said. “If you need to talk, or if you need someone to walk a perimeter with at five in the morning. I’m here.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

Chris put his hand on Viktor’s shoulder. Left it there for a beat, the way Viktor’s hand had rested on the iron stakes, testing for resonance.

“I know,” he said again.

Viktor nodded. The nod that meant understood, agreed, moving on. They walked toward the compound together, their boots crunching on the gravel path, the morning opening around them.

Chris could feel Sloane stirring. She was awake now, her presence shifting from the dull hum of sleep into the sharper frequency of consciousness. He wondered if she could feel him, too. He wondered if she tracked his proximity the way he tracked hers, an awareness that sat just below thought.

He didn’t know how to want someone he was supposed to hate, how to protect someone who had been nothing but awful to the one person he cared for more than anything. Viktor was right about that. Every instinct he had was built for standing behind people, holding doors, keeping watch. The bond was asking him to do the opposite, to step forward, to reach, to occupy space he’d never claimed.

He wasn’t ready for that.

But he walked toward the compound with Viktor beside him, toward the dining hall where Sloane would or would not be sitting at her usual table with her collar turned up, toward a day that would require decisions he hadn’t made yet. He walked, because walking was the thing he could do while the rest of it took shape around him.

The kitchen door was open. He could smell coffee, eggs, the sharp green scent of herbs. Inside, voices. Damian’s laugh, unmistakable, carrying through the stone corridor.

“Breakfast?” Viktor asked.

“In a minute. I want to check the patrol logs from last night first.”