Bound by the Mark of Lies (BL)-Chapter 273 - 267: The call

Gabriel tilted his head, brow raised. "No. I’m going to call."

Marin blinked once, but he couldn’t compute the idea of Gabriel, the dramatic consort, choosing to communicate first. "Call him."

"Yes."

"Right now."

"Yes," Gabriel said again, flat and final. "Are you sure you’re not the one who should be on this bed?"

"I’m very sure about that," Marin replied, already turning. "Unless you enter the room. Then we’ll both need medical attention."

He didn’t wait for a reply. Just walked toward the door with the air of a man deeply uninterested in witnessing a telepathic marital check-in that might short-circuit the palace wards. One hand lifted lazily in a gesture that said fine, but his posture read I didn’t sign up for this.

"I’ll be outside," Marin said. "If something explodes, scream."

The door clicked shut behind him.

Gabriel exhaled and pulled the device from his pocket. He rarely used it now. Before the palace—before Damian—it had been tethered to his palm, vibrating with calls, field reports, raw site data, and frantic engineers trying to fix towers older than their clearance.

Now?

Now it was quiet. It rang for exactly one person. And it had only one line that mattered.

He tapped twice. The frequency locked, encrypted, and pulse-aligned.

It connected before the second ring finished.

"And here I thought you would let me off the hook for this," Damian said, voice clear, a thread of humor in it—but one stretched thin. Too thin.

Gabriel didn’t smile.

"Are you there for an inspection of building integrity," he asked, "or troops?"

A pause. One heartbeat. Then another.

Damian exhaled. "Both.

Gabriel tilted his head. "Because from here, it sounded like the wall lost."

"It did."

The bluntness of his mate’s voice wasn’t what caught him—it was the flatness, the absence of anything dressed in careful tone or imperial polish, and it made Gabriel still mid-breath, his free hand clenching in the fabric of his coat with a pressure that whitened his knuckles.

"You never let anything through the bond," he said quietly, each word precise. "I’m worried. And you seem determined not to talk about it."

There was a pause.

Just the pause of a man calculating how much of himself he could afford to show without coming apart.

"No," Damian said. "I do not. Not now. Not while you have enough on your plate."

His voice was calm—dangerously so—the kind of neutral that only Gabriel would recognize as a controlled detour around something still bleeding.

"I will," Damian added after a moment, "after your heat passes."

Gabriel didn’t respond right away.

He let the silence settle like dust between them, slow and dry and heavy at the edges.

Because he knew. Knew what it cost Damian to say even that much. Knew the walls it had to crack through for his mate to admit, in any shape or form, that something was wrong. That he couldn’t fix it yet. That he didn’t want Gabriel to carry it now, when everything else in his body was already spiraling under the weight of hormones and ether and tension that refused to dissipate.

But Gabriel also knew—knew down to his bones—that whatever Damian was shielding him from had nothing to do with preservation.

It was fear. Not fear of pain or consequence, but fear of what it meant to lay that burden down and not be able to take it back again.

"Alright," Gabriel said finally, voice softer now. Not yielding. Just choosing patience. "After."

There was a breath on the line. Subtle. Barely audible.

Gratitude, maybe. Or exhaustion. Or both.

Gabriel didn’t press.

Instead, he shifted the weight of the moment with deliberate precision, letting just enough air back into the conversation to breathe without relaxing.

"Did you treat your hand?" he asked, "or did you decide to paint the walls? There is, last I checked, a standing rule that only one of us is allowed to be in the physician’s office holding a nutritional pouch and the ruins of their dignity."

Damian didn’t respond right away.

Then: "Why are you at the physician’s office?"

The change in his voice wasn’t loud, but it was immediate—a clean cut through the calm, sharpened by something more than worry and wrapped in instinct.

Gabriel heard it. He smiled, faint and crooked, a little cruel.

"Because Irina asked something that haunted me," he said lightly, "and I wanted to make it clear that I can’t get double pregnant. And now I’m sequestered here like a national hazard."

There was a pause on the line.

"Are you serious?" Damian asked, his voice pitched too carefully.

"As the bloodwork, you bled through the bond," Gabriel said. "Apparently, Marin thinks I’m glowing hard enough to affect the climate."

"Gabriel—"

"I’m fine," he interrupted, still half-laughing. "Stable. Terrifyingly fertile, but otherwise unharmed."

"Are you lying to me?"

"Would I lie to you," Gabriel said, "while holding an empty pouch in one hand and being monitored like a volatile relic?"

"Yes."

"Then no," Gabriel said, "not this time."

There was a pause on the line—short, but heavy. Damian didn’t respond immediately, and that silence said more than a dozen questions would have. Gabriel could almost picture him: one hand probably curled tight at his side, jaw clenched, golden eyes narrowed at nothing in particular while he tried very hard not to feel too much through a bond that was already lit up like a goddamn signal tower.

"You scare me," Damian said finally, and the words were flat—not angry, not even sharp. Just true. Too true.

"I’m the one locked in a sterile room," Gabriel said, gaze flicking toward the closed door, "surrounded by blinking monitors and a man who thinks sedatives are a lifestyle."

"And I’m the one who felt you seize up through a shielded corridor," Damian replied, voice low. "So forgive me if I’m not impressed by your performance."

Gabriel leaned back on the table again, the faint throb of the bond still pulsing steadily beneath his skin. "You’re bleeding. I’m glowing. We’re both terrible at boundaries."

Damian didn’t respond immediately.

But the bond shifted again—warmer now, still ragged at the edges, like pressure held between teeth, barely swallowed.

"I thought you were resting," Damian said at last, and it sounded like an accusation dressed as concern, or maybe the other way around.

"I was resting," Gabriel replied, dragging a hand through his hair. "Then Irina decided to ask whether I could get pregnant again while already pregnant, and now Marin wants to sedate me on principle."

There was a pause on the line, and Gabriel could practically hear Damian pinching the bridge of his nose in some godforsaken corridor where even the walls were afraid to echo.

"Please tell me you’re joking."

"I wish I was," Gabriel said. "But no. I had to physically confirm I wasn’t about to become an imperial nesting doll."

Damian made a sound—half sigh, half growl, low in his throat and laced with the kind of weariness that belonged exclusively to men who had conquered nations but were still somehow losing to their own mate’s social calendar.

"I should have come back sooner."

Gabriel’s fingers tightened slightly against the edge of the table. "You didn’t know she was going to weaponize reproductive theory."

"That’s not what I meant."

"I know."

And that was the truth of it—quiet, inconvenient, and laced in everything they hadn’t said since the bond first flared open and refused to let either of them pretend anymore.

"You can’t protect me from everything," Gabriel said, softer this time. "And I don’t want you to try. Not when it means I only find out what hurts you after you’ve already bled through the stone."

"I know," Damian said again, quieter now. "I just—I needed time to understand it all before I gave it to you."

Gabriel tilted his head, eyes narrowing. "You think I need it packaged?"

"No," Damian replied. "I think I needed to believe it could be explained."

The silence returned, not heavy, but unavoidable.

Then Gabriel, dry as ever: "I’ll forgive you if you arrive with something edible and not in a pouch."

Damian actually huffed a laugh. "Demanding already."

"Always."