Chapter 125: How Will I Make Him Understand.

They arrived back in the room to find Bryce exactly where Vincent had left him, lying motionless on the bed.

Nothing about him had changed.

Agatha immediately moved to his side and leaned over him. She placed her fingers against his wrist, searching for a pulse, then checked again when she found nothing.

There was none.

"Is he okay?" Vincent demanded, the questions tumbling out one after another as he stood beside the bed. "What is actually happening to him? Can you feel his pulse? Because I can’t hear his heartbeat."

Agatha did not answer immediately.

Her attention remained fixed on Bryce as she examined him, her expression becoming increasingly serious.

She moved one hand over him, trying to sense what was happening beneath the stillness that had overtaken his body.

"His body has frozen," she finally said. "Everything has frozen with it, including his mind and his heart."

Vincent stared at her, his expression completely blank.

"What?"

"He was desperately preventing himself from comprehending something, thinking about something, or rather, accepting something." Agatha’s voice remained steady despite the severity of her words. "So his power took a shortcut. It froze everything instead."

Vincent’s face drained of what little composure remained.

Agatha finally looked at him.

"What actually happened? What did he hear? Or what did he realize immediately before he collapsed?"

"Nothing that could cause that reaction," Vincent answered. "We were talking about him deciding who lives and who dies. He asked if I regretted what I had done, and I told him honestly that I did."

Vincent’s words came almost without pause.

"Then suddenly he went silent. His eyes closed, and he seemed to be somewhere else entirely, even though his body was right there in my arms. It lasted for about two minutes. Then he suddenly went completely still. He wasn’t even breathing."

Agatha’s eyes stayed fixed on Vincent for several moments, as though she were not merely listening to his explanation but studying his reaction to it.

"Is there something you did recently?" she asked at last. "Something you said, did, or thought about that you know you shouldn’t have? It seems that when you started confessing how deeply you regretted your past actions, Bryce’s power instinctively replayed everything you were supposed to be judged for. Whatever he saw, whether it was something you did, something you said, or something you thought, affected him deeply."

Her gaze shifted briefly toward Bryce.

"That was why he refused to process it. His power responded instinctively and froze all of his senses instead."

There was certainty in Agatha’s voice. She was not guessing.

Vincent said nothing.

His mind immediately began moving through everything he had done recently, searching through his memories with increasing urgency.

Every action.

Every word.

Every thought.

He tried to remember anything that could possibly explain what had happened, but nothing immediately came to mind. He could not recall doing anything recently that he would consider a sin or even something genuinely wrong.

He was already preparing to tell Agatha that there was nothing when one memory struck him with such force that his thoughts stopped completely.

That night.

The night Bryce and Dave had been so familiar with each other in front of him.

They had looked and sounded like two people who had known each other for years, two people who could hardly imagine being apart. Vincent remembered watching them together and feeling something inside him become unbearably heavy.

Then came the moment he had seen Bryce allow Dave to take him in front of him.

Vincent had been forced to watch his mate surrender himself to another man right before his eyes.

He remembered what it had felt like to stand there and watch the man he loved so deeply, the man he wanted for himself, respond to Dave as though nothing else could make him feel the way Dave did.

He had not been able to bear it.

The jealousy had overwhelmed him so intensely that, for a moment, he had been unable to think clearly.

He had still said nothing.

Instead, his mind had formed a bitter thought.

Perhaps he could let Bryce go.

If Bryce clearly loved Dave with everything he had and wanted him just as deeply, perhaps Vincent should simply step aside.

Perhaps, once Bryce gave birth to their child, Vincent could take the baby and raise it alone while Bryce remained free to live his life with Dave.

And because Vincent knew how painful it would be to separate himself from Bryce, he had told himself that, after enduring the pain of separating from him the first time, he would not allow himself to see Bryce again.

He would make sure they stayed apart, with the baby serving as the only reminder of Bryce, the child they had created together.

Now, as Vincent remembered the thought, it seemed unreasonable in every possible way.

How could he have thought that he could simply take the baby away from its mother and prevent them from seeing each other simply because he had been hurt?

How could he have imagined separating himself from Bryce?!

When the thought had first entered his mind, he had not been able to tolerate the reality of never seeing Bryce again.

The mere idea of a life without him had been unbearable.

He had dismissed the thought almost immediately.

He had hated himself for having it.

And that was what disturbed him most about himself. He seemed to have a habit of doing, saying, or thinking the wrong thing, only to realize almost immediately afterward that it was wrong and regret it.

Now the realization hit him with renewed force.

Bryce had seen it.

His power must have shown him everything.

He knew that taking the baby away was the one thing Bryce feared most. He had seen how deeply that fear affected him, even before Bryce had become pregnant.

Vincent could barely breathe at the thought of Bryce waking up with that knowledge.

How was he supposed to explain it?

How could he make Bryce understand that it had been nothing more than a stupid thought born from jealousy, that it had not lasted more than a brief moment in his mind, that he had rejected it almost as soon as he had considered it?

He had never intended to take the baby.

He did not intend to do it now.

He would never intend to do it in the future.

But Bryce might not know that.

All Bryce might know was that Vincent had thought about taking his child away from him.

Vincent’s panic rose further.

Things between them had finally been going well. Their relationship had changed so much from what it had once been. And now his own thoughts had ruin it again.

Vincent staggered backward.

For a moment, he nearly lost his balance, but he caught himself and forced his body upright again.

Agatha watched him closely.

"So you actually did something?" she asked.

Her expression hardened as she looked at Vincent, her concern for Bryce now mixed with clear frustration. "You know the last thing I wanted was for the two of you to fight at a moment like this. He cannot do what he’s supposed to do while he’s in an unstable emotional state, or when the two of you are emotionally disconnected. You don’t know this, but you play a very big role in this, and you have no idea how glad I was that the two of you had finally started getting along."

Her voice carried a reprimanding edge as she continued, refusing to let him avoid the matter.

"What did you actually do, say, or think?"

Vincent did not answer.

He could not.

The words remained trapped somewhere inside him, impossible to put into an explanation that would not make everything worse.

His silence, combined with the sudden change in his expression and the way he had staggered backward, was enough for Agatha to understand that she had been right.

"All right then, Alpha Vincent. I don’t know what you’re going to do, but I want this made right as soon as possible. I’m going to try to pull him back," Agatha added.

Vincent’s heart raced violently.

He was not ready to face Bryce after what had just been exposed.

He did not know what Bryce would think of him when he opened his eyes. He did not know whether Bryce would be afraid of him, angry with him, or unable to trust him after learning what had briefly crossed his mind.

The thought of facing him terrified Vincent.

But none of that mattered now.

Bryce needed to come back.

Whatever had taken hold of him, whatever his own power had done in response to what he had discovered, Vincent needed Agatha to pull him out of it.

He needed to know that Bryce was alive and okay.

Agatha moved closer to Bryce again and closed her eyes for a long moment, her expression shifting between hardness and softness.

After what felt like an eternity, Bryce finally jerked awake and sat up, looking disoriented, as though it took him a moment to register where he was.