There’s a long pause. Liam is afraid he knows what’s about to happen. This man is going to ask him to help.

“Oh. I sort of hoped you would be there. We don’t know if he’ll be looking for someone permanent, and we expect his ability to resist his designation is quite high, he’s done it for so long⁠—”

“He will want someone permanent,” he interjects. “And just because he’s been denied doesn’t mean he has the desire or will to continue resisting.” Liam can feel his blood pressure rising.

He hears a male voice in the background. “Daniel needs one man and that’s it. That’s all he’s ever wanted,” the person says.

Prey designation is rare. Rare enough that hearing about a submissive named Daniel makes his heart clench in grief.

He will never get over the loss. His own failure and culpability led to Daniel’s death. He’d been told by General Burrows that Daniel died, didn’t make the transition to stasis, and he’d tried to find out if that was true, but had gotten nowhere.

And yet. Part of him has always wondered if that was a lie. And now he’s getting a call about another prey submissive with the same name who would have gone into stasis a few years ago….

Liam knows it’s unlikely, but he’s instantly hoping that somehow this is about his Daniel.

It’s foolish. “I don’t think you mentioned. What is Daniel’s surname?”

“Burrows.”

Liam sits down heavily on the couch. His voice is rough. “The person you’re with now, Daniel’s brother… is he Logan Burrows?”

“How do you know that?” Robert asks.

His eyes are welling with tears and he has to clear his throat. “Because Daniel told me when we were together. Daniel Burrows was my submissive. But Daniel’s dead. That’s what I was told. I don’t even know if I believed it, but there wasn’t anything I could do,” he says. It sounds like an excuse to his own ears, though he doesn’t know what he could have done to discover the truth. “He’s been gone for three years now.”

“Who told you he was dead?” Logan demands. He can tell Robert has put him on speakerphone.

“Your father. The general. He called me a week after Daniel left and said he’d been put into stasis but that he hadn’t made the transition. That can happen if the submissive has a bond. With Daniel’s extreme designation, it was… it was believable.” And he’d been so sure it was his fault, already so swamped with grief at his own failure that he’d accepted the lie.