Caught by the Mad Alpha King-Chapter 343: A part of it. (1)

"I want it."

Trevor didn’t flinch, but something in his eyes tightened, the way a man’s grip tightens around a knife he never meant to use at the table.

"You can’t have it," he said, calmly.

Dax’s smile was still there, technically. It just... stopped being a smile in the human sense. It turned into the kind of baring that belonged to predators and kings and men who had learned to make "polite" sound like a mercy.

Trevor watched it happen in real time, the shift from playful tyrant who teased Chris like he was his favorite indulgence to something older, darker, and far more honest.

The real king of Saha, that Chris, would never see.

Dax’s attention sharpened the way an animal’s does when it smells blood on snow.

"Repeat that," Dax murmured.

Trevor kept his voice even. Friendly, if you were generous. "You can’t have it."

Dax’s violet eyes didn’t blink.

He didn’t ask why. He didn’t argue like a man looking for permission. He was going to obtain what he wanted with or without cooperation.

Adonis Malek.

Even the corridor seemed to dislike it.

Dax’s mind - usually a riot of jokes, calculations, and the casual cruelty that made him so easy to love and so hard to survive - went brutally quiet.

He remembered what his men found, the short recordings of meetings and calls. The way Adonis spoke, not like Chris was a person, not like Chris was a man with teeth and pride and a heart that could break under the wrong hands.

Like Chris was a tool.

A weapon.

Something you kept on a shelf until you needed it.

Like an omega could be reduced into a function, a lever, or a pressure point.

Dax’s fingers flexed once, slowly, as if his body had to remember it was standing in a corridor and not around someone’s throat.

"The diary," Dax said softly, and the softness was the problem. "Where is it?"

Trevor took a deep breath, knowing that Dax would hate what he was going to hear.

"Nobody has it," he said, measured. "At least not to my knowledge. The only reason I know it exists is because Benedict had three pages copied on him when he died."

Dax didn’t move. He didn’t even blink. The stillness was so complete it felt like the corridor itself had learned fear.

Trevor continued anyway, because this was the kind of truth that didn’t get softer if you delayed it.

"The writing was Adonis’s."

Something in Dax’s face shifted.

He exhaled through his nose, slowly, and the sound was almost a laugh if you didn’t know what laughter looked like on a king who had decided someone was going to disappear in a very painful way.

"Three pages," Dax repeated, quietly.

Trevor nodded once. "Three."

Dax’s gaze slid past Trevor, unfocused for a beat, as if those pages were already unrolling in his mind. As if he could already see the slant of the handwriting, the arrogance in the phrasing, and the kind of casual ownership men like Adonis liked to hide under "strategy."

He swallowed once. His voice stayed calm.

"That means the original still exists."

Trevor’s jaw tightened. "Yes."

"And it wasn’t on Benedict when he died," Dax added, as if speaking to himself. "Which means Benedict wasn’t carrying it. He was carrying them for a reason."

Trevor didn’t answer immediately. He didn’t need to. The truth sat between them like a loaded gun.

Dax’s mouth curved into something that tried very hard to be a smile and failed.

"Tell me," he said softly, "what did the pages say?"

Trevor swallowed.

His gaze flicked to the parlor door, to the warmth behind it, to the fact that Chris was laughing quietly at something Lucas said, unaware that a war was being assembled in the hallway outside his breath.

Then Trevor exhaled through his nose, slow and tight, and made a decision.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. He held it out like it weighed more than steel.

Dax’s eyes dropped to it.

For a second, his expression didn’t change.

Then Trevor spoke, voice low.

"Only me and one of my men knew I had these," he said. "I didn’t tell Lucas or Windstone."

Dax’s gaze lifted, sharp. "Why?"

Trevor’s jaw flexed. "Because Lucas would have gone cold and quiet and blamed himself for what he is." His mouth tightened, the words rougher than he liked. "And Windstone would have tried to take it and bury it under six meters of dirt and blood."

Dax’s mouth twitched, almost in amusement, but it died quickly.

Trevor added, quieter, "I asked you out here because Chris was in the room. You won’t like what’s in there."

Dax’s fingers closed around the phone.

His touch was careful, like a king picking up a venomous thing that had already bitten someone.

The screen lit up.

Three photographs. Worn paper under harsh light. The handwriting wasn’t elegant, but it was practiced. A man’s writing who believed that if he wrote something down, the world would eventually be forced to obey it.

Dax scrolled slowly.

The first section was about Lucas.

Not Lucas as a person, but Lucas as a miracle to solve a problem. Lucas as a piece on a board that could be exchanged for another chance as long as you were willing to be patient and cruel.

In that first life, Lucas and Trevor had gotten married. There had been a first pregnancy, and the pages described it with the casual tone of logistics: Benedict and Adonis bribing the physician, the child killed before it could live, like a line item crossed off.

Then another pregnancy.

This time they "allowed" it. They let Lucas have the baby, let him hold his son in his arms, and let him believe, just long enough for it to hurt properly.

And then they killed him when the boy was three months old.

It was written with the same detached, almost bored conviction, as if the suffering was not only intentional but enjoyable.

After that, the notes turned to Trevor, the war with a province, the arranged "accident," and the way you disposed of a dominant alpha by giving him a battlefield and making sure fate had a hand on his shoulder. Like grief could be engineered the way you engineered politics.

They had made Lucas suffer until he broke.

Until his soul wanted another chance. Until he died. Until the world started again.

Dax’s thumb paused for a fraction of a second, just enough for the phone case to creak under the pressure of his grip.

He scrolled.

The second part shifted to Chris.