Caught by the Mad Alpha King-Chapter 344: A part of it (2)

The handwriting changed here. The tone grew bitter in its own way, as if the author resented even having to acknowledge the reality of it.

In the first life, Chris had it all.

His parents remained alive; Chris’s father, Claude, had inherited the title of Viscount, not Adonis. Claude had become the head of the Malek family - oh, the hate in those words, the way the ink seemed to press harder as if resentment could be made physical through a pen.

Andrew had still become the Black family heir, but by marriage in that life, and Mia had married "a civilian beta colleague of Christopher with gold eyes."

Ethan, Dax thought, and it landed in his chest ugly, as the two had no chance to be together now. Lucius of Palatine won’t give up on the girl, and Ethan was changing his secondary gender after saving dozens of lives.

Chris had met Dax by accident and married him. They had their first child within the year.

They were happy.

And Adonis - marked by Benedict, sharpened by whatever rot that man poured into him - hated Dax with the kind of hatred that didn’t come from politics but from envy. From the simple, unbearable fact that Chris had been out of reach.

They couldn’t touch Chris in that life.

The sentence sat in the middle of the page like a snapped leash, frustration and failure packed into four words.

Dax’s gaze didn’t move as he scrolled down, but something in him did, the way a predator’s spine shifts when it catches the exact scent it was never meant to smell.

Lower.

Lower still.

The handwriting became less careful. Like the author had stopped trying to sound clever and started writing from the gut.

And then the underlined line appeared.

I got him.

Dax closed the phone.

It wasn’t dramatic. It was the quietest motion in the world - screen dark, the evidence hidden again - like he was putting the knife back into its sheath before he used it.

For a beat, he didn’t breathe.

Then he let his head fall back against the wall, eyes half-lidding, not because he was calming down, but because rage had hit him so hard it needed somewhere to go.

It poured through him in a hot, immediate wave, sharp enough to make his vision tighten at the edges.

His hand clenched.

The phone case groaned.

Plastic gave first an ugly, small sound, the kind of sound that shouldn’t come from a man’s fingers.

Trevor didn’t move, not because he wasn’t startled, but because he understood instinctively that stepping closer now would be like stepping between an animal and its prey.

Dax’s grip tightened again.

The screen spiderwebbed under his palm.

Glass cracked, then cracked again, the fracture lines racing like lightning across the dark display. Something inside the phone shifted and crunched, delicate pieces folding under pressure they were never built to survive.

Dax looked down at it like it wasn’t a phone.

Like it was a throat.

His jaw clenched hard enough to carve muscle along it. His breathing stayed controlled, the way it did when he was doing everything in his power not to storm back into the parlor and let Chris see even a fraction of this.

Because Chris was still behind that door.

Chris was still warm.

Chris was still safe.

But his mind circled back to Adonis Malek, who had written that line like a victory.

I got him.

As if getting Chris was a trophy.

As if Chris was something you could "get."

Dax’s fingers eased enough to stop destroying the object in his hand, blood trickling slowly onto the marble.

Trevor stared at the phone in Dax’s hand, the crushed casing, the spiderwebbed glass, the way a few sharp fragments had bitten into skin, and then, because Trevor was Trevor and because he understood that if Dax stayed in that headspace one second longer he’d turn the entire estate into a crime scene, he chose the only weapon that worked on kings like him.

Dry humor.

A leash made of sarcasm.

He glanced down at the slow drip of blood tracking toward the pale marble tiles and let his voice go bland, almost bored.

"You’re going to stain my marble," Trevor said.

The words hit like cold water.

Dax blinked.

Not because he cared about the marble - he didn’t care about the marble, he didn’t care about the building, he didn’t care about anything that wasn’t currently sitting behind a parlor door with a sleeping baby tucked against his chest - but because the absurdity of it forced his mind to catch on to something human.

Trevor, seeing the flicker, pushed gently, because this was how you pulled a king back from the edge without making him feel handled.

"Windstone would be furious," he added, deadpan, as if that was the real threat in the corridor. "He’ll complain for a week. He will say I’ve brought barbarians into his house."

Dax’s jaw tightened again, but this time the tension shifted.

The rage didn’t vanish.

Trevor continued, because once you got Dax to bite on something ridiculous, you had to keep feeding it until the animal remembered it had rules.

"And he’ll complain to Killian," Trevor said with the same dry tone, like he was listing the consequences of an overfilled wine glass. "Which means you’ll have two butlers offended at you across two kingdoms."

Dax’s gaze dropped to the blood on the marble.

A slow line. Bright against pale stone.

His mouth twitched, not quite a smile, but the echo of one, an old reflex, a familiar mask.

"Two butlers," he murmured.

"Killian will take it personally. Windstone will take it morally," Trevor said. "Between the two of them, they’ll write a treaty about appropriate bleeding locations."

Trevor exhaled, then added, as if this was the real tragedy of the day:

"Why do we have the only two ex-married alphas in existence as butlers?"

That finally dragged a sound out of Dax, not laughter, not quite, but the low, involuntary huff of a man whose rage had just been forced to make room for something absurd.

"Because the gods enjoy comedy," Dax murmured.

"And punishment," Trevor said immediately.

Dax’s eyes flicked up, violet and sharp, and for a fraction of a second the predator showed again, then he blinked, and the mask settled back into place.

"Well, I have to find an excuse for this." He looked at the wound in his palm. "What do you think Chris and Lucas would believe?"

Trevor looked at the blood first, then at Dax’s face, and in the span of a heartbeat he ran through the options the way he ran through battle maps: what would keep Chris calm, what would keep Lucas from going still and sharp and suspicious, and what lie would be clean enough to hold?

He let out a slow breath.

"Chris will believe anything if it’s delivered with confidence and affection," Trevor said, tone dry. "Lucas will believe nothing if it smells like bullshit."

Dax’s mouth twitched. "Helpful."

Trevor shrugged. "It’s a skill."

Dax rolled his wrist slightly, and pain flashed. The phone shifted in his grip, cracked glass biting deeper. He didn’t react. He just watched the blood start again, patient, controlled, as if his body was a separate thing that insisted on misbehaving.

Trevor’s gaze flicked to the crushed phone and then away again, deliberately not staring. "You need something mundane," he said. "Something stupid. Something that doesn’t invite questions."

Dax hummed, thinking. The anger in him was still there, heavy and hot, but it had been caged. Now he was using it like fuel instead of fire.

"A glass," Trevor offered. "You broke a glass. In the kitchen. Because you insisted on making tea like a competent husband, and the universe punished you for ambition."

Dax’s brow lifted. "That’s almost believable."

"It’s entirely believable," Trevor corrected. "You’re a king. The concept of you doing anything practical is already absurd enough to distract them."

Dax’s mouth curved faintly. "Chris would laugh."

"He would," Trevor said, and his tone softened for a fraction, because they both knew Chris’s laughter was a fragile thing when the world got its hands near him. "And Lucas will narrow his eyes, but he won’t push if Chris is laughing."

Dax glanced toward the parlor door, listening for the cadence of voices, the soft murmur of Chris, and the gentler rhythm of Lucas. A warm pocket of safety that Dax refused to contaminate with the wrong kind of truth.

"Kitchen accident," Dax repeated, tasting it.