Caught by the Mad Alpha King-Chapter 454: Budgets

Following Otto’s departure, time resumed its usual violence, demanding that everyone keep up.

The departure itself had been quiet. Otto had spoken through the reinforced glass before dawn, recorded a second message for later, and left for Alamina with the rulers who wore when duty had won nothing except the right to hurt in two places at once.

The first call had happened that same afternoon.

Arion had not been awake enough to say much. His eyes had barely opened, glassy and unfocused, his body still too exhausted to hold on to consciousness for long. But he had heard Otto’s voice. Chris had seen it happen - the tiny, fragile shift in the boy’s face, the way his fingers had twitched against the blanket, and the way panic had eased just enough to become something survivable.

That had been enough to build on.

So time passed.

Otto returned to Alamina and ruled from there with one eye on an empire and the other on a secure call schedule. His face appeared on a screen morning and evening whenever the physicians allowed it. Sometimes Arion managed a few words. Sometimes only a stare. Once, he cried from pain and fury and exhaustion and then refused to speak at all while Otto sat on the screen saying his name over and over with the helpless steadiness of a father who could not cross a continent or a protocol.

Dax and Chris returned to work because kingdoms did not pause for private suffering.

Dax took meetings, signed off on military updates, reviewed security adjustments, and managed the thousand ugly details that gathered whenever one crisis blurred into the next. He spent part of nearly every day in the medical wing anyway because there were limits to what even emperors could delegate, and one of those limits, apparently, was children he had decided were now under his protection.

Chris slid back into his own work with the polished efficiency of a man who could discuss agricultural tariffs in the morning, intimidate three nobles by noon, and then walk into a medical isolation ward in soft shoes and a diamond collar to coax an eight-year-old prince into drinking water by late afternoon.

He was, to his own irritation, very good at it.

Rowan settled into the steward’s office the way a man settled into armor that had belonged to someone he loved: correctly, resentfully, and with no patience for anyone who mistook competence for enthusiasm.

The palace staff learned quickly that the new steward ran things with brutal precision and a permanently offended expression, as if every successful day only proved he had been burdened with more responsibility than anyone decent should have expected him to survive.

He hated the office.

He hated the paperwork.

He hated that Killian’s filing systems were so efficient they left him nothing respectable to criticize.

Most of all, he hated that he was good at it.

Chris had walked in on him three days earlier, standing in the middle of the office with a stack of household budgets in one hand and the look of a man contemplating murder through administrative reform.

"You’re adjusting," Chris had said.

"I’m being punished," Rowan had replied.

Chris hummed. "You know, the staff expected you to be more... soft. Everyone liked you better as chief of security."

"Yes, because I didn’t have to audit them."

Chris leaned one shoulder against the doorframe, watching him with the kind of interest he usually reserved for public scandals and people making expensive mistakes.

Rowan stood in the middle of Killian’s former office in shirtsleeves, jacket thrown over the back of a chair, tie loosened just enough to suggest he had already lost patience with the day. The desk was covered in printed reports, a tablet, two open spreadsheets on the wall screen, and three color-coded folders that looked like they had offended him personally.

"This," Rowan said, lifting one stapled packet, "is the quarterly household discretionary report."

Chris waited.

Rowan stared at the page as if hoping it would catch fire from the force of his irritation alone. "Do you know how much the palace spent last month on flowers?"

Chris considered mocking Rowan or reminding him that Chris was the one vetting them. "Enough to make the building smell optimistic?"

Rowan looked up slowly.

Chris, seeing that expression, decided against admitting direct involvement in any floral decision that had required adjectives like state-appropriate, seasonally uplifting, or subtly expensive.

"That bad?" he asked instead.

Rowan held up the page. "Bad enough that I had to check whether someone added an extra zero by mistake."

Chris took the sheet, scanned the total, and immediately chose dignity over honesty.

"Hm," he said.

Rowan’s eyes narrowed. "That is not a reassuring sound."

"It’s a neutral sound."

"It’s the sound people make before pretending a bad number has context."

Chris handed the page back with perfect calm. "Most bad numbers do have context."

"Yes," Rowan said. "And usually that context is theft."

Chris leaned one shoulder against the desk. "In this case, the context is diplomacy, televised appearances, visiting delegations, and the unfortunate fact that if the palace looks even slightly underdressed, half the press starts writing as though the monarchy is collapsing from the hydrangeas up."

Rowan stared at him.

Chris lifted a brow. "You asked."

"I asked how much we spent," Rowan said. "Not for a philosophical defense of peonies."

"You live in a kingdom ruled by a man who thinks luxury is a birthright and restraint is a personal insult," Chris said. He lifted a hand and touched his collar lightly, the first one Dax had ever given him. The diamonds caught the office light in a thin, expensive line. That piece alone had been valued at over twenty-seven million crowns.

Rowan looked at the collar.

Then at Chris.

Then back at the floral budget.

"I know," he said flatly. "I don’t want to remember the disaster, and Dax behaving like spending the GDP of a small district on your throat was a normal romantic impulse."

Chris’s mouth twitched. "It was a very good gift."

"That is not the point."

"No," Chris said. "The point is that this..." he tapped the budget sheet in Rowan’s hand, "is the controlled version."

Rowan narrowed his eyes.

Chris went on, entirely calm. "The budgeted version. The one I fought Dax and Sahir over."

That made Rowan pause.

Chris raised a brow. "Do you think those numbers happened naturally? Left unsupervised, Dax would fund half the visual atmosphere of the monarchy out of personal accounts because he decided the orchids looked spiritually undercommitted."

Rowan stared at him for a second, then looked back at the page. "That does sound like him."

"It is him," Chris said. "What you’re looking at is compromise."

Rowan gave a short, humorless laugh. "That is deeply upsetting."

"You should have heard the original proposals."

"I assume they were criminal."

"They were enthusiastic."

"That is a richer word for criminal."

Chris leaned one shoulder against the desk. "The kingdom can afford this. And on the rare occasion it shouldn’t have to, Dax would rather eat the cost himself than let the state carry something he considers indulgent."

"I know," Rowan said. "That’s not why I’m offended."

Chris tilted his head. "Then why are you offended?"

"Because I now have to read the line items."

That pulled a real laugh out of Chris.

Rowan, seeing it, looked even less pleased. "As chief of security, I knew the king had expensive habits. As steward, I get spreadsheets."

"Yes," Chris said. "Welcome to suffering."

Before Rowan could retort, Chris’s phone rang.

He glanced at the screen once and answered immediately. "Yes?"

The voice on the other end was one of the nurses from the medical wing, calm but quick. "Your Majesty, Prince Arion has regained consciousness."