Caught by the Mad Alpha King-Chapter 481: - : The fall

Three years later, the palace had acquired a toddler.

This, in practice, meant it had also acquired a small, dark-haired force of nature with Dax’s purple eyes, Chris’s mouth, and a complete lack of respect for hierarchy, schedules, or the structural purpose of furniture. Jax Soraya Altera was two years old and firmly of the opinion that the world existed to be climbed, bitten, or questioned with great intensity.

At present, he was sprawled across Nero like a very determined annexation.

Nero, fifteen now and taller by enough to be annoying about it if anyone had given him the chance, sat on the carpet of the private family sitting room with one leg stretched out, the other bent, and Jax using his thigh as a battlefield for a small wooden army that had already lost all resemblance to organized warfare. One of the toy horses had been declared king, two blocks had become a fortress, and a carved wolf had been promoted for reasons known only to the toddler currently making solemn attack noises into Nero’s shirt.

In the next room, separated from them by open double doors and a distance that made the arrangement feel private without actually being private, Chris was in a meeting.

Nero could hear the rise and fall of voices, the low cadence of policy discussion, and the occasional rustle of paper and faint click of a tablet being set down. It was one of the palace’s internal workrooms, close enough to family quarters that Chris could keep half an eye on Jax while still doing his job and close enough to domestic life that Jax, if sufficiently offended by adult conversation, could probably wander in and derail a procurement discussion with a single well-timed question.

Nero had volunteered to keep him occupied.

Under ordinary conditions, this would have been fine.

Under current conditions, Nero was beginning to suspect his body had developed a personal grudge.

He had felt wrong for three days.

Not sick, exactly. Just off. Too warm under the skin. Too restless. Sleep had come badly and left worse. Training had felt heavier than it should have, his concentration strange around the edges, his temper shorter in private and his patience thinner in class. Since Nero had never, in all his life, been remotely cold or sick, he had dismissed the heat as exhaustion. Training had intensified. His schedule had grown uglier. School, tutors, security instruction, and crown prince duties - limited because of his age, yes, but still real - had begun stacking in ways he disliked.

So he had ignored it.

This, as it turned out, was a mistake.

Jax slammed the wooden horse into a block and looked up at him with delighted violence. "Again."

Nero blinked once. "That horse is dead."

"No."

"It died bravely."

Jax frowned in deep, personal rejection of this interpretation. "Again."

Nero sighed with all the suffering of an older brother who had, for reasons beyond his current understanding, become emotionally attached to the tiny tyrant currently drooling on military assets.

"Yes, all right."

He reset the horse.

Jax immediately destroyed the fortress again and clapped for himself.

Nero smiled despite the thick, unpleasant pressure behind his eyes.

Across the room, one of the doors opened.

Dax entered first, Rowan a step behind him.

They were mid-conversation, which was obvious from Rowan’s expression alone. He carried a tablet under one arm and the face of a man who had once again encountered palace budgets and was still, after years of exposure, not fully resigned to their existence.

"I’m only saying," Rowan was saying, "that no household requires this many discretionary line items labeled security-adjacent."

Dax removed his gloves as he walked, entirely unbothered. "That’s because you still think like a sane person."

"That is not the defense you imagine it is."

Dax turned into the sitting room and stopped.

Not because of Rowan, but because of the children or, more specifically, because of Jax, who saw him and lit up at once.

"Papa!"

Jax abandoned Nero without a backward glance and launched himself upright with both arms out, all curly black hair and imperial confidence.

Dax, who could be discussing military expenditure one second and become a thoroughly compromised father the next with offensive ease, crossed the remaining distance automatically.

"Traitor," Nero muttered.

Jax ignored him because love, at two, was a hierarchy and Dax ranked obscenely high in it.

Dax bent to scoop him up, but Nero spoke first.

"Can you take him for a minute?"

The words came out rougher than he intended.

Dax straightened halfway through the lift and looked at him properly.

Rowan did too.

That was annoying.

Nero pushed one hand back through his hair and tried to sit up straighter. The room tilted a little when he moved.

Dax’s gaze sharpened at once. "What’s wrong?"

"Nothing," Nero said, which was always a convincing answer in families like this. "I’m just tired."

Rowan’s brows moved slightly, but he said nothing.

Jax, already settled against Dax’s shoulder and fully satisfied by this transfer of ownership, patted his father’s cheek twice with great approval.

Dax took him anyway, one arm secure around the toddler, but he did not look away from Nero.

"You look flushed."

Nero let out a dry laugh. "I always look dramatic. It means nothing."

"That isn’t what I said."

Nero opened his mouth to produce something dismissive.

He never got the chance.

The world lurched.

A hard drop, sudden and absolute, like his body had reached some internal threshold without consulting him and then cut the floor out from underneath itself.

Heat tore through him.

For one split second he did not understand what was happening. Only that the air had become too thick, his skin too tight, his heart suddenly pounding so hard it seemed to hit every wall of him at once.

Jax made a questioning little noise.

Dax’s expression changed.

Rowan saw it too late.

Nero tried to brace a hand against the floor.

Missed and blacked out.

Jax gasped.

"Nero." Dax’s voice cracked through the room like an order and a curse in one.

He moved before the echo died, shoving Jax toward Rowan with the blind precision only fathers and kings seemed capable of in genuine emergency.

Rowan caught the toddler automatically, tablet clattering onto the nearest chair as Jax twisted in his arms, startled and offended.

Dax was already on his knees.

Nero had hit the carpet badly, not with the full force of a collapse from standing but hard enough to make the position ugly: one shoulder twisted, one hand caught under him, white-blonde hair fallen across his face.

And the scent...

Rowan froze.

Jax, still in his arms, went abruptly quiet.

Dax’s face went still in a way that had nothing to do with calm.

"Nero," he said again, sharper, one hand already sliding under his son’s neck while the other checked his pulse, his temperature, and his breathing all in the same sequence.

Hot.

Nero made a low, unconscious sound, its body caught between unconsciousness and the first brutal grip of a threshold it had finally decided to cross.

Rowan looked from Dax to the boy on the carpet and then at the toddler in his own arms, and for one very honest second the old general of budgets and order looked exactly like a man who had stumbled into the wrong kind of battlefield.

Jax, sensing that something enormous had changed, pressed one hand into Rowan’s coat and whispered, "Neno?"

Dax looked up.

His voice, when it came, was deadly with control. "Take Jax to Chris. Now."

Rowan did not argue.

He turned at once, Jax held securely against his chest, and strode toward the adjoining room just as the first wave of scent began to hit the edges of the sitting room with brutal force.