Chapter 397: Chapter 397: A week of Silence

The recovery suite had been turned into a fortress with softer furniture.

The curtains were drawn against the palace’s curiosity. The lights were low and warm, after Chris had threatened, very calmly, to strangle whoever turned on something fluorescent near him again. The room smelled like antiseptic and linen and that faint, unmistakable newborn scent that didn’t belong to anything else.

Chris was on the bed, propped up with enough pillows to qualify as architecture. The sheets were tucked around him like the nurses were trying to trick his body into believing it was safe. His skin was still a little too pale, his hair messy, and his mouth had the tight set of a man who had survived something he refused to admit had scared him.

Dax stood just shy of the bed with their son.

Nero Ezekiel Altera was a ridiculous thing to behold, because he was so new, so small, and yet somehow already looked like a future problem. He was bundled in white, his face scrunched in sleeping offense, and his white-blonde hair clung in soft wisps that made him seem less like a prince and more like a very tiny, furious prophecy.

In Dax’s hands, Nero was almost swallowed.

The King of Saha’s palms were built for weapons, punishments, and violence that made entire rooms go silent. Watching those same hands cradle a newborn – fingers splayed to support a fragile spine, thumbs hovering like they were afraid of using pressure at all – looked wrong in the way miracles always did.

Dax didn’t breathe like a normal man. He breathed like someone who had been told not to move while holding something sacred.

Chris watched him without blinking.

“You look like you’re defusing a bomb,” Chris murmured, voice rough with recovery and exhaustion that made even sarcasm come out softer.

Dax’s eyes flicked up, purple and dark. “He is more like a crystal ornament. I can break him if I flex my fingers.”

Chris stared at him, and for a second the sarcasm stalled, replaced by something sharper.

“You will not,” Chris said flatly, like it was a law.

Dax’s jaw worked once, the muscle jumping under his cheekbone. “Of course I won’t. That is why I am standing like this.” He barely shifted, as if even breathing wrong might count as negligence. “I have killed men with less care.”

“That’s reassuring,” Chris deadpanned.

Dax didn’t even pretend to be amused. His gaze dropped back to Nero, reverent and frightened in the same breath. “He is… too small.”

Nero Ezekiel Altera, bundled in white, made a tiny sound in his sleep, an offended little huff, and then settled again as if the entire palace was beneath his concern.

Chris’s eyes narrowed. “He’s not too small. He’s just new. You’re acting like someone handed you a glass heir.”

Dax’s mouth tightened. “You did.”

Chris let out a slow breath and shifted as carefully as his stitches allowed, adjusting the pillows with one hand. The movement tugged a quiet grimace out of him that he tried to hide.

Dax’s eyes snapped to Chris’s face. “Don’t move.”

Chris’s brows lifted with offended dignity. “I’m not moving. I’m negotiating with gravity.”

Dax took one step closer, then stopped himself, because he still had the baby and the world had rules now. “You’re in pain.”

Chris’s voice went bland. “I’m in recovery. That’s the polite word for pain with paperwork.”

Dax’s expression darkened, but his hands stayed perfectly steady around Nero, even as something in him bristled at the idea that Chris was hurting and he couldn’t fix it by tearing down a wall.

Chris watched him for a beat, then sighed. “I will be fine, just a little more fragile than usual.”

Dax’s eyes sharpened on the word ’fragile,’ like it offended him personally.

“You are not fragile,” he said, flatly.

Chris’s mouth twitched. “Tell that to my stitches.”

Dax looked like he wanted to declare war on stitches; before he could, the door opened.

Nadia stepped in first.

She had a clipboard in one hand and a folder in the other, and her face had the expression of a woman who had survived an entire year of watching the palace lose its mind. Behind her, Rowan entered like a shadow with a pulse, shutting the door with the exact amount of force that said, ’You’re allowed in because I decided you are.’

Chris’s gaze flicked to Nadia’s hands immediately. “If that’s a list of visitors, I’m going back under anesthesia.”

“It’s not visitors,” Nadia said, already walking to the foot of the bed like the room belonged to her. “It’s labs.”

Dax’s posture tightened. “He is fine.”

Nadia didn’t look at him. “He is a week old. Fine is not a medical category. Fine is what people say right before they do something stupid.”

Chris let out a soft huff. “That’s also your review of the council.”

Nadia’s eyes slid to him. “The council doesn’t drool on itself and scream when it’s hungry.”

Chris paused. “Sometimes it does.”

Rowan made a sound that might have been a laugh if he wasn’t on the job.

Nadia flipped the folder open. Papers rustled.

“This,” she said, tapping the top sheet, “is the mandated secondary gender screening. As per Sahan law, the royal couple is required to have their child tested after the first week of life. The record goes to the Registry and the Palace Medical Archives.”

Dax’s jaw set. “I know the law.”

“I know you know,” Nadia replied. “I’m saying it out loud because the last time you ’knew’ something, you tried to intimidate a surgeon.”

Dax didn’t deny it.

Chris lifted a brow. “In his defense, the surgeon was smug.”

Nadia’s stare turned flat. “The surgeon was competent.”

Chris sighed like he was being oppressed. “Yes, yes. Competence is attractive. We’ve established this.”

Nadia ignored him with professional cruelty and turned a page.

“There are multiple panels,” she continued, voice clipped. “General markers. Hormonal baseline. Genetic predispositions. A dominance indicator. And…” Her finger paused on one line, just long enough that even Chris felt the room tilt. “One panel that is currently more important than the others.”

Dax’s grip on Nero tightened by a fraction before he forced it loose again, as if he’d remembered his own hands were weapons.

“Let me guess.” Dax said as he felt the scent of the baby from Chris’s fifth month of pregnancy, and there was something beneath it that he couldn’t identify. “Nero is a dominant alpha.”

Nadia looked up.

She held Dax’s gaze like she’d been trained for kings and disasters.

“Yes,” she said. “Dominant alpha.”

Chris exhaled slowly through his nose, eyes flicking to the small bundle in Dax’s hands like he was personally offended by the predictability of fate.

“Of course,” Chris muttered. “Of course we produced a royal menace on schedule.”

Nadia’s finger didn’t move from the paper.

“And,” she added, voice still clinical but weighted now, “his markers are very strong.”

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