Chapter 453: Chapter 453: Between nation and heart

Dax found Otto standing at the glass again.

He had one hand braced against his hip, the other hanging stiffly at his side, shoulders drawn tight beneath a dark shirt. He looked like a man who had been standing there too long and knew it.

Beyond the reinforced window, Arion lay in the isolated room surrounded by monitors and lines and too much white.

Dax stopped beside Otto without speaking for a moment.

He looked through the glass too.

Arion’s face had changed over the last week. Not in any dramatic way. That would almost have been easier to bear. But there was a strained fragility to him now, the aftermath of an induced awakening forced through a body far too young to carry it with grace. Even asleep, he looked exhausted.

Otto’s voice, when it came, was low and roughened by lack of rest.

“I have to go back.”

Dax turned his head slightly.

Otto kept looking through the glass. “Alamina cannot remain without me indefinitely. I’ve delayed what I can. Reassigned what I can. Signed things remotely. But I am not just a father.”

The words sounded bitter in his mouth.

“I know,” Dax said.

Otto exhaled once through his nose, hard and controlled. “If I were only his father, I would not leave this corridor.”

Dax said nothing.

Because there was nothing soft to offer a man like Otto. He did not need comfort shaped like lies. He needed someone willing to say the ugly thing plainly.

“But not only do I have other children waiting for me,” Otto said, voice lower now, roughened by exhaustion and the effort of keeping it level, “and a postpartum mate who kept taking on more work than she should have even before this…”

His jaw tightened

“—but an empire too.”

The words sat heavily between them.

He looked through the glass again. Arion had not moved. The prince lay small beneath the sheets, too still for a child, surrounded by machinery and physicians who spoke in careful probabilities and guarded language, as if precision could make any of this kinder.

Otto laughed once, but there was no humor in it.

“If I stay, I fail Alamina.” His eyes remained fixed ahead. “If I go, I risk my son waking and deciding I chose a throne over him.”

Dax’s expression did not shift. “Then don’t let him decide alone.”

That made Otto glance at him.

Dax met his stare calmly. “Otto, even if Arion wakes the hour after you leave, you still won’t be allowed into that room. At best, the physicians will permit a video call. So the choice is not between staying close and going far. It is between making that call from this hallway or from Alamina.”

Otto said nothing.

Dax continued, just as even. “Arion will not know the difference in distance. Not in any way that matters. He will only know whether you were there when he needed to see you.”

Otto’s jaw tightened.

“And if he improves enough to be safe for visitation,” Dax said, “you return. Immediately. Until then, there is no virtue in standing outside a door the physicians will not open for you while your kingdom waits leaderless.”

Otto looked back through the glass. Arion still lay small and motionless under white sheets and machine light, his breathing monitored, his body doing the slow, violent work of surviving what had been forced on it.

“He’ll still feel it,” Otto said quietly.

“Yes,” Dax replied.

The answer came without hesitation and without comfort.

“Yes,” he said again. “He may feel hurt. He may be angry. He may think badly for an hour, a day, or a week. He is allowed that. But that is different from abandonment.”

Otto remained silent.

Dax’s voice lowered slightly. “Abandonment is absence without return, without explanation, without effort. That is not what this is.”

Chris stepped in beside them, tablet tucked under one arm. He had caught enough to understand the shape of the conversation.

“No,” he said. “This is a parent making the wrong choice only because all the others are worse.”

Otto gave him a tired look. “That is not reassuring.”

“It isn’t meant to be,” Chris said. “It’s meant to be accurate.”

He glanced through the glass and then back at Otto. “If Arion wakes and asks for you, we call. If he wakes frightened, we call. If he wakes angry, we still call. Better he see your face and decide he hates politics than imagine you vanished.”

Otto let out a slow breath.

Dax folded his hands behind his back, pulling the fabric of his traditional long coat over his chest. “Go home. Put your empire in order. See your mate. See your other children. Then make sure Arion sees you every day until he is strong enough for more.”

“And when he’s stable enough that the physicians stop acting like every emotional stimulus is a biological attack, you come back,” Chris said as he appeared from the hallway, a file in his right hand, a thin row of diamonds at his collar catching the sterile light.

Otto hesitated.

Chris stopped beside them and glanced through the glass first, because that was the point of all of this, and then at Otto.

“We can take your place until you’re ready,” he said, more quietly now. “Arion already likes Dax more than rest.”

Otto looked at him.

Chris’s mouth shifted faintly. “For reasons I continue to find suspicious, but the fact remains.”

Dax ignored that.

Otto’s eyes moved between them, measuring something harder than competence. Both of them had that already. He was looking at whether he could leave his son inside another household’s care and still call himself a father afterward.

Chris seemed to read that thought clearly.

“We are not offering out of politeness,” he said. “We are telling you he won’t be left to feel alone here.”

Otto looked back through the glass.

Arion still hadn’t moved.

The sight of that small body in the white room seemed to scrape something raw each time. Otto’s jaw tightened, then eased, then tightened again.

“He’s never liked being looked after by strangers,” Otto said.

“I’m your cousin, Otto.” Dax said deadpan.

Chris turned his head toward him.

Otto did too.

Dax’s expression did not change.

Then Chris exhaled quietly. “That may be the worst possible way to make your point.”

“It was accurate,” Dax said.

Otto looked back through the glass. “Unfortunately.”

Chris shifted the file in his hand. “And I’m married to him, which counts as familiarity at this point.”

Dax ignored that.

Otto kept his eyes on Arion. “He knows you both. That doesn’t mean he’ll want either of you when he wakes frightened.”

“No,” Dax said. “But wanting you and being allowed to have you in that room are not the same thing.”

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