Chapter 487: Chapter 487: The report

Late spring had reached the palace in the quiet, expensive way it reached most things in Saha: with warm light on polished stone, windows left open in the private wings, and gardens so aggressively in bloom that even Rowan had begun muttering about maintenance budgets like a man personally insulted by beauty.

In the royal suite, however, the evening had narrowed into paperwork, suspicion, and a toddler.

Jax Soraya Altera sat in Dax’s lap with the unshakable authority of a two-year-old who believed all large furniture belonged to him by right. He had Chris’s black hair, Dax’s purple eyes, and the kind of grave concentration only toddlers and heads of state seemed able to sustain while doing completely unreasonable things. At present, he was turning one of Dax’s signet rings around and around with both hands as if attempting to solve monarchy mechanically.

Dax let him.

He was seated in the deeper of the armchairs by the window, one long leg stretched out, the other bent, his posture deceptively easy in the way it always became when he was most alert. Across from him, Chris sat on the sofa with a tablet in one hand and a printed file spread open beside him on the low table, as though he trusted paper more than encrypted systems when irritation was involved.

He had been reading in silence for nearly three minutes.

That alone was enough to tell Dax the answer was not good.

Jax, oblivious to dynastic intrigue, succeeded in prying the ring halfway over Dax’s knuckle and looked up at him with sudden delight. “Mine.”

“No,” Dax said.

Jax smiled wider, which in this family usually indicated escalation rather than surrender.

Dax took the ring back before it could become a constitutional issue and slid it into his pocket. Jax, betrayed, made a soft sound of protest and then immediately recovered by climbing higher against his father’s chest as if proximity itself were compensation enough.

Dax’s eyes remained on Chris. “Well.”

Chris kept reading for another second. Then he looked up, and the expression on his face was one Dax knew too well: the one that appeared when something had confirmed what he already suspected and he was trying to decide whether to be angry at the boys, the physicians, the aristocracy, or all of them in rotating sequence.

“They lied to everyone,” Chris said.

Dax’s mouth moved faintly. “Including us?”

Chris tapped the page once. “No. That’s the irritating part. Not really.”

He set the tablet down and picked up the printed summary instead. The report had been ordered quietly, run through palace channels with enough discretion that neither Nero nor Dean had been notified and no physician involved would be stupid enough to mention it.

Officially, it was a follow-up review prompted by conflicting observations from the earlier pairing assessment. Unofficially, it was because Chris had looked at the boys for one month too long and concluded that neither of them was half as subtle as they imagined.

Dax had agreed instantly.

Not because he had proof, but because he had children.

And because he remembered himself at fifteen with enough clarity to know exactly how badly high-born boys could lie when they believed they were being strategic instead of obvious.

Jax, deciding this was not enough attention on him specifically, patted Dax’s chest twice and said, “Mama?”

“In a meeting mood,” Dax said.

Chris looked up. “I can hear you.”

“That is not the same as being available.”

“It is in this room.”

Jax turned immediately toward Chris with delighted faith, as if adult irritability had never once delayed access in his life. “Mama.”

Chris’s expression softened despite himself. “Yes, menace.”

Satisfied by acknowledgment alone, Jax relaxed bonelessly back against Dax and began trying to steal the cufflink from his father’s shirt instead.

Dax removed his hand from danger and refocused on Chris. “What exactly did they lie about?”

Chris held up the page. “Not the first report. The first report was accurate enough on the surface. They made themselves clinically incompatible on purpose.”

Dax nodded once.

That, at least, they had already suspected.

Nero’s pheromone control had become too precise too quickly for Dax not to mistrust any ’natural’ mismatch involving a politically convenient candidate. Dean, on the other hand, was too smart and too aware of social norms to accidentally fall into the kind of public coolness that came after.

But Chris was not finished.

“The problem,” he said, “is that they only managed the upper layer.”

Dax went still.

Jax noticed the change and looked up at him briefly, then decided it was irrelevant and returned to trying to fold the hem of Dax’s sleeve into some new shape.

Chris continued, “The secondary resonance was unstable because Nero made it unstable. The surface chemistry reads wrong by design. The physician who ran the original panel wasn’t incompetent. He simply tested what they allowed the room to show.”

“And underneath.”

Chris gave him a long look. “Underneath, they’re a disaster.”

That pulled a quiet laugh out of Dax. “How obvious?” he asked while trying to redirect Jax’s attention toward a carved wooden lion and away from his cufflink.

Jax accepted the lion with brief suspicion, then bit its ear.

Chris glanced down at the report again, then back at Dax. “If you don’t know how to read this,” he said, lifting the pages once in emphasis, “it isn’t obvious at all. Even when you do know how to read it, it’s hard to pinpoint the lie.”

Dax’s mouth curved. “So they did it well.”

Chris looked at him over the papers. “That is not the conclusion you should say out loud.”

“It is still the conclusion.”

Jax, apparently pleased with the lion’s structural integrity, smacked it against Dax’s knee twice and then leaned against his father’s chest as though he had contributed meaningfully to the analysis.

Dax rested one hand absently over the toddler’s back. “Are we going to let them have it?”

Chris let the report settle back onto the table. “Sure. Nero doesn’t do something like this without a reason.”

That quieted Dax more effectively than disagreement would have.

Because that was true.

Nero could be reckless, sharp-tongued, proud, and needlessly difficult on principle, but he was not careless where strategy was concerned. He did not build a deception this layered simply because the opportunity amused him. If he had gone this far – controlling his pheromones, coaching Dean, and steering the clinical result just enough to cool the aristocracy without setting the whole court on fire – then something in him had already concluded that the pressure around them was becoming dangerous.

Chris saw Dax follow the same line of thought and added, more quietly, “He must have felt cornered.”

Dax’s gaze moved to the window for a moment, to the spring dark beyond the glass, and to the gardens and terraces and palace wings where children of his still somehow kept outgrowing the age he wanted them to stay. “Or Dean was.”

“Yes,” Chris said. “Possibly both.”

“That’s not it.” Nayra said, entering the room.

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