Chapter 490: Chapter 490: Still them

Three years later, Chris sometimes suspected that time had passed the rest of the kingdom and simply failed to report to their household.

Not because life had gone still. Quite the opposite.

Too much had changed for stillness to be mistaken for peace.

Dean was in Alamina now, officially engaged to Arion in a development that had started as a private catastrophe, matured into a diplomatic reality, and somehow ended with both empires acting as though the match had always been obvious to civilized people. The photographs alone had been enough to make several noblewomen in Saha develop opinions strong enough to require medication. Dean, infuriatingly, looked magnificent in all of them, and Arion looked exactly like a man who had never once doubted that the world would eventually arrange itself around his preferences.

Meanwhile, Nero had developed a level of brilliance that exhausted adults upon contact.

At the age of eighteen, he had become exactly what his parents had privately feared and publicly refused to predict: too clever, too composed, too difficult to manage once he set his mind to something, and somehow possessing both Chris’s strategic cruelty and Dax’s maddening certainty. For their continued annoyance, he had taken the worst in each of them and polished it into something sleek enough to pass for charm until the damage report arrived.

Chris blamed Dax’s blood.

Dax blamed Chris’s standards.

Neither of them was entirely wrong.

The private suite was quieter now than it had been when the children were younger, though only in the technical sense. Jax, five and still not fully persuaded that silence had any legitimate function, was in the adjoining sitting room under supervision and currently constructing what sounded like either an army base or a legal argument out of wooden blocks. Nayra, fifteen and increasingly alarming in the serene, black-eyed way she watched rooms before deciding whether to improve or destroy them; had gone riding that afternoon and had not yet returned. Nero was elsewhere in the palace, which never really meant absent so much as temporarily not in sight.

Chris stood by the open window of their bedroom, one hand around a coffee cup he had already forgotten to drink from, and looked out over the late-evening gardens. Behind him, Dax was unbuttoning his cuffs with the unhurried calm of a man who had survived a council meeting, a defense briefing, and a finance update and was therefore in an unusually good mood.

That alone was suspicious.

Chris did not turn. “What?”

“Nothing,” Dax said.

“You’re pleased.”

“That sounds subjective.”

Chris looked over his shoulder.

Dax, still unfairly broad, still indecently handsome, still carrying age as though it had mistaken him for someone else, looked back with exactly the expression that had once convinced half a kingdom he was invincible and the other half that he should be stopped before he modernized them to death.

They had both changed in the last three years, of course.

Not in the obvious ways lesser people might have hoped for.

Chris still wore elegance like a threat.

Dax still looked like a king made of expensive danger.

And somehow, against all reason, they had both remained offensively intact.

Chris narrowed his eyes. “You are definitely pleased.”

Dax set the cufflinks on the dresser and came farther into the room. “I had an interesting conversation.”

“That is never reassuring.”

“No,” Dax agreed. “It isn’t.”

Chris turned properly then, leaning one shoulder against the window frame, and took in his husband’s face with the resigned accuracy of a man who had spent years learning all the expressions Dax denied having.

“With whom,” Chris asked.

“Nero.”

That narrowed it instantly.

Chris straightened a fraction. “Why does that sound like the beginning of a problem?”

“Because he’s our son.”

“That is not enough detail.”

Dax’s mouth moved faintly. “He wanted funding.”

Chris blinked once. “For what?”

Dax came to stand near the foot of the bed, close enough that Chris could smell the last traces of council room air on him beneath his own scent. “A research initiative.”

Chris stared at him. “A research initiative.”

“Yes.”

“At eighteen.”

“Yes.”

“With palace money.”

“Yes.”

Chris closed his eyes briefly. “I knew I should have been stricter when he was twelve.”

“That would have changed nothing.”

“It might have made me feel morally superior.”

“You already do.”

“That,” Chris said, opening his eyes again, “is not the point.”

Dax’s amusement deepened by a fraction. “He wants to expand the pheromone stabilization program.”

That stopped Chris cleanly.

The coffee cup lowered a little in his hand.

For a second he said nothing at all, and Dax watched him with the kind of patience that only appeared when he already knew the exact route his mate’s thoughts would take.

Pheromone stabilization.

Something that led directly back to one room in one recovery wing and a fifteen-year-old boy burning through sedation while physicians recalculated the limits of medicine around him.

Chris looked away first, toward the dark glass and the reflection it now held of both of them. “That was fast.”

“It’s been three years.”

“It has not felt like three years.”

“No,” Dax said. “It hasn’t.”

Chris set the untouched coffee on the sill behind him and folded his arms. “What exactly does he want to do?”

Dax rested one hand against the carved post at the foot of the bed. “Refine response protocols for high-dominance onset, build a better predictive model, and expand the palace’s capacity to handle younger presentations without improvisation.”

Chris stared.

“That,” he said at last, “is infuriatingly sensible.”

“Yes.”

“And very him.”

“Yes.”

“And deeply unfair.”

Dax’s gaze steadied on him. “Yes.”

Nero had done what they had always expected he would do eventually: he had taken the thing that hurt him worst and started turning it into infrastructure so no one else would have to meet it blind.

That was genius, yes.

It was also, in a way both fathers privately hated, a form of maturation born of damage.

Chris rubbed once at his temple. “He should be spending money on something shallow.”

“He does that too,” Dax said with a low laugh as he began unbuttoning his crisp white shirt, the silver buttons sliding through his ringed fingers. “Did you see the price on his last sports car? The one custom-made for his size.”

Chris turned his head slowly.

“Yes,” he said. “I saw it. I also saw the invoice attached to it like a threat.”

Dax’s mouth curved. “He looked happy.”

Chris watched another silver button disappear through Dax’s fingers and felt, unhelpfully, some of his irritation lose coherence. That, too, had never improved with time. Dax could be saying something objectively terrible about their son’s spending habits while undressing in their private suite, and somehow Chris’s mind still chose betrayal.

“The thing was absurd,” Chris said.

“It was a gift for his coming of age,” Dax replied after crossing the room in two long steps, his shirt now open enough that Chris knew, with old and weary certainty, that the effect had been intentional.

Of course it had.

Dax was seven foot three, built like monarchy had decided subtlety was beneath it, and had spent years pretending his size was an unfortunate natural fact rather than a tactical asset. Nero, at eighteen, had already outgrown him by two offensive inches and was now seven foot five with the same alarming ease in expensive things. Nayra, mercifully, had inherited Chris’s height at five foot eight, which made her the only child in the house who did not force furniture into negotiations… yet. If one ignored Jax, who was still too small to count in these grievances, Chris remained the shortest person in his own immediate family.

He considered that one of the great structural insults of his life.

Dax closed the last of the distance and caged him against the open window, one hand braced on either side of Chris against the frame. “Are we still going to talk about this?” he asked, his warm breath brushing Chris’s ear while the dark spiced-rum edge of his pheromones began to rise.

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