Chapter 122: Chapter 122: The real chaos.

Dean had slept absurdly well, and he knew, he knew, Arion’s pheromones were to blame.

It wasn’t just the ’alpha presence’ nonsense people liked to romanticize. It was the simple, humiliating reality that Dean’s body had apparently decided Arion was safe, and once that decision had been made, his nervous system had folded like paper. He’d gone under fast, deep, and without the usual midnight inventory of every mistake he’d ever made.

Arion himself wasn’t there when Dean woke at seven.

The bed was still warm on Arion’s side, which was rude.

Dean blinked at the ceiling for a moment, then reached for his phone with slow dread, because peace in a palace was never peace; it was only the calm before someone weaponized it.

There was a message.

From Arion.

’Nero arrived.’

Dean stared at the screen.

Then he cursed quietly between his teeth and dropped his head back onto the pillow.

“Of course he did.”

There were exactly three people in the world capable of turning a perfectly peaceful morning into immediate emotional labor.

Two of them were currently related to him.

Dean dragged himself out of bed a minute later, already mentally preparing for chaos. The palace was quiet at this hour, large windows letting early light spill across polished floors, distant staff moving like ghosts through the halls, but Dean had lived here long enough to know that calm mornings were usually the prelude to disasters.

A hot shower helped a little.

Clothes helped more.

Dean chose something simple, something that made him look like a functioning adult and not someone who had spent the previous morning… involved in activities he absolutely refused to analyze before coffee.

By the time he finished tying his shoes, his irritation had cooled into something closer to reluctant resignation.

’Nero.’

Dean didn’t have anything against him.

That was the problem.

He actually liked Nero.

They had grown up together in that strange, half-royal ecosystem where children of powerful families were thrown into the same rooms and expected to either bond or start wars. In their case, they had bonded immediately. Too immediately, according to several alarmed tutors and one deeply concerned security team.

They had visited each other constantly.

More often than was probably legal.

Climbing palace roofs, stealing food from kitchens, arguing about everything from politics to videogames – Nero had been one of the few people Dean could exist around without calculating every word.

And then, suddenly, they had stopped.

The official version of events was simple.

They had fought.

Around the same time Nero presented as a dominant alpha at fifteen, labs had shown that their pheromones were incompatible. The timing looked suspicious enough that the adults connected the two things immediately.

Two teenagers.

A biological mismatch.

Problem solved.

Except it wasn’t true. Not even close.

Dean and Nero were extremely compatible.

Maybe not as frighteningly compatible as Dean was with Arion, which Dean absolutely refused to think about right now, but still highly compatible. High enough that any responsible royal household would have quietly started discussing long-term alliances and engagement possibilities.

So why lie?

The truth was simple.

And the truth was the kind of simple most people didn’t understand, because most people didn’t understand the things you did to protect the person you wanted when the world insisted on turning you into a bargaining chip.

Nero had liked someone.

Badly.

Dean didn’t know who.

He’d never pried, because some secrets were holy, and also because Dean had no desire to end up on the wrong side of Nero’s attention. He was a psycho when someone was trying to threaten him.

But he’d seen enough, back then, to understand what Nero had been doing.

If Nero and Dean were labeled compatible, then the palace would eventually begin its slow, gleeful chant of “match, match, match.” It would become a plan. It would become a conversation. It would become inevitable in the way politics always tried to pretend it was destiny.

So Nero had made sure that conversation never started.

Dean had helped.

And then, years later, Dean’s own body had decided to join the chaos.

He’d manifested at eighteen – late, abrupt, and violently loud in the way dominant omega surges could be. Fever, hypersensitivity, the whole place suddenly smelling like a threat. Marin had arrived like a hurricane in gloves, Trevor and Lucas had supported him through the worst of it, and Dean—humiliated, overwhelmed, and furious—had clung to the only explanation his brain could turn into blame.

Nero.

Because Nero was an enigma, and enigmas were feared for a reason.

Because Nero had always been too powerful, capable of manipulating biology as if it were just another political tool.

So, half-delirious and shaking with sensory overload, Dean had grabbed his phone with trembling hands and called him.

Nero answered on the second ring, his voice instantly sharp with attention. “Dean?”

Dean had no grace left. He didn’t even bother pretending he did.

“Did you do this to me?”

There was a pause.

“Do what?” Nero asked, genuinely confused, as if Dean had just accused him of moving a mountain in the middle of the night.

Dean swallowed hard. The room still smelled like too much. The air still felt loud. His skin felt wrong, like his body had become a stranger wearing his name.

“I’m a dominant omega, Nero,” Dean ground out through his teeth. “What. did. you. do.”

Another pause.

Then Nero made a sound – half incredulous, half offended – that could only come from someone who was used to being held accountable for divine acts.

“It wasn’t me,” Nero said flatly. “You just inherited Lucas’s traits.”

Dean blinked slowly.

“What,” he rasped.

Nero’s voice shifted into that maddeningly calm tone he used when he was explaining something obvious to someone being dramatic on purpose. “Your father is a dominant omega, Dean. You share DNA. This is not a conspiracy.”

Dean stared at the bathroom tiles like they had personally betrayed him.

“I didn’t—” he started, then stopped, because the sentence “I didn’t think my father would do this to me” was not one he was willing to say out loud even in private, even to Nero.

Nero continued, relentless. “You manifested late. It happens. It’s messy. It’s not pleasant. Congratulations, you’re officially rare and politically inconvenient.”

Dean’s jaw tightened. “You say that like it’s funny.”

“It is funny,” Nero replied, and there was a sharp edge of affection under it that made Dean want to throw his phone into the sink. “Sebastian is a dominant alpha; it was clear as day that you will be either this or a dominant alpha.”

Dean dragged a shaky breath in. “I hate you.”

“No, you don’t,” Nero said immediately, as if this were a known fact filed under Dean: dramatic statements during crisis. “I will deal with this. I will ask the board of physicians to test us… and manipulate my pheromones to look like we are incompatible.”

No, you don’t,” Nero said immediately, as if this were a known fact filed under Dean: dramatic statements during crisis. “I will deal with this. I will ask the board of physicians to test us… and manipulate my pheromones to look like we are incompatible.”

Dean had closed his eyes and swallowed against the heat and the humiliation and the terror of becoming something the palace could use.

“Why?” he’d managed, voice raw.

“Because,” Nero had said simply, and for once he sounded older than his years, “I already chose someone. And I’m not letting them turn you into collateral.”

“Gods help the one you are obsessed with,” Dean said.

—

A soft clink of porcelain pulled Dean back to the present.

He blinked once, hard, as if he could shake the memory loose like water off skin, and realized he’d stopped walking.

He was standing on the threshold of the breakfast room.

Arion’s private breakfast room, technically, because Arion didn’t do ’common’ spaces when he could avoid it, but it had the same careful luxury as the rest of the wing: wide windows, pale morning light, and a table set like the palace believed hunger was a negotiation.

And there Nero was.

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