Chapter 158: Chapter 158: Dragged by duty

Dean stared at him for a beat.

Then he said, with cold disbelief, “That is not the comforting defense you think it is.”

Zion, who had clearly been holding himself together through sheer force of curiosity, made a strangled sound and looked away toward the windows.

Dean caught it immediately. “Do not encourage him.”

“I’m not,” Zion said, not remotely convincing.

Nero remained maddeningly composed. “Sylvia is fine.”

“She had better be,” Dean muttered. “Because I like her, and unlike the rest of you, she has the decency to be normal.”

“That seems inaccurate,” Zion said.

Dean looked at him flatly. “Compared to this room? She’s a saint.”

For a second, the silence held.

Then a soft knock came from the outer door.

All three men in the room recognized it immediately.

Zion sighed first, long and theatrical. “Found.”

A second knock followed, this one somehow even more pointed.

Nero closed his eyes briefly.

Dean, who had been waiting for some proof that the universe still contained justice, felt a slow and ugly satisfaction unfurl in his chest.

“Ah,” he said, settling deeper into the sofa. “Nature is healing.”

Zion dragged one hand down his face. “That sounds hostile.”

“It is mature,” Dean corrected.

The door opened just enough for a secretary to appear in the outer sitting room – one of Zion’s, Dean thought, from the look of careful endurance and deeply repressed frustration.

“Your Highness,” the poor man said into the room, gaze fixed heroically above shoulder level in the universal palace expression of ’I see nothing and know nothing.’

“The council briefing began twelve minutes ago.”

Zion winced.

Dean’s smile sharpened.

A second figure appeared behind the first, darker suit, colder expression, unmistakably one of Nero’s people. He didn’t even bother pretending calm interest.

“Your Highness,” he said to Nero, “the transportation team has been waiting. The revised dispatch is now delayed, the border report requires your signature, and Lord Cassian has asked twice whether you’ve vanished on purpose.”

Zion turned his head. “That last question feels accusatory.”

“It was,” said Nero’s secretary.

Dean, suddenly much more at peace with existence, picked up his tea.

’This,’ he thought, ’was excellent.’

This was what royal disasters deserved: not death, not suffering, but schedule pressure and exhausted secretaries.

Nero rose first, because unlike Zion he at least had the good sense to recognize defeat when it arrived in a pressed suit with a folder.

“We’re going,” he said.

Dean lifted his cup with saintly calm. “What a shame.”

Zion gave him a long look. “You’re enjoying this.”

“Yes,” Dean said, not even pretending otherwise. “Deeply.”

The two secretaries, to their credit, showed no reaction.

Years of service, Dean assumed. Or trauma.

Zion stood more slowly, giving the room one last regretful glance, like a man being forced out of a theater before the final act.

“We came because we wanted to make sure you were fine,” he said, and for once there was no joke in it.

That took a little of the edge out of Dean.

Only a little.

“I am fine,” Dean said, then added before either of them could comment, “relatively.”

Nero’s gaze rested on him for one brief second, quiet and assessing in that infuriating way of his that made it clear he was actually checking, not merely being polite.

Apparently satisfied enough, he inclined his head once.

“Good,” he said.

Zion pointed at him. “See? We performed a humanitarian visit.”

Dean gave him a dead look. “You performed harassment with concern in it.”

“That still counts.”

“It does not.”

The secretary from the outer room cleared his throat very softly, the sound of a man trying not to lose his career to royal timing.

Zion sighed and finally moved toward the door. “All right. We’re going.”

“You should,” Dean said.

Nero was halfway there already but paused long enough to look back once.

“If Sylvia calls,” he said, “tell her I said thank you.”

Dean blinked.

There it was again: that strange, careful seriousness that made it hard to keep treating Nero like a total menace.

So naturally Dean compensated by sounding even drier.

“You can tell her yourself.”

“Yes,” Nero said.

He didn’t elaborate.

Dean watched him for half a second, then said, with all the reluctant grace of a man forced into fairness against his will, “I’ll tell her anyway.”

That seemed to settle something.

Nero nodded once.

Then Zion, who clearly couldn’t leave well enough alone, looked back over his shoulder and said, “Try not to spiral too much about university.”

Dean stared at him in open offense. “Get out.”

“That’s not a no.”

“Zion.”

“I’m leaving.”

“You’re still speaking.”

That finally made Zion grin again as he backed through the doorway.

Nero’s secretary stepped aside at once. Zion’s own secretary looked one short breath away from physically dragging him toward responsibility.

Nero, at least, had the decency not to add anything else.

He left with the same controlled ease he did everything with, which was deeply annoying in a man so obviously suffering from his own terrible decisions.

Then the doors shut behind both of them.

Silence returned to the suite.

Blessed, expensive, private silence.

Dean sat there for a moment with his tea in hand, Boreas pressed warm and enormous against his leg, and the faint aftertaste of social warfare still hanging in the room.

Then he looked at the dog and said, “Their secretary teams looked like prisoners of war.”

Boreas blinked.

Dean nodded solemnly. “Yes. I noticed too.”

He took another sip of tea, leaned back into the sofa, and let out a long breath.

—

A few hours later, Nero found himself in a meeting so aggressively harmless that it almost felt insulting.

Not because it lacked purpose. It did have one. Border coordination notes, seasonal readiness, a brief discussion of transport routes and winter-to-spring transition protocols, the type of low-priority military housekeeping that still required royal attention but would not be handed to him if they truly expected blood, brilliance, or catastrophe.

Which was, he supposed, exactly the point.

He was still barely eighteen.

Old enough to have fought beasts. Old enough to have seen mutants up close. Old enough to have blood on his hands and enough training to hide what that did to a person in polite company.

But still eighteen.

So he got this. A smaller strategy room in the Alamina Palace wing, a restrained team, maps that would not change the fate of a nation before dinner, and officers who were careful not to look too impressed when he spoke and too nervous when he didn’t.

Nero endured it with excellent manners.

Sebastian, unfortunately, was also there.

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