Chapter 208: Chapter 208: The true extent

The knock came a second later.

Boreas lifted his head from Dean’s thigh and looked toward the outer room with the grave patience of a creature who had already decided whether the visitor deserved to keep all their fingers.

Dean did not move immediately.

He was still in bed, still warm, still half-wrapped in the expensive effects of the last few days, and still not ready to face the morning in a respectable way if morning couldn’t first prove it had earned the right.

“Come in,” he called, voice rough with sleep and disuse and absolutely no desire to improve the effect.

The door opened.

Nero stepped in, then stopped just inside the room; took in Dean in bed, Boreas occupying half the lower mattress like a territorial mountain, the state of the sheets, the open curtains, and the general atmosphere of aggressively reclaimed domesticity; and then had the decency to look only mildly entertained rather than fully unbearable.

“That,” Nero said, “is a very specific visual argument.”

Dean looked at him. “If that sentence continues, I’m having you removed.”

“I wasn’t criticizing it.”

“That’s worse.”

Nero’s gaze dropped once to Boreas, who had not resumed resting but was now watching him with the solemn intensity of a court official assessing whether admission had been granted in error. Nero, to his credit, did not attempt to pet him.

Instead, he leaned one shoulder lightly against the doorframe and said, “Dax is here.”

Dean blinked once.

Then again, slower this time, because the information had arrived in the exact tone one used for a weather warning, a minor war, or an invasive species sighting in the south garden.

“He’s here,” Dean repeated.

“Yes.”

“In the palace.”

“Yes.”

Dean looked up at the ceiling for one brief second as if perhaps it might develop mercy out of structural guilt.

It did not.

“Excellent,” he said. “That’s exactly what I wanted to hear before breakfast. Is Chris with him, or has he shown up here alone to make everyone regret civilization.”

Nero’s mouth moved faintly. “Chris stayed in Saha. Dax came for the meeting.”

Dean narrowed his eyes. “How bad?”

Nero considered that. “Let’s say Lucas started by blaming Dax for not seeing through our training reports, and Dax responded by attacking your father’s parenting style.”

Dean stared at him.

Then he looked down at Boreas.

Then back at Nero.

“Interesting,” he said at last. “So the morning has, in fact, become ungovernable.”

“That’s one phrasing.”

Nero pushed off the doorframe and came farther into the room, looking much too composed for someone delivering this level of social collapse before breakfast. “Trevor told him to stop.”

“And did Dax listen?”

Nero tilted his head. “Enough to remain invited indoors.”

Dean let out a slow breath through his nose and tipped his head back against the headboard. “Wonderful. So while I’ve been asleep, my family has internationalized the concept of disappointment.”

Boreas thumped his tail once against the mattress, as if in agreement with the broad shape of the statement, if not the specifics.

Nero glanced at the dog. “He’s very invested in your emotional decline.”

“He’s invested in bed rights,” Dean corrected. “Everything else is incidental.”

Boreas did not move.

Which, annoyingly, made it impossible to prove.

Nero folded his arms. “To be fair, Lucas is not entirely wrong.”

Dean looked at him with immediate offense. “If you continue with blaming us for not telling them, I’ll have to remind you that I swore to pretend I’m not compatible with you.”

The corner of Nero’s mouth twitched with the betrayed amusement he usually reserved for finding out Dean had, once again, chosen violence through phrasing.

“That’s a horrible threat.”

Dean lifted a brow. “And yet you understand it.”

Nero considered that for one beat too long. “Unfortunately.”

Boreas looked between them with the solemn patience of a creature who had already accepted that humans routinely said bizarre things before breakfast and had somehow still been entrusted with governance.

Nero shrugged one shoulder and pushed off the doorframe. “I didn’t really want to listen to more of it, so I came here instead. They’ll work it out between themselves while Arion tries to keep you away from anything resembling a fight.” He paused, gaze sharpening with a little more accuracy than Dean wanted from him at this hour. “At least until he remembers you’re just as stubborn as he is.”

Dean made a face. “That is a grotesque comparison.”

“It’s a precise one.”

Dean looked down at Boreas, who had resumed pinning one of Dean’s legs to the mattress with the casual authority of a military occupation. “Do you hear this? I’m being slandered by people with insufficient self-awareness.”

Boreas blinked slowly.

Nero’s eyes narrowed. “You know, the dog is not actually on your side.”

“The dog understands me.”

Nero, annoyingly, seemed to consider that a fair point.

For a second the room quieted, the earlier tension thinning into something more familiar. Not peace. Dean had never been naive enough to confuse sibling honesty with peace. But it was closer to equilibrium than what they had managed in the last week, and given recent history, Dean was willing to count that as structural progress.

He looked back at Nero. “Arion is not keeping me away from fighting.”

Nero’s expression stayed bland in the very suspicious way that meant he had already reached a conclusion and disliked that he found it amusing. “No?”

“No.”

Dean frowned, one hand still buried in Boreas’s fur. “He keeps people away from turning me into an experiment. Do you realize what the other dominant alphas would do if they felt threatened? Draxil and Rohan are famous for exploiting their dominants. Give them even the suggestion of a way out, and the dominants, their families, their governments, everyone with enough fear and power, would do anything to get my ability.”

Nero leaned back against the wardrobe and studied him with a much more serious face now. “Yes,” he said after a beat. “That’s the part everyone else is only beginning to phrase properly.”

Dean looked at him. “And that’s exactly why I’m not going to spend the morning pretending Arion is overreacting.”

Boreas’s tail thumped once, as if in approval of the basic structure of that sentence.

Nero glanced at the dog and then back at Dean. “No. He’s not overreacting.” He paused. “He’s just doing it like Arion.”

“That’s not a small qualifier.”

“No,” Nero said. “It isn’t.”

Dean looked toward the windows, to the too-beautiful summer light on the floor, and felt his ability becoming more pressing than ever. Draxil. Rohan. States that had already made an art form of chewing through their own people so long as the result could be dressed in the right language. Dominants there were not political assets in the clean, polished Alaminian sense. They were currency, leverage, breeding stock, pressure points, symbols, weapons… whatever the system required that season.

And if one of those systems smelled even the possibility of an answer to the biological trap it had been exploiting for generations… They would remove it immediately.

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