Caught by the Mad Alpha King-Chapter 458: Warmer

A few days later, the new room no longer looked improvised.

The equipment had stayed.

There was no escaping that. Portable monitors still blinked in the corner. Infusion pumps still hummed. Emergency medication remained stocked in the locked cabinet. A physician’s station had been set up in the adjoining room, and the nurses rotated through with the same precision they had used in the medical wing.

But the room itself no longer felt like something designed to erase a child.

The walls were warm cream instead of white. The curtains remained a muted green. The blanket had been replaced twice, not because it was necessary, but because Arion had declared the first replacement ’too official,’ and Chris had apparently decided this was now a valid medical category.

A low screen near the far wall played Arion’s favorite cartoons at barely-there volume.

The cedar-and-citrus blend used in the imperial children’s corridor in Alamina was used in Arion’s new room too. A softer undernote from the oil his mother preferred in the family sitting rooms. It had taken Dax less than a day to have the palace staff coordinate with Alamina’s household and even less time for Chris to start threatening anyone who called that excessive.

The move itself had been followed by disaster.

Arion’s body had held together for less than an hour in the new room before it cracked open under the pressure of everything that had been forced into it.

One minute he had been lying between Chris and Dax, too tired to speak much but calmer than before, one hand still clutching Dax’s sleeve as though afraid they might leave if he slept.

Next, the mutation had surged so hard that his entire body locked.

His back had arched. His teeth had clenched. A sound had torn out of him that Chris still hated remembering because no child should ever make it.

The room had exploded into motion.

Nurses.

Physicians.

Dax already on his feet.

Chris catching Arion’s shoulders before he could hurt himself worse.

After that, the physicians had stopped arguing with Dax about the room.

Arion had gone under there instead.

In a warm bed, with cartoons playing low, with home folded carefully into the air, and with familiar voices on every side of him.

The hormonal treatment had worked.

That was the ugly triumph of it.

His body had found the path the physicians had been forcing it toward. The mutation was still tearing through him but was no longer blind. No longer trying six different violent possibilities at once. It had seized on one and driven forward with frightening certainty.

Rut.

Early and medically induced, dangerous only because of his age and condition, but real.

The first signs had appeared in the bloodwork and scent fluctuations before they became visible in the room. Then the fevers had shifted in pattern. The instability had narrowed. The mutation spikes stopped scattering through his system like electrical damage and began resolving into something the physicians could finally predict.

His body had entered rut.

Now, three days after the transfer, Arion still slept more than he woke.

Chris sat by the bed that afternoon with his tablet abandoned face-down beside him and one leg folded under the chair in a posture no etiquette advisor would have endorsed. Dax stood by the far screen, reading through the newest physician summary with the expression of a king reviewing war damage.

Arion stirred first with a small sound, then with a deeper frown.

Chris looked up immediately.

"There he is."

Arion opened his eyes.

They were heavy with sedation residue and exhaustion, but clear enough to focus. He blinked once at the ceiling, then toward the screen where cartoon voices muttered softly in the background, then at Chris.

Chris leaned forward. "Before you complain, yes, you look awful."

Arion swallowed. His throat was still dry, his mouth still sore from the way his body kept forcing itself through changes too big for it. "Did I die?"

Chris considered. "No. That would have involved significantly more paperwork."

A tiny pause.

Then Arion’s eyes moved toward Dax.

Dax set the report down and came to the bedside. "You did not die."

Arion looked between them. "It hurts less."

Chris and Dax exchanged a glance for a second.

Dax sat on the edge of the bed and rested one hand lightly over the blanket near Arion’s leg, close enough to be there, not enough to crowd. "Yes."

Arion frowned weakly. "Why?"

Chris exhaled through his nose. "Because your body finally chose a direction for being difficult."

That earned him a look.

Dax, less inclined to sarcasm in medical explanations, said, "The treatment worked. The mutation is stabilizing through heat instead of attacking everything at once."

Arion stared at him for a second.

He was eight. Smart enough to know that ’stabilizing’ was supposed to sound reassuring. Tired enough not to care for the sales pitch.

"It still hurts," he muttered.

"Yes," Dax said.

Chris held the straw to his mouth until Arion drank a little water, then took it away before he could decide to be difficult out of principle. "Unfortunately, less disastrous and pleasant are not the same thing."

Arion turned his face away with weak offense.

Then Dax went still.

"What?" Chris asked.

Dax didn’t answer immediately. He leaned in slightly, eyes narrowing as he looked at Arion’s face.

Arion frowned. "What?"

Chris followed his line of sight.

Then he saw it too.

Arion’s eyes had always been dark, but now the color sitting in them was changing under the light. Not the muddy, wrong gold that had marked the infected cases they had all been briefed on. Not that sick, murky metallic sheen that presented in the first days of Arion in Saha.

Chris sat up fully. "Dax."

"I see it."

Arion’s frown deepened. "See what."

Dax reached for the call button without taking his eyes off the child. "Do not rub your eyes."

That, naturally, made Arion want to rub his eyes immediately.

Chris caught his wrist. "No. We’re being strange for a reason."

"I hate when you say that."

"Yes," Chris said. "Everyone does."

The attending physician came in less than ten seconds later, already speaking. "What changed?"

Dax stepped aside just enough for her to see. "His eyes."

She looked at Arion, then went quiet.

That was never a comforting reaction from physicians.

Arion looked between all of them, increasingly offended. "What about them?"

The physician bent slightly, careful not to crowd him. "Your Highness, look at me."

"I am looking at you."

"Yes. Keep doing that."

Chris murmured, "Excellent bedside charm."

She ignored him.

A second physician came in behind her, then one of the senior nurses. Within moments the room had shifted from warm recovery back into clinical focus, though this time the panic was quieter.

The first physician checked his pupils with a small penlight.

Arion squinted and glared. "Rude."

"Still good," Chris said. "Very promising."

Dax stayed at the bedside, one hand resting on the mattress near Arion’s hip, close enough to anchor without interfering. "Report."