Caught by the Mad Alpha King-Chapter 460: Departure

After that, everyone waited.

There was nothing else to do.

The physicians monitored the hormone cascade hour by hour. The numbers were obvious now. Arion’s body had entered a dominant alpha rut pattern so cleanly it would have been clinically impressive if it had not been happening to an eight-year-old prince trapped in mutation.

Dax did not leave the medical wing.

Chris left only long enough to shower, change, and threaten three people who had asked questions they did not deserve answers to.

Otto arrived in Saha shortly after midnight, with a face that made Hale step back without being told. He went straight to the medical wing and stopped only when the doctors informed him, with the careful bravery of people who knew they were speaking to a father rather than just an emperor, that he still couldn’t enter.

He took that badly, not loudly, but badly.

Dax stood beside him at the reinforced glass while Arion lay inside under the new sedation protocol, still twisted by the rut, still wrong in all the visible ways that made every adult around him feel briefly murderous.

"He looks infected," Otto said once, very quietly.

Dax’s answer came just as low. "He isn’t."

That was the line they all held.

Because the markers kept saying the same thing. This was not an infection. Not contamination. Not collapse in that direction. It was a mutation routed through rut, brutal but self-contained, a body forcing itself through the narrowest possible door and mangling the frame on the way.

So they waited.

One day.

Then another.

Then a third.

Arion slept through most of it, drugged when he needed to be, half-awake when the physicians needed to test response, fed and hydrated, and watched like something precious in the middle of a fire.

The beast’s eyes remained.

The sharper teeth remained.

The near-claws came and went in intensity depending on the spike.

Otto stood through more of those hours than any physician liked.

Chris kept him from murdering staff twice, perhaps three times.

Dax handled the rest by existing in the corridor like a promise no one wanted to challenge.

Then, on the morning of the fourth day, the first physician went very still over the chart.

Chris noticed first, because he had spent enough time around doctors lately to recognize the particular silence of a person seeing something they had hoped for too long to trust immediately.

"What?"

The physician looked up. "Hormones are dropping."

The whole corridor sharpened.

Dax took the file from her hand and read it himself.

The mutation response had begun to withdraw.

Otto was already at the glass.

Inside, Arion slept on his side, smaller again somehow without the active violence of the rut distorting him. His hands were visible over the blanket.

Normal hands.

Chris moved closer to the observation pane and stared hard at the child’s face.

The teeth were no longer visible, but the jaw tension had eased. The set of his mouth looked young again.

Then Arion stirred slowly, his lashes lifted and when he opened his eyes, the murky gold was gone.

What looked back through the glass was clear gold again, strange but clean. No slit pupil. No shadowed distortion. Just that polished metallic color that still didn’t belong to the boy they had known a week ago but no longer looked like a beast had gotten there first.

No one in the corridor spoke for a second.

Then Chris exhaled, long and shaky enough that he was going to deny it later if asked.

"Oh, thank God."

Otto had one hand braced against the glass.

Dax stood perfectly still.

Inside the room, Arion blinked slowly at the ceiling, then at the monitor beside him, then toward the window.

He looked tired, confused, and normal in all the ways that mattered most.

His hand lifted weakly from the blanket and touched his own mouth first, as if checking what was there.

His eyes widened.

The physician opened the door with astonishing speed for someone who had spent three days preaching caution and was at his bedside before anyone could stop her. She checked his pupils, his pulse, his reflexes, and his teeth.

Then she straightened, visibly trying and failing to keep triumph out of her voice.

"The rut is over."

Chris laughed once under his breath, almost meanly, with relief.

Dax took one step toward the door.

The physician looked at the monitors, then at Arion’s face, then back at them.

This time when she spoke, she sounded tired enough to be human.

"He can have visitors."

Otto was already moving.

Arion saw him first, then Dax behind him, then Chris, and his face changed with the slow, stunned recognition of a child surfacing from too much darkness and finding the same people still waiting at the edge.

"Papa?" he asked, hoarse.

Otto crossed the room and bent over the bed at once, one hand cupping the side of his son’s face with a gentleness that looked almost violent after so many days of restraint. "I’m here."

Arion stared at him. Then at Chris. Then Dax.

His brows pulled together faintly. "Did I bite anyone?"

Chris, who had absolutely been waiting for consciousness before deciding how merciful to be, folded his arms. "Not successfully."

That got the tiniest, weakest offended look.

Dax came to the other side of the bed and rested a hand briefly on Arion’s hair. "Welcome back."

He blinked once. "I feel weird."

Chris nodded. "That’s because your life remains committed to drama."

Otto actually laughed at that, a brief, wrecked sound that belonged more to a father than an emperor.

—

A few weeks later, after completing four months in Saha, Arion went home to Alamina.

By then, he was stable. His rut had ended, the mutation had settled, and his eyes had remained clear gold without shifting again. His teeth and hands were normal. His hormone levels were still closely monitored but no longer read like a crisis every hour.

The physicians in Saha prepared a full transfer file for Alamina’s imperial medical board and direct handling recommendations. Training in handling Arion and his new self was done while the boy was still in Saha’s Royal Hospital.

On the morning of departure, Arion stood between Otto and Minerva on the tarmac, tired but calm. His gold eyes caught the light strangely now, unfamiliar but no longer frightening.

A little apart from them, Chris watched the last medical case being loaded onto the aircraft. "Alamina’s medical board is going to hate us."

Dax kept his gaze on the plane. "Yes."

When Arion turned before boarding, Chris lifted a hand. Dax only inclined his head once.

Arion hesitated, then lifted his own hand back.

Then he boarded with his parents, and the aircraft doors sealed.

Chris and Dax stood in silence as the plane taxied, turned, and finally lifted into the morning air.

Chris watched it until it became small against the sky. "He’ll hate parts of going home."

"Yes," Dax said.

"He’ll also like that everything smells right again."

"Yes."

Only when the plane disappeared did they turn back toward the waiting motorcade.

Inside the car, the palace route already opening ahead of them, Chris leaned back and looked out the window. "The palace is going to feel quiet."

"Nero will fix that in under an hour." Dax said laughing.