Caught by the Mad Alpha King-Chapter 474: The break

By the time the first block of meetings broke for the private interval before dinner, everything was going according to plan.

That, in Chris’s opinion, was deeply unfortunate.

It was not that anything had gone wrong.

Quite the opposite. The timing had worked out. The media sequence had landed perfectly. The joint appearances had produced exactly the kind of images the summit team wanted: heirs in frame together, old powers visibly present but no longer central, Dax looking radiant with state-sanctioned menace, and Caelan maintaining his dignity with the increasingly brittle grace of a man forced to sit through his own elegant displacement.

It was working.

That was the problem.

Because when Dax’s plans worked, he became unbearable.

Chris knew this from long experience.

The private royal lounge assigned to the hosts occupied the upper floor of the east wing, tucked behind biometric doors and a quiet security corridor that kept staff far enough away to restore the illusion of privacy.

It was more residence than conference room, deliberately designed for heads of state who needed ten minutes to breathe before returning to rooms full of cameras, strategy, and people pretending not to measure one another for weakness.

The space was all low modern lines, dark wood, smoked glass, and seating that appeared decorative until one sat in it and realized it had been designed by people who understood both power and lower back pain equally well.

One wall was nothing but city-facing glass, the late afternoon light pouring in gold over the rugs and the bronze accents. Another held a long drinks console, chilled water, tea service, coffee, and several platters of untouched fruit and high-end canapés that had already survived two political regimes and would probably outlive the summit.

Chris had changed.

Not fully, of course. There would be another appearance, then the dinner, then the longer evening program, and no one hosting something of this size was granted the luxury of becoming entirely human in the middle of it. But he had stripped off the formal omega robe and changed into something softer and easier to breathe in: dark tailored trousers; a loose ivory shirt of absurdly expensive fabric, sleeves open at the wrist; and the collar slightly lower at the throat.

The diamond collar remained.

Its slim band of white fire rested at the base of his throat, severe and gleaming in the afternoon light, a piece so unmistakably royal and so intimately his that it no longer felt ornamental. Dax liked it rather too much. Which, considering Dax, was saying something.

Chris had one leg folded beneath him on the long corner sofa, a tablet abandoned beside him, and one hand wrapped around a glass of cold sparkling water when the lounge doors opened.

He did not need to look up.

He knew the sound of Dax entering a room after a successful act of political harassment.

There was a difference between ordinary Dax and victorious Dax.

Ordinary Dax was already difficult.

Victorious Dax had the energy of a large predatory animal that had been told, legally and in writing, that biting counted as diplomacy.

The doors sealed quietly behind him.

Chris took one look at his husband and sighed.

Dax had not changed yet. He was still in the black suit with gold at the lapel and cuffs, tie loosened now, the first two buttons open, the polished king-for-the-cameras image fraying just enough to reveal the man beneath it. At seven foot three, he still made the room feel slightly too small for him, even if the architecture had been designed with his size in mind. He looked relaxed, pleased with himself, and far too alive.

"Don’t," Chris said.

Dax stopped three steps into the room, one hand already halfway to his cufflinks. "I haven’t spoken."

"You don’t need to. I can feel the monologue from here."

That only made Dax grin.

"Everything is going beautifully."

Chris took a slow drink of water. "Yes. I noticed. You’ve been radiant all afternoon."

Dax started toward him with the unhurried confidence of a man who had been welcomed in every part of Chris’s life for nearly twenty years and still found new ways to look like an invading force. "Caelan is trying very hard not to murder anyone."

"Yes."

"It’s excellent."

Chris gave him a flat look over the rim of his glass. "You are enjoying this far too much."

"It would be rude not to."

"You built an international summit to professionally corner a retired emperor in full public view."

Dax’s mouth curved. "That is an ungenerous summary."

"It is an accurate one."

"I prefer mine."

"You always do."

Dax reached the sofa and, without asking permission because he had stopped needing it somewhere around year one of their marriage, bent down and gathered Chris into his arms.

Chris let his eyes close for a second as the heat of him settled in. Even after all this time, Dax still approached him like a man recently informed that mates were real and that he personally had been gifted the only one in existence. The obsession had never faded. It had merely matured into something more polished, more controlled, and in some ways more dangerous because it now wore confidence instead of hunger.

Chris had once believed it might soften with age.

He had been embarrassingly wrong.

At five foot eight, he disappeared against Dax’s frame with insulting ease when his husband wanted closeness, which was every day. Dax drew him up from the sofa as though Chris weighed nothing at all, then sat and pulled him into his lap like this was the most natural thing in the world.

Chris rested back against him with the long-practiced resignation of a man who knew resistance at this stage would only be interpreted as flirtation and exploited accordingly.

"You are impossible," he murmured.

"Yes," Dax said into his hair, sounding pleased. "But I’m your impossible."

"That line should have stopped working years ago."

"And yet."

Chris could feel the smile against the side of his head.

Dax lowered his face to his shoulder the way he always did when the world had been particularly entertaining, dropping some of his enormous weight carefully without ever actually crushing him, his forehead brushing the line where Chris’s neck met shoulder.

Chris relaxed despite himself.

Dax inhaled once.

Then went very still.

Chris felt it immediately.

"Dax?"

No answer.

Dax inhaled again, slower this time.

And then again.

Chris turned his head slightly, enough to look at him from the corner of his eye. His husband’s expression had changed.

Chris frowned. "What?"

Dax did not speak immediately.

That, more than anything else, made Chris sit up straighter.

Because Dax always spoke. Even when he should not. Especially when he should not.

Instead, Dax’s hand slid from Chris’s waist to the center of his abdomen, broad palm settling there with a care so sudden and deliberate it made Chris’s pulse trip once.

"Dax."

His husband lifted his head slowly.

There was something in his eyes Chris had not seen in a very long time.

Not since Nayra.

That thought arrived, absurd and uninvited, and Chris rejected it on principle before it could fully form.

"What is it?" he said, quieter now.

Dax looked at him for one stretched second. Then he bent again, not to his shoulder this time but closer to his throat, to the scent glands below the collar.

He inhaled once more.

Chris felt his own brows draw together.

His scent.

He knew his body. Knew the quiet internal shifts of it after years of living in a palace, after births, after heats, after recovering, and after settling into a long marriage with a sigma who had been terrifyingly attentive from the beginning. He knew what stress did to it. What lack of sleep did. What travel, hormones, anger, and being around too many alphas in tailored suits did.

This was not that.

Or if it was, Dax was reacting to it like it was not.

"Say something," Chris said.

Dax’s voice, when it came, was lower than before. "Your scent changed."

Chris stared at him.

That was not impossible by itself.

The scent varied. Complicated itself with mood and biology and memory and age.

But Dax was still looking at him with that same strange intensity, hand unmoving over Chris’s stomach, body gone too quiet around him.

"How?" Chris asked.

Dax did not blink. "It smells like..."

He stopped.

Chris felt the air in the room alter.

’No. Absolutely not.’

Dax tried again, more carefully this time, as if saying it too fast might make it real. "Chris."

Chris’s heart kicked once, hard and stupid.

"No."