Taming the Wild Beast of Alamina

The transition from the warmth of his bed to the sterile, high-backed chair in the Crown Prince’s office was one Arion made with a very specific, military-grade reluctance.

It had been three days.

The disaster Dean had predicted had arrived, though not in the form of raised voices or broken furniture. It had arrived as four men were seated around a polished mahogany table while the morning sun cut across the Alaminian crest on the far wall and turned the whole room into an exercise in controlled displeasure.

Arion felt settled.

It was a dangerous condition for a man in his position.

For three nights, he had taken back every inch of the distance Lucas’s caution had built between them. He had ignored every one of Seven’s stabilization recommendations that involved time, restraint, and respectable personal boundaries and had replaced them with a much older, much more effective form of regulation that left Dean sleeping hard and deep in the private suite beyond the office wing. Arion had not intended to wake him for the meeting.

Basically, Arion had exhausted Dean with sex for the past three days without shame.

And Dean had exhausted his quota of strategic family meetings for at least a decade, and Arion intended to enforce that calculation personally.

So Dean slept.

Arion sat here instead, in full possession of his suit, his title, and his worsening opinion of mornings.

Across from him, Dax looked offensively at ease.

That in itself was enough to qualify the meeting as hostile.

The King of Saha occupied his chair with the predatory leisure only very dangerous men and very spoiled cats ever truly mastered. White-blond hair, purple eyes, and a posture suggesting that if this conversation turned ugly enough, he would not only enjoy it but possibly improve.

To Dax’s right sat Trevor, who wore a more expensive stillness. There was nothing casual in him, but a lesser observer might have mistaken the control for ease. Arion, having now dealt with both Trevor and Lucas in the full force of their parental displeasure, he had no such misconceptions.

Lucas, naturally, looked like a man who had agreed to attend something diplomatic and deeply regretted the diplomacy of it. He had dressed for civility. He had also brought his disapproval and seated it in the room before he himself sat down, which Arion almost respected.

The office held its usual weight around them: dark wood, exact lines, controlled light, the crest on the wall, the broad windows overlooking the inner gardens, and part of the eastern military courtyard. It was a room built to remind visitors that the Crown Prince of Alamina did not merely inhabit power but worked from inside it.

At the moment, however, it mostly felt like a meeting chamber for men who all knew too much and liked too little about the circumstances.

Dax was the first to speak.

"You look better," he said, studying Arion with open insolence. "Deeply annoying of you."

Arion did not bother asking whether that was meant as a greeting or an insult. "I am."

Dax’s mouth curved. "Yes. I noticed. I assume that correlates with why Dean is not here."

Lucas glanced once toward the windows and then back again. "He’s asleep."

"That wasn’t directed at you," Dax said.

"No," Lucas replied. "But I know things too."

Trevor did not look at either of them. "This will go faster if you both decide to be adults before noon."

Dax looked delighted by that. "And deprive myself of the hour’s only entertainment."

"It’s eight in the morning," Lucas said.

"That’s why I need entertainment."

"You barely sleep, Dax." Lucas tapped his fingers once against the armrest, eyes sharp and unimpressed. "Tell me, did you know that Nero and Dean had discovered Dean’s ability to neutralize pheromones... even from a damn enigma?"

That changed the room.

Because Dax, unlike most men, did not startle cleanly. He went still by degrees, amusement draining first from the mouth, then from the eyes, leaving behind something much colder and infinitely more attentive.

Arion noticed Trevor straighten by less than a fraction.

Dax leaned back a little farther in his chair, but the movement had lost its leisure. "That," he said after a beat, "depends on what you mean by know."

Lucas’s expression flattened. "Oh, I hate that answer already."

Trevor spoke before Lucas could sharpen it further. "Did you know Nero had been exposed to it directly before the recent incident?"

Dax’s gaze shifted between them, then landed on Arion, perhaps because Arion was the one least likely to confuse irritation with imprecision. "I knew Dean had interfered with Nero’s pheromones in training," he said. "I did not know the mechanism had been identified clearly enough at that point to be called a second ability."

Lucas let out a short breath through his nose. "So yes, but in a useless format."

"In a partial format," Dax corrected. "Which is what most dangerous information looks like before someone makes the mistake of clarifying it."

Arion remained still behind the desk, but his attention sharpened.

"You knew Nero had been affected," Arion said.

"Yes."

"And you said nothing," Lucas pressed.

Dax’s mouth curved faintly, though there was no warmth in it. "That describes a great many people in this chain of disasters."

Lucas leaned forward. "Do not do that."

"I’m not deflecting," Dax said. "I’m being accurate. Nero did not present it to me as a named phenomenon. He presented it as Dean being unexpectedly annoying at close range in ways he found offensive and intriguing. Given that the source of the complaint was Nero, I assigned it the level of caution usually appropriate to one of his wounded observations."

Trevor’s expression did not change. "And that level was insufficient?"

"Yes," Dax said simply.

That quieted Lucas for a second.

Arion said, "What exactly did Nero tell you?"

Dax considered the question for a moment, his eyes narrowing slightly in recollection. "That Dean had a way of ruining pressure at close range. That it had occurred when Nero was angry enough to make the interaction significant. That Dean had not understood it fully, and neither had he." He paused. "Nero assumed it was one more ugly little adaptation born from Dean’s presentation and temperament. He did not treat it as stable. Neither, at the time, did I."

Lucas folded his arms. "That sounds familiar in a way I strongly dislike."

Trevor glanced at him. "Because it matches Dean’s explanation."

"Yes," Lucas said. "I know. I still dislike it."

Dax tapped one finger lightly against the armrest. "For the record, had I understood that Dean could directly flatten dominant output with that degree of specificity, I would have treated the information differently."

Lucas’s brows lifted. "That is not comforting."

Dax decided he had enough of Lucas’s temperament. "Oh, excuse me for not observing something that Dean’s parents couldn’t find out. Dean fought at most three times in those conditions in Saha, if even that. Don’t blame me for your lack of attention."

"Dax..." Trevor pinched the bridge of his nose.