Chapter 206: First step
"Dax..." Trevor pinched the bridge of his nose.
It was not an especially loud warning.
That made it more effective.
Dax, however, had already committed himself to the sentence and was not a man inclined to retrieve blades once thrown. He leaned back in his chair with all the easy insolence of someone who knew perfectly well he had just crossed a line and was now deciding whether the consequences would entertain him.
"Oh, that’s interesting," Lucas said, voice calm enough to be immediately dangerous. "You’ve decided the best defense for partial knowledge of a biologically significant anomaly is to insult the parents who were deliberately kept outside the capital where it mattered."
Dax’s smile did not improve. "I’ve decided that if I’m being accused of negligence over incomplete information, I’m allowed to note that the entire situation was apparently built on everyone misjudging the scale at once."
Trevor lowered his hand slowly from his face and looked between them with the expression of a man reconsidering whether diplomacy had, perhaps, simply been a historical mistake.
"That," Trevor said to Dax, "was not your best phrasing."
"No," Dax replied. "But it was accurate enough to be worth saying."
Lucas leaned forward in his chair, fingers locking once over his knee. "Do not confuse provocation with accuracy."
"Do not confuse parental injury with immunity from context," Dax returned.
Trevor spoke before Lucas could worsen the situation.
"That’s enough."
His tone remained controlled, but there was iron in it now.
Dax actually had the decency to stop.
Lucas did not look away from him. "No one is saying you were solely responsible. We’re saying you knew enough to understand that something unusual had happened and still left it in the hands of Nero’s judgment."
Dax’s fingers tapped once against the arm of the chair. "And I am saying I assessed it as a training anomaly because that is how it was presented to me."
"And I am saying," Lucas replied, "that when the people around my son keep describing him as ’unexpectedly annoying at close range’ instead of ’in possession of a potentially strategic second ability,’ I reserve the right to find every one of you collectively unbearable."
That earned a smile from Trevor.
Dax, however, had recovered enough of his composure to answer more cleanly this time. "That is fair. I’m not disputing the broader failure. I am disputing the idea that this should have been historically legible on first contact." He shifted one shoulder, the movement elegant enough to be annoying. "Saha keeps records on unusual secondary presentations, pheromonal deviations, gland anomalies, dominance events, and the more exotic disasters our bloodlines produce under stress. There is not a negligible amount of information in those archives. And nothing in it suggested this." His gaze moved between them. "So yes, I assumed Nero had one unstable moment in training and Dean happened to be in the wrong place to benefit from it, because Nero is still a teenager and teenagers, as a species, are not trustworthy narrators of their own restraint."
Lucas stared at him for one beat. Then another.
Trevor’s smile disappeared into something flatter, though not unfriendly enough to restart the argument.
Arion let the words settle.
Because there was truth in them, and that was the more offensive part.
Dax continued, tone steadier now that he had finally moved from provocation into actual explanation. "If Nero had come to me saying, ’Dean can locally flatten dominant output under pressure, and I think it bypasses the usual pheromonal hierarchy,’ we would not be having this conversation in the same room." He paused. "But that is not what I was told. I was told Dean got uncomfortably good at close-range disruption when Nero was in a bad mood, and given that the source of the complaint was an enigma boy with a wounded ego, I categorized it badly."
Lucas let out a breath through his nose. "God, I hate how reasonable that sounds after the fact."
"Because it is true. So can we focus on what should be done and not who is to blame?" Dax asked, with the faint irritation of a man whose tolerance for other people’s circles of blame had sharply decreased in direct proportion to how long he had been away from his own mate.
The room went still for a beat.
Because Dax, insufferable creature that he was, had not said anything incorrect.
Arion folded his hands once over the closed file and looked at the three men in front of him. Trevor was still too controlled to be called calm, Lucas was still one sentence away from renewed offense on principle, and Dax was sitting there with all the predatory impatience of a king who had agreed to be useful and now wanted the room to earn the privilege.
It was time to stop circling the failure and address the point beneath it.
"Yes," Arion said. "We focus on what happens next."
Dax leaned back slightly, signaling, for once, that he was willing to let someone else hold the center of the room.
Arion continued.
"Dean’s second ability is dangerous. It is politically unstable. It is strategically significant. All of that is true." His gaze moved once across the room, making sure each of them stayed where he needed them. "It is also the first useful irregularity any of us have seen in years that does not begin with destruction and end with disposal."
That changed the air again.
Lucas’s expression sharpened first.
Then Trevor’s.
Dax, infuriatingly, looked interested in a way that meant he had already been expecting something close.
Arion went on before anyone could interrupt the line.
"If it can locally flatten dominant output at the source," he said, "then it may be the first real indication that corrupted pheromonal escalation is not irreversible in every form."
Lucas sat back in his chair, the earlier irritation fading into a more focused kind of attention. "You’re talking about the infected and the beasts?"
"And bersker dominants," Trevor added quietly.
"Yes," Arion said.