Caught by the Mad Alpha King-Chapter 484: Not a curse.

"Can Nayra inherit the throne?"

"Do you really want to work for Nayra?" Chris asked with a low laugh.

Nero paused.

Then, with the grave seriousness of a prince weighing national stability, "That is an excellent point."

Dax looked faintly pleased with his mate, as if this counted as a successful redirection rather than parental mockery.

Then, because mercy had never truly lived in him, he added, with the calm of a man laying out renovation plans and not fresh psychological damage, "Your training will shift. Less sparring for now. More pheromone control. And you’ll add classes on how to manage it."

Nero stared at him.

There was a beat of silence in which Chris visibly registered the sentence, evaluated it, and decided, with weary resignation, that he agreed with the substance while objecting to the delivery with every civilized bone in his body.

Nero lowered the broth cup very slowly. "I’m sorry," he said. "Did I survive one biological apocalypse just to be told I’m now enrolled in a second one?"

Dax did not blink. "Yes."

"That is a terrible parenting strategy."

"That is prevention."

Chris pinched the bridge of his nose. "Would it kill you to introduce horrifying truths in smaller pieces?"

"Yes," Dax said.

"I wasn’t asking you."

Nero looked between them, already exhausted again. "No, I would like the horrifying truth to stop there, actually."

"It won’t," Dax said.

Chris closed his eyes briefly, perhaps in prayer, perhaps in mourning for the concept of timing.

Dax’s expression shifted then, the earlier bluntness settling into something more serious, more deliberate. "You being an enigma means you carry an unacceptable amount of power for your age. More than an alpha. More than a dominant alpha. More than a sigma. And when that power settles fully, part of it will be influence."

The room changed.

Nero felt it right away, not in scent or force, but in the silence that followed only when the important part of a conversation arrived and everyone knew it.

He set the cup down on the tray.

Dax continued, every word measured now. "If unmanaged, that influence can push people around you to adapt to you. Their secondary presentation can change, as instinct wants alignment and the perfect chance. And with something like yours, alignment can become coercion very quickly if you’re careless."

Nero’s face emptied.

Chris spoke before the silence could harden too much. "The old records are inconsistent," he said, more carefully than Dax had, "but they agree on one thing. A strong enigma’s presentation affects the environment around it. Sometimes subtly. Sometimes not. That’s why control matters so much."

Nero looked at him. "You’re saying I could change someone."

Chris held his gaze. "I’m saying you could pressure someone’s body toward you if you were out of control, if they were vulnerable, if proximity was prolonged, and if no one intervened. We are not allowing you to learn that through accident."

"There would be people that would try to take advantage of that just to marry into the royal family." Dax said while sitting on the bed. "You are the only enigma in the world at this point. The last one... was my grandfather, the first one shaping the Saha you know now."

Nero looked down at his hands.

They did not look like the hands of someone who could do that.

They looked ordinary enough: long fingers; the faint trace of bruising where needles had been, skin still a little too pale after days in a medical wing; a tremor now and then when he had pushed himself too far too recently. Nothing in them suggested the kind of danger Dax had just laid across the room with all the warmth of a state report.

That, somehow, made it worse.

Because pain had the brutal honesty of those days when his body had burned so hot he had thought the sedatives were failing out of cruelty rather than limitation. But this was different. This was a future problem, a broader one, something that reached past him and toward other people.

Toward consequences.

He sat with that for longer than was comfortable, which, given that nearly everything in his body still felt vaguely offensive, was saying something.

Then he said, quieter than before, "So if I’m careless, I don’t just ruin myself."

"No," Chris said.

Dax looked at his son and spoke again, this time with less blunt force and more certainty. "You shouldn’t start treating this like a curse. That is not what it is. You’ll find someone who is yours, someone who could be your mate, and the two of you would have a choice. Change or not. Yes, you need to be responsible. Yes, control matters, but this is not a disease."

Nero looked up at him.

Because until that moment, everything they had said had been about risk. What could go wrong if he failed to master something too large for his age. Necessary things, all of them. But necessity had a way of turning a person into a problem inside his own head if no one was careful with the edges.

And for one ugly second, Nero had begun to feel exactly that.

A risk, a hazard, and a body with conditions attached.

Chris caught it too.

His face changed, and some of the old sharpness faded into something calmer. "Your father’s right," he said. "The danger isn’t in what you are. The danger is in ignorance, arrogance, or lack of control. Those are three different things."

Nero frowned slightly. "That sounds like one lecture wearing three coats."

"It is," Chris said. "But it’s still true."

Dax stayed seated on the bed, his posture still in a way that meant he had thought about this longer than he would ever admit. "Power changes the shape of responsibility. That is all. It doesn’t make you wrong."

Nero looked away for a moment, toward the pale rectangle of light at the window, toward a city that had managed to keep moving while his body tore itself open and rebuilt something he had not asked for. The ache was still there in his muscles, a low reminder that nothing had gone back to normal simply because the fever had broken.

"So," he said after a moment, "the issue is not that I could change someone. It’s that I don’t get to take that choice from them."

"Yes," Chris said at once.

"Yes," Dax said too, quieter now.

For the first time in the entire conversation, Nero felt the ground under it settle into something he could actually stand on.

He let out a slow breath. "That would have been a better opening than ’you’re a consent hazard.’"

Chris turned his head with visible offense. "I did not say that."

"You implied it beautifully."

Dax’s mouth moved by a fraction. "He’s not wrong."

Chris looked at his husband. "You are making my work here impossible." 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝔀𝓮𝒃𝙣𝓸𝒗𝒆𝒍.𝙘𝒐𝒎

"That has never stopped you."

Nero almost smiled.

Then, because he was still himself, he said, "I still hate the classes."

"That," Chris replied, "is allowed."

"I hate the suppressants more."

"That," Dax said, "is also allowed."

"And I hate that the two of you are suddenly being reasonable."

Chris lifted one shoulder. "That one you’ll have to endure."

Nero looked at them both and, despite everything, understood that they were simply keeping the future from turning monstrous before it had even arrived.

He appreciated it against his will.

Which was deeply offensive.

"So I learn control," he said.

"Yes," Dax replied.

"And I don’t panic every time someone says ’enigma’ like it’s a natural disaster."

Chris’s mouth twitched. "That would be a lovely secondary goal."

Nero gave him a flat look. "I heard that."