Chapter 41: Compatibility

Chapter 41: Chapter 41: Compatibility

Dax was sitting on the sofa beside Chris, one hand resting somewhere on his mate at all times, currently spread across Christopher’s thigh as though the physical contact were less affection than a basic requirement of continued existence.

Trevor sat opposite them with one ankle over his knee, while Lucas remained standing near the tall windows of the private receiving room, arms folded across his chest and clearly unimpressed by how comfortable the King of Saha appeared in the middle of a crisis involving Lucas’s eldest son.

"You could at least pretend to be a decent man," Lucas said, his green eyes pinning Dax down.

Dax only looked more entertained.

"The engagement announcement is out. People love the pair. Should I cry?"

Lucas’s expression sharpened. "My son almost died this morning."

"And mine stopped him."

"That does not make this a celebration."

"No, the engagement makes it a celebration."

Chris continued reading the statement on the tablet in his lap as though the conversation beside him had not already crossed into familiar territory.

Trevor was equally unaffected.

He reached for his coffee.

Lucas looked between the two of them.

"Are neither of you going to correct him?"

Trevor took a sip. "Why would I waste the effort?"

Chris scrolled another paragraph. "He knows exactly what he’s doing."

Dax smiled at his husband. "You understand me."

"I endure you."

"Lovingly."

Chris did not look up. "Sometimes."

Lucas made a sound of disgust.

Dax’s purple eyes shifted back to him. "You’re very hostile for someone whose son agreed to marry mine."

"He agreed to an announcement while half-conscious and biologically dependent on Nero."

"He was coherent."

"You sound exactly like Nero."

"I raised him."

"That explains several things I have disliked for twenty-five years."

Dax’s smile widened.

There had never been anything subtle about the incompatibility between them.

Lucas’s pheromones belonged to a siren-type dominant omega, strange even among dominant omegas and built around influence, redirection, and an instinctive pressure that wanted everything around him to move according to his emotional center. Dax, meanwhile, was a dominant alpha whose nature had been difficult before Christopher bonded him and remained profoundly territorial afterward.

Put them in the same room for too long, and their instincts began noticing each other, whether either man wanted them to or not.

Usually they tolerated it.

Occasionally they cooperated.

Then one of them said something irritating, and the entire arrangement collapsed.

Dax leaned back against the sofa.

"Sebastian is safer with Nero."

Lucas’s folded arms tightened.

"For now."

"For longer than now."

"That remains to be seen."

"Does it?"

Lucas’s pheromones sharpened faintly.

Trevor lowered his cup.

Chris finally looked up from the tablet.

Neither intervened yet.

Dax noticed the shift and, because he possessed the survival instincts of a man who had somehow reached his sixties despite routinely ignoring them, smiled.

"You know what the problem is?"

Lucas’s eyes narrowed. "You?"

"That too, according to several governments, but no."

Trevor exhaled through his nose.

Dax continued.

"You’re angry because Sebastian needed Nero."

Lucas went very still.

Chris’s hand came down over Dax’s, where it rested on his thigh, in warning.

Dax ignored it.

Lucas’s voice became quieter. "Be careful."

"He needed someone, and it wasn’t you."

The atmosphere changed.

Trevor put his cup down.

Chris closed the tablet.

Dax’s expression remained calm, but his eyes had sharpened too, alpha instinct answering the pressure Lucas was no longer bothering to hide.

Lucas stepped away from the window.

"Do not mistake my gratitude for what Nero did today for permission to use my son’s collapse as proof of your family’s superiority."

"I didn’t."

"You implied it."

"I said he needed Nero."

"You said it like you won something."

Dax’s pheromones pressed back instinctively.

Chris squeezed his hand.

"Dax."

That single word was enough.

The pressure around Dax disappeared almost immediately.

Lucas noticed.

His mouth curved without humor. "At least one of you is trained."

Dax raised a brow, his head tilting back with a grin that would have terrified anyone with a functioning sense of self-preservation.

"Oh, very clever, dear Grand Duke of Fitzgeralt. But you see, we have reached the part of this charming family discussion where the options are painfully simple."

The grin disappeared.

Dax’s purple eyes moved to Trevor.

"Nero helps, or your son dies."

The room went quiet.

Trevor did not flinch, although his jaw tightened enough that a muscle shifted beneath the skin.

Lucas did.

His pheromones sharpened instantly, the faint pressure of his siren nature spreading through the room before Trevor’s hand closed around his wrist.

"Don’t," Trevor said quietly.

Lucas looked at him. "He does not get to say that as though Sebastian belongs to them now.

"That isn’t what he said."

"It is what he means."

Dax leaned forward, forearms resting across his knees, all traces of amusement gone now. Chris’s hand remained against his thigh, but this time Dax did not need the restraint.

"No, Lucas. What I mean is that Sebastian’s body stopped regulating itself in front of us, every monitor Claude had on him insisted nothing had changed, and my son was the only person in that room who could keep him breathing."

Lucas’s green eyes burned.

"I know what happened."

"Then stop treating Nero’s involvement like something you can remove from the situation because you dislike how pleased he is about the engagement."

"I dislike considerably more than that."

"I’m aware."

Dax’s gaze moved back to Trevor.

"And so are you."

Trevor held it.

For decades, the two men had known each other well enough that most conversations between them did not require the polite version.

Trevor finally nodded.

"Yes."

Lucas turned toward him.

Trevor kept one hand around his mate’s wrist, thumb moving once over the inside of it in a quiet attempt to settle him.

"I don’t like the circumstances," Trevor said. "I don’t like that Sebastian’s body is becoming dependent on Nero while he is too exhausted to decide what any of that means emotionally, and I certainly don’t like Nero announcing an engagement before Sebastian has had twelve uninterrupted hours to think."

Dax opened his mouth.

Trevor raised one finger.

"But Nero is keeping him alive."

Dax closed his mouth again.

Chris glanced at him, faintly amused by the rare success.

Trevor continued, his attention on Lucas now.

"That does not mean we hand Sebastian over and stop asking questions. It means we do not interfere with the one thing currently preventing another collapse."

Lucas stared at him for several seconds.

The anger remained, but some of the pressure receded from the room.

"I’m not asking Nero to stop."

"I know."

"I want him supervised."

Dax snorted.

Lucas’s gaze snapped toward him.

Chris tightened his fingers around Dax’s thigh before the next argument could begin.

Dax looked down at his husband’s hand.

"I merely breathed."

"You breathed disrespectfully."

Trevor’s mouth twitched.

Lucas did not find it funny.

"Nero should be supervised," Lucas repeated.

Dax looked back at him. "By whom?"