CHAPTER 215: CHAPTER 215: THE WHOLE REASON

Chris hesitated, palms pressing flat against the table behind him. "We had a great aunt," he said. "A dominant omega."

Dax didn’t move, but the tension in the room rose with the king’s pheromones.

"She was like me," Chris continued. "A rare dominant omega born into a noble Palatine house."

"And?" Dax asked quietly.

Chris took a slow breath. "And the Maleks sold her."

Dax’s jaw tightened, his purple eyes gleaming in the dim lighting. "Define ’sold."

Chris shook his head. "That’s the problem. No one knows exactly what the arrangement was. Just that she was sent abroad at eighteen to ’marry into an allied family,’ and she never came back."

Dax’s eyes narrowed with a deadly focus.

"They said she lived in luxury," Chris added. "They sent letters for a few years. Expensive gifts. Photos of her smiling in some estate halfway across the continent."

"But?" Dax murmured, he was sure that there was a lot more to it.

"But no one ever saw her again," Chris said, voice dipping. "No visits. No return. No children were ever mentioned. And when the letters stopped coming, the Maleks pretended it was normal."

Dax’s fingers curled slowly against the table.

"And when I asked about her," Chris went on, "I was told dominant omegas were ’sensitive assets,’ that she was ’best placed where she could thrive,’ and that our family ’knew how to protect its own.’"

Dax’s expression froze into something frighteningly calm. "Protect."

Chris gave a thin laugh. "Yeah. That word didn’t age well, did it?"

"No," Dax said, voice low.

Chris swallowed. "I don’t know what really happened to her. Nobody does. Maybe it was fine. Maybe she lived a quiet, wealthy life somewhere far away. Maybe she was happy."

"And you don’t believe that," Dax said softly.

Chris shut his eyes. "I don’t know what I believe. But the silence scared me. And the way the family talked about her like she was a transaction, not a person, scared me more."

Dax’s breath left him in a slow, dangerous exhale.

Chris’s hands tightened on the edge of the table, knuckles pale. "So when I realized what I was," he said quietly, "I didn’t want to be sent away. Or married off. It was a year after our parents’ deaths... and everything was already falling apart."

Dax’s breath stilled, his attention sharpening.

"Andrew was trying to keep us afloat," Chris went on. "We didn’t starve, we didn’t lose the house, we had clothes and school and some kind of stability... But nobody helped him. Not our relatives. Not the other Maleks. Not the nobles who pretended to care."

A muscle in his jaw twitched. "He had to keep working, cooking, paying bills, and fighting the legal mess our parents had left behind, and he did it all alone. For years."

Chris’s voice softened with each memory coming back to him. "I didn’t want to be another burden to him. He was twenty-four and raising us. He had an eighteen-year-old grieving brother and a twelve-year-old terrified sister clinging to him, and he still had to put his entire career on hold."

Dax blinked once. Slowly. It was like his brain was recalibrating to a new level of anger he hadn’t prepared for.

Chris swallowed. "He wanted to take his prosecutor’s board exam. He worked for it. Studied for it. He had a real shot. But then our parents died, and he had to choose between his future and us."

"So he chose you," Dax said, voice low.

"He always chose us," Chris whispered. "Every time."

Dax closed his eyes for a beat, like he needed that second to keep from snapping something in half.

Chris continued, quieter. "And when I figured out I wasn’t just an omega... but a dominant one... I panicked. I knew what that meant in our family. I knew what they did to our great aunt. I knew what they could do with me."

"So this is the whole reason you hid," Dax muttered.

Chris nodded. "I hid because I didn’t want Andrew to wake up one day and find me gone. I didn’t want to be shipped off to another country. I didn’t want to become a bargaining chip. And I didn’t want to give him another crisis to handle when he was already juggling three lifetimes’ worth."

Dax didn’t say anything at first; he just crossed the space between them with his impossible, predatory grace. And when he stopped in front of Chris, the size difference settled between them in a way Chris could never quite forget. Dax’s height towered over him, a solid seven-foot-three wall of heat and muscle, while Chris, who was annoyed, tired, and five-foot-eight on a good day, felt abruptly and unreasonably small in comparison.

It wasn’t a thing he usually noticed. But right now, with Dax lowering his head to fit into Chris’s space, with those broad shoulders cutting half the dim conference room out of view, the contrast felt almost laughably unfair.

Chris sighed up at him, hands braced behind him on the table. "You’re gigantic. It’s rude."

Dax didn’t even pretend to hide the faint amusement in his eyes as he wrapped an arm around Chris and pulled him in, letting his pheromones warm and settle. "You love it," he murmured.

"Only when it’s convenient," Chris grumbled, even as his body relaxed into the hold.

Dax held him a little closer, just enough to make Chris’s ribs stop protesting from the stress of the day. The pheromones shifted again, easing into something smoother, almost velvet-like. It was gentler and more controlled than before, as if Dax had wrapped an arm around the atmosphere and told it to behave.

Chris’s breath eased without his permission. "You’re doing the pheromone thing," he muttered into Dax’s chest.

"Yes," Dax murmured. "You need it."

"And you like it," Chris added, because he could feel the smug.

"That too," Dax admitted, with zero shame.

The oppressive rum-scented dominance softened into something calmer, warmer. It wrapped around Chris in slow waves, soothing him from the inside out, and the tension he’d been carrying all day bled away like steam.

Dax lowered his head until his chin rested lightly on top of Chris’s hair. The height difference made the gesture easy for him and deeply annoying for Chris, who absolutely did not need to be reminded how small he was compared to his mate.

Still... he leaned in.

Just a little.

The warmth helped. The weight helped, but the reassuring scent helped the most.

"Christopher," Dax murmured, "you should never have had to handle any of this alone."

Chris huffed a quiet laugh against the fabric of Dax’s shirt. "You can’t fix everything."

Dax shifted just enough to look down at him, one eyebrow raised in royal disbelief. "Watch me."

Chris groaned. "That’s what I was afraid of."

Dax lifted a hand to Chris’s jaw, thumb brushing his cheek in slow, steady circles. "I’ve been thinking."

Chris stiffened. "Oh, hell, no."