Caught by the Mad Alpha King-Chapter 297: Power of friendship and husband

Chapter 297: Chapter 297: Power of friendship and husband
"Are we going to fight them?" Heather whispered, grasping for hope the way only a teenager caught in a geopolitical disaster could. "You know... the power of friendship?"
Chris huffed a quiet breath that might have been a laugh in a kinder moment.
"More like the power of dominants," he murmured instead.
Heather blinked at him, perplexed for a heartbeat, before the air turned colder and her breath became a floating cloud. He clasped her hands over her mouth in an attempt to conceal it from those following them.
His scent didn’t spike in the normal omega instinctive response. Instead, it sank downward, seeping into gravel, earth, roots, hedges, and stone. It clung and settled like frost crawling across glass.
For a terrifying heartbeat, nothing happened.
The dampener held strong.
If Chris were a normal omega, that would have been the end of it.
’Good,’
Chris thought, calm in that way that felt almost cruel to the situation.
’I’ve never been ordinary.’
Chris exhaled slowly, lowering the frequency of his pheromones, focusing them.
The temperature dropped.
Gravel stiffened beneath their feet as thin white veins spread outward, ice threading silently through soil and stem and bark. Frost bloomed over hedges in delicate crystalline lace, creeping over green leaves with cold, effortless insistence.
Heather nearly shouted.
"What...?!"
His hand closed gently around her wrist.
"Shh," Chris whispered, soft and terribly calm.
Something shifted in the hedge line. A scrape of a boot. The faint crunch of frozen gravel beneath a weight that was neither cautious nor clumsy. Something like a civilian trying to emulate how a professional would move, but... wrong.
Then four silhouettes broke from the shadowed greenery.
Heather went painfully still.
They were big, taller than most beta palace guards, but not as big as Dax’s alphas. Their shoulders were squared and bodies held in disciplined readiness... But something was off again. Their movements were just a fraction delayed, like their instincts were a step behind their bodies. Their eyes didn’t track the environment like predators.
They searched for scent.
They expected scent.
And Chris watched realization dawn far too slowly on faces that should have understood immediately.
’They’re not thinking or processing anything,’
he thought, even as he pulled Heather subtly further behind the frost-glazed hedge.
’They can’t.’
One of the alphas finally saw them.
He didn’t tense up with tactical awareness.
He turned like a fucking puppet.
The others followed a beat later, heads snapping toward Chris and Heather not in instinctive synchronization... but delayed, mechanical, like the idea traveled through them first before their bodies obeyed.
Heather’s fingers dug into Chris’s sleeve.
"Chris..." she whispered, terrified even when she tried her best to hide it.
He couldn’t blame her.
These were alphas, powerful ones, yet every step they took felt hollow. Their gaze didn’t hold personality or strategy or ego.
They simply charged when the information sink in.
Heather gasped.
Chris didn’t move.
Ice answered him before his muscles needed to.
It surged as if the ground itself obeyed him, frost thickening, then solidifying, then rising, a translucent wall spearing upward between them and the lunging alphas in a breath. Cold cracked sharply through the garden, frost exploding outward like shattered crystal trapped midair.
The first alpha slammed into it hard enough that the impact echoed.
The second collided an instant later.
The wall didn’t break.
They bounced.
Heather flinched back with a muffled sound, instinctively cowering into Chris even as she forced herself not to scream. Glassy cold vapor hissed along the line of the barrier, ice crawling outward like something alive, like it enjoyed being challenged.
The alphas hit again.
Harder.
Just throwing themselves against the wall like living battering rams.
Heather stared, horrified.
"They’re not... thinking," she whispered, voice shaking. "They look like they’re awake, but they’re not there."
Chris watched one of them stagger slightly, then reset unnaturally fast.
Eyes glossy and entirely empty.
"Yes," he murmured, voice dropping, something colder than the air sliding beneath his words. "That’s because they aren’t."
—
Dax felt the dampener the moment he stepped into the gardens.
His jaw tightened as he walked, his nails already biting half-moons into his palms, because if he let himself run, he would start killing everything between him and Christopher without asking questions.
He did not rush.
That was somehow worse.
Seven feet of controlled catastrophe moved through the maze of hedges with the unhurried inevitability of a natural disaster deciding to take its time. Black silk stretched over shoulders built to break armies, suit trousers cut perfectly over long legs. His shadow dragged across gravel and polished stone like a second, darker being following him, broader and heavier than any mortal thing had a right to be.
There was nothing gentle about Dax of Saha when he walked like this.
The silk shirt shouldn’t have worked here. It was meant for dinners, meetings, and carefully staged diplomatic images. Instead, it clung to his frame with every measured step, making him even more dangerous than he was already. Fine shoes crushed gravel underfoot with a sound that echoed too loudly in a space that suddenly seemed too small to hold him.
He breathed in again.
No pheromones. No signature of Christopher’s presence in the air.
He tasted metal on his tongue.
Someone had muted his world.
Someone had dared to silence instinct in his country. His Palace.
He did not say a word, but rage rolled beneath his skin in quiet, massive waves, something ancient and territorial and entirely unwilling to tolerate insult.
Somewhere deeper in the hedges, a scuffle broke out. Rowan’s work: mindless alphas falling one by one.
But that wasn’t enough.
Dax wasn’t looking for enemies to subdue.
He was looking for one person.
He stopped for a moment and let the rest of his senses do what scent could not. The faint scent of perfume, sweet, expensive, and aggressively floral, struck him like a truck.
Heather.
He latched onto that instead, because if he couldn’t follow instinct, he would follow vanity and luxury and the trail of a girl who had never learned the concept of subtlety. It cut through the sterile air like color bleeding through monochrome.
"For once," he muttered under his breath, voice low and edged, "I’m glad someone else is with Chris."
After that, speed stopped belonging to reason.
For a man that large, he was not supposed to move with that fluidity. Not with that sudden, predatory force that erased distance as if the world bent to fit him. Gravel barely had time to complain under his shoes before it was behind him. Branches swayed violently in the wake of his passage. Air shifted, displaced by mass, fury, and purpose.
He turned a corner of hedges and found them.
Heather’s perfume slammed into him like a shout in silence. She was pressed close to the inner curve of the hedge, eyes wide, posture caught somewhere between indignation, terror, and the stubborn refusal to be sensible. Her hands were clenched in the fabric of someone’s sleeve.
Christopher.
Standing between her and the world like it was the most natural thing to do.
Frost still clung to the leaves around them. Crystalline lace glittered faintly along the green, delicate, and lethal all at once, beautiful in the way storms could be beautiful right before they broke a city.
And in front of them... four alphas throwing themselves.
Bodies charged forward with brutal force, only to bounce off the translucent barrier in front of Chris, like animals driven solely by command rather than instinct. The ice held, ringing low with each impact, a sound like winter breathing.
Their eyes were wrong.
If Dax’s rage had been coiled before, it now burned.
He stepped forward without a word, and the first alpha that lunged again met a hand instead of ice.
Dax caught him by the throat, lifted him off the ground effortlessly, and slammed him into the gravel hard enough that the garden swallowed the sound. The man didn’t even scream. His body simply folded under force and went still.
The second didn’t even have time to react before Dax’s elbow met his skull. He hit the ground in a graceless sprawl, consciousness extinguished like a candle.
The third came from the side.
Dax pivoted, shifting weight, and a hand slammed between shoulder blades, forcing the man downward, grinding his face into stone.
The fourth barely made it half a step before Rowan ghosted out of the green like an execution sentence and clipped him down.
Dax’s chest rose once as if he were simply lifting papers, and he turned to face Chris and Heather.
Heather released a sound halfway between relief and outrage because that was who she was, but he barely glanced at her. He catalogued: alive, uninjured, borderline hysterical, therefore fine.
Then his attention landed where it had always been going.
Christopher.