Caught by the Mad Alpha King-Chapter 298: Done playing

Chapter 298: Chapter 298: Done playing
The late autumn of Sahan air slid between them, November cold settling over the garden like a quiet verdict. The wind threaded through hedges and caught the ends of Dax’s white-blonde hair, carrying the faint metallic chill of approaching winter. It lingered, patient and unsettling, like something testing the strength of bones before deciding whether to break them.
Chris stood in the hush of it.
Frost traced the hedges around him in delicate crystalline filigree, and the cold belonged to him. Breath misted faintly between them, his chest rising, calm in a way that made the whole scene surreal. Heather was close behind him, wrapped in the protection of Chris’s presence and pheromones, breath too fast, eyes too wide, but upright and very much alive.
Dax stopped.
The world did not.
Branches rustled. Gravel whispered. A fallen leaf skidded across stone. The bodies on the ground remained motionless. Rowan’s presence lingered somewhere nearby like a shadow with intent.
But inside Dax, everything narrowed to Chris.
And for one breath, the furious king, the unstoppable force, the creature who had walked through a scentless palace garden with murder in his bloodstream... simply looked at the man he had almost lost to silence.
Then he closed the distance.
There was no hesitation. No performance for witnesses or politics or dignity. His hands found Chris like they always would. One at the back of his neck, warm and big, the other wrapping around his waist with instinctive ease, pulling him in, pulling him close, as if he were something Dax had needed to breathe.
Chris went willingly.
He didn’t protest. He didn’t roll his eyes or pretend this was excessive. His body met Dax’s with quiet trust, his hand closing into silk at Dax’s chest, breathing him in like this too was expected, like being held in the middle of danger was just another way to exist.
The November chill threaded between them and lost.
Heat bled back into Dax’s lungs. Into his muscles. Into bone-deep tension that finally remembered how to loosen. He bowed his head just enough to brush his temple against Chris’s hair, breath slow and controlling for the first time since the garden went silent.
"You’re late," Chris murmured, and the humor in his voice was faint but real.
Dax’s fingers tightened, outrage and relief merging into something untranslatable.
"Don’t joke," he muttered, low and rough. "Not when I nearly burned the kingdom down getting to you."
Heather stared at them.
For three seconds.
Four.
Then she made a sound like someone personally offended by intimacy.
"Are you two serious right now?" she demanded, somewhere between appalled, relieved, and dramatically betrayed. "We were being hunted by mindless super soldiers, and your first instinct is to hug? Publicly? In front of me? I’m a minor. This is emotional indecency."
Dax didn’t even glance at her.
He reached back without letting go of Chris and dragged her behind them by the wrist like she weighed nothing, tucking her safely in their shadow as if that solved the conversation entirely.
"You’re alive," he said flatly. "That’s sufficient."
"That is not how emotional acknowledgment works!" Heather protested, indignant and shaking, which only made it funnier and sadder at the same time. "I deserve gratitude. Possibly compensation. At least eye contact!"
Chris huffed quietly against Dax’s chest, the closest he would come to laughing while still pressed into him.
"He’s not ignoring you," he said gently. "He’s prioritizing oxygen."
Heather opened her mouth to argue.
Then she closed it.
Because Dax wasn’t just holding Chris.
He was breathing like a man who had been drowning until this very moment.
And for once, Heather said nothing.
—
Two hours later, the garden incident was becoming erased in real time, and the personal wing became an active war room.
Heather was gone, handed firmly into Marianne’s custody and then surrounded by Rohan’s diplomatic convoy like she was a national treasure and a potential explosion at the same time. Dax had looked Marianne dead in the eye and promised that if Heather so much as sneezed wrong, Saha would consider it an act of aggression. Marianne dragged the girl off before Heather could dramatically declare emotional trauma and demand a tiara.
Silence returned to the palace after that.
Chris sat curled on the armchair in their private sitting room, hair still damp, skin warm from the shower, wrapped in one of Dax’s heavy robes that swallowed him in folds of dark fabric and soft scent. There was tea on the table near the collar he left off before showering. Chris didn’t reach for any of those, he only watched.
Because Dax was pacing.
He paced like someone scraping knives across the floor.
Barefoot now, black silk shirt replaced with something darker and cleaner, sleeves rolled to his elbows, he moved across the room with sharp, controlled strides, every step rooted in purpose. The November cold pressed faintly at the windows, but inside the room the air was hot with tension and something far heavier, authority gathering mass.
"Camera feeds for the last six hours," Dax snapped into the comm pinned at his collar. "All raw data. I don’t want curated summaries. I don’t want interpretations. I want the truth, and I want it now."
A reply came immediately, too quiet for most people to hear.
Dax’s eyes narrowed.
"Then find me what’s missing," he said. "If a hole exists in my palace, it exists because someone built it. I want the architect."
He moved again, cutting across the room.
Another call connected. Another voice ed. Dax’s jaw clenched.
"No," he said, his tone ice-cold now. "I do not care who they belonged to. I care who controlled them. I care who funded them. I care who believed that muting instinct and sending puppets after my spouse in my country was an acceptable gamble."
His gaze flicked toward Chris for half a heartbeat.
That was enough to lower his voice.
"Because that," he finished quietly, "wasn’t a threat. That was an insult."
He ended the call.
Silence.
Then...
"Rowan," he barked.
A second later, Rowan stepped into view from the adjoining doorway, posture sharp, expression grim, every inch the soldier again. The air shifted with him, focus tightening.
"We confirmed chemical dampener release in the gardens," Rowan ed. "The dispersal method was low-tech but powerful. Someone mapped the patrol overlap pattern and found the seam. The puppets are already being analyzed."
"Find out where Adonis Malek was while all of this was happening." Dax didn’t raise his voice, but his tone sent a shiver down Rowan’s spine. "Every second accounted for. Every call. Every contact. Every shadow he stood in. If someone thinks he can use my palace for theater, then he can explain the funding of the orchestra."
Rowan’s jaw tightened, eyes flicking briefly toward Chris in what might have been an apology for existing during whatever this was, then back to Dax. "Understood. I’ll bring you proof, not speculation."
"I’m done playing nice," Dax said, and for a heartbeat the mask slipped, letting the fury underneath breathe. "And for sure..." His head turned, his attention concentrating fully where it had always belonged, "...not playing with anything for curiosity."