Caught by the Mad Alpha King-Chapter 488: The price

"That’s not it," Nayra said as she entered the room.

Both of them turned.

She stood in the doorway in sleep shorts, an oversized shirt, and the kind of expression that meant she had either overheard something, solved something, or become a national problem in under ten minutes. At eleven, with black hair and black eyes like Chris and a mind that had begun arranging itself into something far too sharp for anyone’s peace, she looked offensively awake for the hour.

Chris narrowed his eyes first. "Why are you not in bed?"

Nayra leaned one shoulder against the frame with infuriating calm. "Because Jax stole Mr. Pepper from my room, and I came to retrieve him, but now I see you’re doing conspiracy without me."

Dax glanced down automatically.

Jax, asleep in his lap, had indeed trapped a bedraggled stuffed pepper-shaped toy under one arm like captured territory.

Chris pinched the bridge of his nose. "That is not the point."

"No," Nayra said. "The point is that you’re wrong."

That quieted the room very effectively.

Dax looked at her. "About what?"

"About why Nero did it."

Chris folded his arms. "You’re going to tell me you know."

"I do know."

Dax’s brow moved slightly. "And how, exactly, do you know?"

Nayra gave him a look of deep injury. "Because unlike the rest of you, I pay attention when people are being obvious in boring ways."

Chris stared at her for one beat. Then another.

Dax’s mouth twitched.

Chris did not look at him. "Do not encourage that."

"I haven’t spoken."

"You almost did."

Nayra pushed off the doorframe and came further into the room, stopping near the low table where the report had been sitting minutes earlier. Her eyes moved once from Chris to Dax to the sleeping toddler in Dax’s lap, and some quick little calculation passed behind them.

Then she said, with perfect confidence, "Nero didn’t do it because Dean was cornered."

Dax leaned back slightly in the chair. "No?"

"No."

Chris’s voice was very even now, which meant he was interested despite himself. "Then why?"

Nayra’s expression brightened.

"There is a price."

Dax looked offended on principle. "For information about your brother."

"Yes."

"That is extortion." 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

"That," Nayra said with dignity, "is family consulting."

Chris’s mouth flattened. "You’re eleven."

"And correct."

That, unfortunately, was her strongest point so far.

Dax considered her for half a second. "What price?"

Nayra lifted one finger. "First, I want Mr. Pepper returned without bite damage being held against me."

Dax looked down at the sleeping toddler, who had gone boneless with complete innocence while clearly in possession of stolen goods. "Accepted."

"Second," Nayra continued, "I want advance veto rights on any hideous dress selected for the midsummer reception."

Chris stared at her. "That is not how clothing works."

"That is exactly how clothing should work."

Dax said, "Granted."

Chris turned slowly toward him. "Excuse me."

"She’s negotiating."

"She’s eleven."

"She’s winning."

Nayra lifted a third finger. "And third, I want to learn to drive a motorcycle." She saw Chris’s face and continued at once, "Not right now, but you know... at sixteen. Preferably the permission given in writing."

Silence.

Real silence this time.

Dax looked at his daughter with something dangerously close to admiration.

Chris looked at his daughter as though reconsidering every bedtime story, tutoring choice, and moment of positive reinforcement that had led them here.

"No," he said.

"Yes," Dax said.

Chris turned slowly. "Absolutely not."

"She negotiated well."

"She is extorting us for illegal future velocity."

Nayra folded her hands with saintly patience. "It would not be illegal when I’m sixteen."

"That," Chris said, "is not helping."

Dax looked at her. "In writing."

Nayra nodded at once. "In writing."

Chris stared at both of them as if they had become a coordinated act of divine punishment. Then he exhaled, long and visibly unwilling. "Fine. Conditional. At sixteen. Training first. Safety certification. A proper instructor. A helmet that does not offend me. And if you become insufferable about this for the next five years, I revoke my half."

Nayra brightened with such immediate triumph that Chris regretted everything at once.

Dax, deeply satisfied, said, "Accepted."

Nayra looked between them and, having secured all three prices, shifted at once into the terrifying ease of someone now prepared to deliver value.

Then she started to giggle.

Real, helpless laughter, the kind that bent her forward in the chair and left tears bright in her eyes while both parents stared at her with the deep suspicion of people who had just funded their own ambush.

Dax’s brows rose first.

Chris’s patience began leaving his body in visible stages.

Nayra pressed a hand to her mouth, failed to contain herself, and laughed harder. "He has a crush on Sebastian," she managed at last.

The room went still.

Jax, asleep in Dax’s lap, remained the only person present with a functioning sense of peace.

Chris blinked once. "What are you talking about?"

The confusion in his voice was genuine enough to be almost insulting. Sebastian was twenty-one. Sensible, sharp, professionally exhausted, and irritatingly competent. He was not, in Chris’s mind, the obvious next answer to anything involving his fifteen-year-old son, least of all this.

Nayra was still trying to recover enough breath to be useful. "I don’t know," she said, which was not a reassuring opening. "But I discovered it half a year ago."

Dax looked at her very carefully. "Discovered."

"Yes."

"Like a buried temple."

"Like a person with eyes."

Chris leaned back slowly into the sofa. "No."

Nayra looked at him in open disbelief. "Yes."

"No."

"Yes."

Chris pointed at her. "You are eleven."

"And right."

"That is not always the same thing."

"It is tonight."

Dax, infuriatingly, had gone quiet in the way he did when the room had stopped being ridiculous and started becoming interesting. That was never good for anyone but him.

He looked at Nayra. "Explain."

She wiped at the corners of her eyes, still smiling with the last aftershocks of laughter, and then composed herself enough to answer like someone who had apparently spent months carrying superior intelligence in a house full of slower adults.

"I don’t know when it happened or how, but Nero isn’t really interested in anyone," she said. "He’s interested in finding out new things about Sebastian. That’s different."

Chris said nothing.

Dax did not either.

So Nayra continued, now calmer, the laughter fully gone. "He isn’t obvious about it in the stupid way. He doesn’t blush when Sebastian walks in. He doesn’t stare like an idiot. He just..." She frowned slightly, searching for the exact words. "He keeps collecting information. He notices what Sebastian reads, what he drinks at receptions, which people he dislikes, which ones he tolerates, and when he’s actually tired instead of just pretending to be severe. It’s not performance. He wants to know him."

That landed more quietly than the earlier laughter.

Because that sounded less like childish infatuation and more like the beginning of something neither father could dismiss as easily as they might have preferred.

Nayra glanced between them once and, seeing no interruption, went on. "I confronted him after his rut came. Not immediately, because I’m not suicidal. Later. I asked whether the crush had passed."