Caught by the Mad Alpha King-Chapter 248: Vague history (Win - Win)

Chris’s office was quiet in the way he preferred.

The door was closed, the corridor muted, the only sound the soft hum of the palace systems and the faint ticking of the clock embedded into the far wall. His laptop sat open on the desk, the screen filled with text dense enough to demand attention rather than skim-reading. Dax was occupied elsewhere with military briefings and layered meetings, the kind that required command presence rather than diplomatic finesse. Not Chris’s role. Not yet.

He would sit in on those eventually. But not without preparation or without context.

So he read.

Dax of Saha. Fourth prince.

Born not of the queen, but of a consort, one who had never sought influence, never competed for favor. After the former king’s death, she had left Saha quietly, returned to her homeland, and remarried within the Alamina Empire. She was still alive and actively distant.

Chris paused there longer than necessary. He never heard Dax talking about her.

The former king’s death had been ruled natural. The footnotes disagreed. Inconclusive records. Missing witnesses. A succession that moved too quickly for comfort.

What followed was worse.

The three elder princes inherited a kingdom that had thrived under the previous king and his predecessor, and they stripped it bare with remarkable efficiency. Trade monopolies carved up. Treasury drained. Military contracts were bloated and useless. Famine in the outer regions. Riots contained by force rather than policy.

By the time Dax moved, Saha was already fractured.

He had not negotiated. He had killed them the moment he decided to be involved in politics.

Chris scrolled, jaw tight, reading the dry, factual language that tried, and failed, to sanitize it. Executions during open rebellion. Loyalists were purged, but not entirely. A throne taken by force, then held without apology.

And then... Fifteen years of reconstruction. Reinstated trade routes. Audited finances. Reduced standing military costs without weakening borders. Public works. Debt renegotiation. A kingdom dragged back from collapse by someone who had learned, very young, that mercy without control was just another way to lose everything.

Chris leaned back, exhaling slowly.

Dax had not been raised to rule. He had survived into it.

The screen dimmed slightly as the system timed out. Chris tapped the keyboard to wake it again, eyes returning to the final line of the summary.

Current status: Stable. Economically resilient. Politically volatile.

Chris closed the official file.

"Damn it," he murmured, opening a browser instead. "You have every reason to be smug."

Chris shifted away from the sanctioned record and into the noise.

Forums. Archived discussions. Opinion pieces that had never been meant to last, preserved only because someone, somewhere, had refused to let the memory fade. The tone immediately changed, becoming less cautious, less polished, and laced with rage, exhaustion, and the intimacy that official history never permitted.

He scrolled slowly.

Again and again, the same correction appeared in different words.

He wasn’t king then.

Chris paused, scrolling back up, rereading.

The post was old, dated to the first year after the purges.

People keep calling him King, but he isn’t. He won’t take the crown.

The responses were fragmented and contradictory, but they reached strangely consistent conclusions.

Because he doesn’t trust Parliament.

Because the throne is cursed.

Because he knows they’ll try to kill him the moment he does.

Thread after thread confirmed it. For five years, Dax had ruled without the title. Emergency authority. Provisional councils. Crisis charters were renewed again and again because no one else could hold the structure together long enough for anything permanent to form. Ministries were rebuilt, borders stabilized, and the treasury dragged into transparency, all without the legitimacy of a crown to shield him.

Then came the financial collapse.

Chris felt his jaw tighten as he read about it, the wording shifting from opinion to documentation. The Central Bank of Saha had stepped in with reconstruction loans, debt restructuring, international backing that could have saved the country from bleeding out entirely. But the final agreements required a single signature. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝒆𝒘𝙚𝓫𝙣𝙤𝒗𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

A king’s signature and seal.

An archaic clause, left behind by Dax’s father, buried in the legal foundations of the Bank. A relic of a man who had known his sons too well and had tried, in the only way he could, to keep what little remained of the kingdom out of their hands. The last resources of Saha could only be bound by a crowned monarch.

Chris leaned back slowly, the weight of it settling in his chest.

Dax had taken the crown at twenty-five, not because he wanted legitimacy, but because the country could not survive without it.

The tone of the forums shifted after that point from speculation to reluctant acceptance.

He waited until the ministries functioned.

Until the borders held.

Until the country could survive him becoming king.

One post lingered on his screen longer than the others.

Five years without a crown. Ten years with it.

Chris stared at the words, letting the numbers align properly in his head.

Ten years as King.

Not fifteen. Not a lifetime of inherited authority. A decade layered on top of five years of reconstruction so brutal and thankless that no one even argued about the blood anymore, only whether the result had been worth it.

Another thread caught his attention, quieter than the rest.

He could have ruled us by fear alone, someone had written. That’s what terrifies the old families. He didn’t.

Chris closed the browser slowly.

"What are you doing?" Dax’s voice cut into the quiet of the office.

Chris looked up.

Dax stood in the doorway like he belonged everywhere at once, dressed down, unguarded, a simple white t-shirt clinging faintly to his shoulders, dark sport pants sitting low on his hips. A towel was looped around his neck, one hand dragging it through his shoulder-length blonde hair with distracted movements, water still darkening the fabric at his collar.

Chris blinked once, then leaned back in his chair.

"Reading," he said. "The version of your history that doesn’t come with seals and footnotes."

Dax paused mid-motion. His eyes flicked to the laptop, then back to Chris. "You could have asked me."

"Yes, but then I had to tolerate your smugness." Chris raised his hands in mock surrender. "Earned, don’t get me wrong, but probably you would have asked for payment."

"I would’ve asked for a kiss." Dax said closing the space between them.