Taming the Wild Beast of Alamina

Chapter 173: Chapter 173: A son and father talk [Win-Win]

Lucas did not move at first.

Then, very slowly, he leaned back into the chair and studied Sebastian with greater care than before.

”I see,” Lucas said.

Sebastian nearly laughed. ”Do you?”

”No,” Lucas said. ”But I suspect I’m about to.”

That was, Sebastian thought grimly, fair.

He rested both forearms on the desk and looked at his clasped hands instead of at Lucas. ”He confessed to me.”

Lucas was silent.

Then, ”And?”

There were only two ways to answer that question. One would make Sebastian sound evasive. The other would make him sound like exactly what he had been.

He chose accuracy.

”And I handled it badly.”

Lucas’s expression did not change much, but something in it cooled. ”Badly how?”

Sebastian let out a low breath. ”I told myself I was drawing a clean line before it became complicated.”

Lucas tilted his head slightly. ”That sounds like the sort of sentence people say right before they reveal they were idiots.”

Sebastian gave him a tired look. ”Your support is overwhelming.”

”I was never hired for comfort. Continue.”

Sebastian looked back down. ”I told him he was young.” The words already sounded worse here, in this room, stripped of the urgency and fear that had dressed them as reason two weeks ago. ”That it was proximity, timing, and intensity. Something he would outgrow.”

Lucas went very still.

Sebastian saw it and disliked it instantly.

”That bad?” he asked quietly.

Lucas’s voice, when it came, was almost too calm. ”Did you mean it?”

Sebastian opened his mouth.

Closed it again.

Lucas watched that with brutal clarity and answered for him. ”No. You didn’t.”

Sebastian sighed and tried to put his spiraling thoughts in order. ”Yes and no. Yes, I think it’s because we’ve been close since he was a kid that he may be infatuated with me...” He stopped, already hearing how weak that sounded beside everything else. ”But I know Nero. And the way he reacted after hearing that... and more...” He put a hand over his mouth, then dragged it down slowly. ”I told him nobody wants to change their secondary gender for him.”

Lucas went completely still.

Not dramatically. That would have been easier to withstand. No sharp inhale, no visible recoil, and no immediate cut of words. Just stillness, deep and absolute, like the entire room had paused to let the sentence settle into its full ugliness.

Sebastian saw the exact moment Lucas understood it in full.

Saw the exact moment Lucas stopped being worried and started to be angry on Nero’s behalf.

”Oh,” Lucas said at last.

It was a very soft word.

It landed like judgment.

Sebastian looked away first. ”Yes.”

Lucas remained silent for another breath, then another, as though selecting from a long and richly deserved list of things he could say and rejecting each one only because none of them were yet sufficient.

When he finally spoke, his voice was calm enough to make Sebastian more tired on instinct.

”That,” Lucas said, ”is impressively bad.”

Sebastian let out a humorless breath. ”Thank you.”

”No,” Lucas said. ”I don’t think you understand. I was already prepared to hear that you’d been a fool. I was not prepared to hear that you had decided to be cruel with precision.”

Sebastian’s jaw tightened. ”I wasn’t trying to be cruel...” Then he stopped, because there was no point trying to soften it here, not with Lucas looking at him like that, not with the room already too quiet for dishonesty. ”I lied. I did want to be cruel. I did want him hurt and to never talk with me again.”

Lucas did not interrupt.

That, somehow, made the admission feel even cleaner.

Sebastian took a deep breath and looked past him, toward nothing in particular. ”If I refused him on grounds of age, or only said no...” He dragged the words up from somewhere deeper than pride wanted to reach. ”Nero wouldn’t have stopped. He would have tried again later. He would have tried to find out why I refused him and then made it his personal project to change my mind. He would have pretended to accept it, but Nero is so much like his father...”

He trailed off there.

Lucas remained still for a moment, studying him with that same grave and infuriating attention that never let him get away with elegant evasions for long.

”And that frightened you,” Lucas said.

Sebastian gave a short, tired laugh. ”Yes. Did you see how Dax is with Chris?”

Lucas let out a humorless laugh of his own and leaned back slightly in the chair. ”You don’t know how bad Dax was at the beginning of their relationship. If Chris wasn’t the strong man he is, believe me, the relationship would look very different.”

That pulled Sebastian’s attention back to him fully.

Lucas’s expression had gone distant in that particular way it did when memory became briefly heavier than wit.

Sebastian looked at him for a moment. ”That bad?”

Lucas’s mouth flattened. ”Worse in some ways, because Dax had never learned restraint where Chris was concerned and did not yet understand that wanting someone violently and loving them properly are not the same discipline.” He paused, then added with dry precision, ”He understands now. At the beginning, I would not have trusted him with a glass of water and an emotional provocation.”

Despite everything, Sebastian barked out a low laugh.

Lucas did not smile. ”I’m serious.”

”I know.”

And he did. That was part of what made the comparison so unsettling. Not because Nero was Dax. He was not. But because he was enough like him in the places that mattered: fixation, patience, pride, and the terrifying capacity to decide that something belonged in his life and then simply begin reorganizing reality around that conclusion.

Only Nero, Sebastian thought, was subtler.

Which could be worse.

”Plus,” Sebastian said, dragging a hand over his mouth before letting it fall again, ”there is the Fitzgeralt issue. A duchy I’m heir to, from Palatine, in a marriage with the future king of Saha?” He laughed once without humor. ”Uncle Sirius would be in a position to either oppose it or solve the problem by proposing another heir.”

Lucas’s brows rose slightly.

”That,” he said, ”is a very elegant way of saying you think your personal life could trigger a succession adjustment.”

Sebastian looked at him flatly. ”I dislike how amusing you find this.”

”I don’t find it amusing. I find it accurate.” Lucas crossed one leg over the other again. ”Also, you are not wrong.”

No, he was not.

That was part of the structure too, the one no one got to ignore merely because the emotional center of it had become inconveniently personal.

Sebastian was not some decorative younger son with romantic flexibility and a charming title on the side. He was embedded in Palatine’s aristocratic framework in a way that had actual legal and political consequences. Fitzgeralt was not a dinner-table surname. It was land, authority, obligations, inheritance lines, and the kind of strategic value people politely pretended not to calculate until marriage made them do so openly.

And Nero was not merely Nero.

He was the future king of Saha.

Together, they were not a private problem.

They were a diplomatic one wearing a desirable face.

”If I became tied to Nero seriously,” Sebastian said, quieter now, ”then every conversation stops being about us and becomes about what Palatine gains, what Saha gains, whether Fitzgeralt remains where it is, whether I remain heir, whether I am expected to move, whether that weakens anything here, whether it strengthens too much there...”

”Whether Sirius can afford to look relaxed about it,” Lucas said.

”Yes.”

Lucas nodded once. ”Also, whether certain people would start treating you like an extension of Saha before anything had even formally changed.”

Sebastian let out a low breath. ”And the fact that Nero is an enigma is a secret.”