Chapter 281 The Only Useful Response – Aleksandr’s POV

Chapter 281 The Only Useful Response – Aleksandr’s POV
The whiskey tasted like nothing. Three fingers in a crystal glass designed for kings who made better decisions, the burn reaching my stomach without delivering warmth. I had stopped counting pours around two in the morning. The bottle was half empty, and the hollow behind my sternum remained untouched.
Two days. Forty-eight hours of sleeping alone in a bed built for two, waking to the wrong silence and reaching through darkness for cool sheets instead of Amelia. I had not shaved. The stubble had passed deliberate scruff and entered neglect, another small task abandoned while guilt occupied the available space.
Skoll had finally gone still. Around dawn, he settled onto his haunches in our shared mind, ears forward while confusion resolved into reluctant understanding.
We were wrong, he said. The admission arrived without performance, each word carrying a wolf’s blunt respect for truth. Mate angry because we hid. Not because we protected. Different things. I understand now. Not fully. But enough.
“Took you long enough.” I swallowed more whiskey and set the glass down too hard. Maps covered the desk: security reports, patrol rotations and coloured pins charting a kingdom choosing sides over the lies of two men I should have executed when I had the chance. I had absorbed none of it. The office felt borrowed, and the work belonged to someone more functional.
Lunch arrived at one seventeen. Dominic had apparently instructed the kitchen to log every delivery, and the servant placed the tray at the edge of my desk with the care normally reserved for unstable chemicals. Roast chicken. Vegetables. Bread still warm from the oven. The smell reminded me that I had not eaten since yesterday morning and that my body objected, even if I did not.
I ignored it. The chicken cooled. The bread hardened. Watching food become inedible through neglect, I recognised the punishment for what it was: pathetic, predictable and exactly the sort of thing Amelia would call bullshit.
Dominic knocked at two forty-three. Three sharp raps, then the door opened to reveal my beta taking in the whiskey bottle, untouched lunch and general wreckage of a king who had spent two days converting guilt into inertia.
“My King.” He entered and closed the door. His attention moved from the maps to the bottle, then to me. Disapproval flickered and disappeared beneath duty.
“How is she?” The question came first, protocol be damned. Protocol had stopped mattering when my wife walked out with six guards and no certainty that I would follow.
“Physically, she’s fine.” Dominic’s answer carried facts he had verified himself. “Sylvia saw her this morning. Fourteen-week scan. Kaela’s stable. The pups...” He paused and withdrew a folded sheet from his inner pocket. “The pups are perfect, my King.”
He placed it between the whiskey and untouched lunch. I unfolded the heavy medical paper, and the room narrowed to greyscale and two heartbeats I had not been there to hear.
Ultrasound. Two images side by side. Twin A and Twin B, Sylvia’s neat handwriting identifying each frame. Fourteen weeks. Normal development. Normal cardiac activity. The shapes were abstract but legible: head, spine, curled limbs, two pups fitting themselves into the limited space they shared.
They were perfect in the simple, undeniable way that reduced a century of hard choices to background noise. Healthy, growing and wholly unaware their father had missed the appointment because he had failed their mother.
“She went without me.” The statement carried no accusation except the one aimed inward.
“Yes.” Dominic didn’t elaborate. Didn’t need to. The single syllable carried the weight of a beta who had spent two days watching his king and queen occupy different towers and had developed opinions about which party bore more responsibility for the arrangement.
I studied the images. Twin A: 160 beats per minute. Twin B: 164. Both measurements normal. Both development trajectories exactly on track. My little princes. They grew inside the woman I loved while I sat in an obsidian office drinking whiskey I could not taste and staring at maps I could not read.
Skoll leaned towards the images through our bond. A low whimper carried the grief of a creature built for distance measured in miles, not estrangement.
I want to see, he said. Our mate. I want to go. Now.
I stood. The chair scraped against obsidian. My elbow caught the whiskey glass, but Dominic saved it before it fell, treating royal clumsiness as another foreseeable hazard.
“I need to apologise to my wife.” The decision had taken forty-eight hours and two ultrasound images to become action. At last, it felt like the first correct thing I had done.
Dominic stepped aside, clearing the door without comment. His efficiency required no embellishment.
“Yes, my King.”
I left the whiskey, maps, reports and congealing lunch behind. The ultrasound images went into my inner pocket, folded carefully. Then I headed for the eastern tower with Skoll’s urgency matching my own.
She had gone without me. She had sat alone in a medical room, cold gel on her abdomen, and watched our future appear on a screen while I drank in an office made empty by my own choices.
The only useful response was to go to her and listen.