Chapter 449

“Actually—”

The word hung there for half a second before she aborted the entire mission, turning her face toward the window.

“Never mind.”

The silence that followed was three seconds long. She stared at her window with a blank expression on her face.

“You can ask me,” Dex said, breaking the silence. “What is it?”

Bellatrix moved her gaze back to her son.

“Will you talk to Serena for me?”

Dex blinked.

“Talk to Serena,” he repeated. “About what?”

“I was trying to surprise her.” Bellatrix’s voice was quieter now, stripped of the theatrical projection she usually operated at, running at a register Dex had heard maybe twice in his life. “There is champagne, flowers, balloons, and Onyx. My tailor was there. I was going to surprise her with a fitting for a wedding gown.”

Dex ignored the Onyx detail. The fact that his mother had taken Onyx from the Draken Forces, dressed him in a tuxedo, and placed him in her parlor next to champagne and balloons like a goddamn centerpiece, was a conversation that was going to happen. It was a tomorrow problem because today’s problems had already exceeded capacity.

“She never had a wedding, Dexmon. My son’s mate never had a wedding. That is an absolute failure on my part as a mother. I want to make that right.”

Her voice cracked.

Dex sat with it. The crack was doing things to his chest. His mother did not crack. His mother did not show vulnerability. She operated behind walls that had outlasted most of her enemies. If those walls were failing now, the thing they had been containing was genuine, because even at her most calculating, Bellatrix would die before she showed weakness. The walls were the one constant thing about her.

He thought about Serena. About the ancestors telling him that every woman wants a wedding. About the fact that his mate had been crowned and it never came up after that. He wanted to do a ceremony, but it kept getting shoved aside by crises and artifacts and training and the general state of a continent that refused to stop being on fire.

“I think she would love that,” he said after a moment.

Bellatrix shook her head. “I don’t think she would because I am involved.” She let out a breath. “She was saying harsh things to me in the grand hall, Dexmon. Before I collapsed. She told me to fuck off. Used curse words. Multiple times. I have never heard that language from her. The servants were staring and I was frankly as shocked as they were.”

Dex processed this. Serena. His Serena. The woman who was kind to everyone had told his mother to fuck off. In public. With witnesses. Using curse words. Multiple ones.

She was quiet for a moment.

“She compared me to her mother. Said I was a bad Luna. Said I make her sick. Said I disgust her. I probably deserved all of those things.” Her voice trailed off.

Dex’s brow furrowed. That did not sound like Serena at all. Serena cussing out his mother in a public corridor was a sentence that required more context than it was receiving, because Serena did not cuss at people outside of one time with Agnes Viremont, which was well deserved.

“What did you say to her before that?” he asked. “Serena does not just go off on people unprovoked. That has never been who she is.”

“I asked her if she would visit me in my parlor for tea. I told her it was a genuine invitation and that I wanted to extend an olive branch. I was kind.”

Dex looked at her for a long second. His instincts were feeding the whole moment through a specialized Bellatrix filter, and the filter was throwing errors. Those errors were sitting in his chest next to the crack in her voice and right now, the crack was outvoting the data.

“This is not you trying to poison her or pull something?”

“No.”

“Because if I find out—”

“Dexmon,” she cut him off. “Check my parlor. It’s still decorated. It was supposed to be fun. It was supposed to be the kind of afternoon that mothers and daughters-in-law have in normal families, and I am aware that we are far from a normal family, and the awareness is the entire reason I was trying.”

He was absolutely going to check the parlor. He was going to check every cup, every bottle, every goddamn napkin ring. He was going to have Hyran sweep for magical residue and Alaric test every liquid and he was going to do all of it before Serena got within a hundred feet of that room, because trust was a currency his mother had spent years depleting and the account was still in the fucking red.

Bellatrix’s hand flew to her chest and she winced. The wince was brief, passing, accompanied by a flicker of something on her face that was there and gone before Dex could classify it. She was looking at the window when it happened.

“I hope she can give me a second chance,” she said. Her voice was small. Smaller than Dex had ever heard it. “I know I don’t deserve it, but I still would like to try.”

She looked away from the window back at her son. The look was the look of a mother asking her son for something, and the asking was the hard part, because Bellatrix Drakenfell did not ever need to ask for things.

“I’ll talk to her, Mother.” Dex stood. “Get some rest.”

He walked to the door. Stopped at the threshold. Looked back.

His mother was staring at the window again. The wet rag had fallen off her forehead entirely and was sitting on the pillow beside her head. She had not replaced it. The tea was cooling on the nightstand. The room was quiet, dim, carrying the energy of a woman who was alone and had been for a long time.

Dexmon’s chest was doing things at the sight he didn’t have a framework for.

He left. Closed the door behind him.

He would talk to Serena right away.

The corridor was empty. The grand hall was one floor down, carrying the residual energy of a confrontation that had happened an hour ago and whose consequences were already multiplying.

Dex was passing through it when he froze, eyeing the mural.

“What the fuck is that?”