DRAKENFELL — DRAKEN FORCES TRAINING FIELD

“Serena. A word.”

Serena looked up. Her face fell when she saw Dexmon’s expression.

“Of course,” she said softly, and stood.

✦✦✦

DRAKENFELL — DEXMON’S STUDY

Dex closed the door behind them. He leaned against his desk, arms crossed.

“Sit,” he ordered.

Serena sat without a word. This wasn’t like Dexmon at all.

“My mother is running a temperature. She is having chest pains. Alaric is running blood work.”

Her stomach dropped. She should have found Dexmon after that and told him, but she got distracted and figured she’d tell him tonight.

“She told me she was trying to invite you to her parlor,” he continued, “and that you were saying cruel things to her. Cussing at her. Tell me that’s exaggerated.”

Serena opened her mouth.

Closed it.

The closing was the closing of a woman who had been ready to defend herself but the accusation was correct.

“It’s an accurate account.” Her voice was steady. “I told her hard no. I walked away. She followed me.”

“Serena.”

“But, I think cruel is a bit of an exaggeration,” she added quickly. “I listed the things she has done to me after she followed me. If that is what she is referring to as cruel—”

“Did you tell her she makes you sick and call her a bad luna?”

“Yes,” Serena replied with no hesitation.

Dex’s face was pained. The pain was real, visible, the specific expression of a man caught between two women he loved and whose love for both was producing a conflict his face could not resolve.

“As much as I would have loved to see you cuss my mother out,” he said, and the sentence carried the ghost of a grin that died before it reached his mouth, “she never extends olive branches, Serena. Ever. This is a first.”

Serena’s resolve thickened at that statement.

“I don’t care if she meant it.” Her voice was flat. “What she did to me was never okay. She called me a slut at my pack initiation. She threw wine at me at my first dinner. She told Gavriel I was a hole he was sharing with you in front of me. She spread rumors that I was a whore and illiterate and did everything in her power to make me feel unwelcome. She laughed while Agnes cut my dress and groped me. What kind of—”

Dexmon held up his hand. Serena stopped talking. The words had tumbled out and she had more that she could add to that.

“Groped you?”

Blood rushed to Serena’s face. She had kept that detail to herself because she didn’t want everyone to know. It had slipped from her mouth earlier with Bellatrix and again just now and she only had herself to blame. But it was the truth, and the truth was out now.

“Yes,” Serena replied. Her eyes said please don’t make me elaborate.

“Why didn’t you tell me that?” Dexmon’s composure had completely cracked.

The reason why she hadn’t was his exact reaction right now.

“Don’t worry about that, Dex. It was months ago,” she said softly. She took a deep breath, forcing her voice steady. “I know I was an omega for a third of those offenses and she was queen. But that shouldn’t matter. Luna queen or not, that doesn’t make it okay.”

She swallowed the lump in the back of her throat. “I assumed a long time ago that she saw herself in Agnes. She was a chosen mate to Tiberon. You and I were fated. That much was obvious, and probably blinded her a bit. But it doesn’t excuse her behavior. Neither she nor Agnes faced any real consequences, and I refuse to continue playing in a broken system.”

Dex pulled her into a hug.

The pull was immediate, closing the four feet between them in a single motion, his arms wrapping around her with the specific grip of a man whose mate was hurting and whose solution was always physical and whose physical was always right. Her face hit his chest. His chin found the top of her head. The matebond between them was carrying her turmoil at full volume, guilt, resolve, fury, and grief braided together into a signal that Dex was receiving and absorbing and holding.

“I can feel this is costing you something through our matebond, baby.” His voice was low, vibrating through his chest into her cheek. “I’m not saying you have to do anything. You’re exactly right. Would you feel better if you heard her out?”

Her eyes burned. “Probably not.”

Her voice cracked on the second word. The crack was the crack of a woman who knew the answer was probably yes and was saying no because the yes required forgiveness and the forgiveness required trust and the trust had been shattered so many times that rebuilding it felt like assembling a house out of the pieces of a house that the builder kept burning down.

Dex kissed her forehead. Held the kiss. Let the contact do the work the words could not. “I agree she did things that are unforgivable.”

She could feel his pain through their matebond. The pain was his, separate from hers, running alongside hers on a parallel track. This was hurting him. He was never going to say that out loud. He was never going to admit that watching Serena and Bellatrix go to war was the thing that hurt him most, because admitting it meant choosing a side and choosing a side meant losing the other and losing either one was a cost Dexmon Drakenfell could not afford and would not pay.

She understood it.

This was his mother. Bellatrix was a nightmare and a disaster and a woman who had done things that Serena would carry scars from for the rest of her life. She was also the woman who raised Dex. The woman who held him as a child and taught him to navigate a court and loved him in the complicated, imperfect, deeply fucked up way that Bellatrix loved anything.

The matebond was showing Serena the part of Dex that was terrified his mother was genuinely sick. The part that was standing in front of Serena right now asking her to bend, because the bending was the only thing that would stop the tearing, and the tearing was killing him.

There was no way around it. Bellatrix was his mother and there was no world where that stopped being true.

“Actually,” she said after a moment. The word was quiet. Costing her something she could feel leaving her chest. “I’ll hear her out, Dex.”

His arms tightened. The tightening was gratitude. The gratitude was silent.

She pressed her face into his chest and let him hold her and did not say the thing she was thinking, which was that hearing Bellatrix out was going to require every ounce of composure she had.