The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 450

Chapter 450: The System Is Broken & She’s Fucking Done

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.

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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.

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.