The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate-Chapter 127: Mommy’s In Chains, Sweetie

The entire room rose, hundreds of people in unison.

It caught her off guard.

"Chin up. Shoulders back." Elara’s hand found her elbow. "If you trip in front of these people I will never recover."

The courtroom was full. Most faces reflected surprise at her presence. She saw it in their widened eyes, their exchanged glances. They hadn’t expected her to attend.

She hadn’t expected to attend either. Not until this morning, when Elara told her who was being tried.

Cass. The seamstress. Single mother. The woman who had sewn every gown Serena had worn since arriving at Drakenfell, who had taken her measurements with warm hands and quiet conversation, who had a daughter she spoke about in the way only single mothers do.

But the woman being tried today had laced both of their clothing with poison.

They needed to be here.

They moved down the center aisle toward the seats reserved for the Crown. The whispers grew louder.

Hale looked up from his position near the front. His expression darkened the moment he saw them.

Dex’s head turned a second later.

She could feel his displeasure through the matebond. He didn’t want her here. She hadn’t seen the High Emperor since the night Maelor came.

But she was still having nightmares and nowhere near back to resembling normal. Dex dreamwalked into one the night prior for the third night in a row.

The last thing she wanted was to give him one more reason to worry.

Serena pushed calm into him through their matebond.

Dex stiffened, eyes flickering with surprise. It was supposed to be the other way around. He was supposed to be doing that to her.

He closed the distance in three steps. The entire kingdom had heard what happened, and now every eye in Drakenfell watched their interactions everywhere they went. No one bothered to hide their staring.

Dex pulled her into a hug, taking her by surprise.

Gavriel leaned forward, whispering to Hale. "Twenty gold says he kisses her before the first defendant sits down."

Hale didn’t look at him when he responded. "That’s not a bet. That’s a prophecy."

"Are you sure you want to be here?" Dex whispered against her ear. He could have mindlinked her. So this was 100% an excuse to hold her. She almost laughed.

"Yes, Dex. I need to be here."

Dex kissed her forehead and grabbed her hand, guiding her to her seat. Elara settled beside her, close enough that their shoulders touched.

The proceedings began.

Lord Varric Mournel went first.

He stood in the defendant’s box, a raised platform surrounded by iron bars, and he did not grovel or weep. He looked at King Tiberon with the flat, dead eyes of a man who had already calculated his odds and accepted the outcome.

The charges were read. Supply audit manipulation. Falsified records to conceal the movement of restricted alchemical substances, including Viper’s Kiss and its component reagents, through Drakenfell’s trade channels. Direct facilitation of Agnes Viremont’s poisoning campaign against the Crown Princess.

Varric said nothing in his defense.

Tiberon stripped his titles, lands, and ordered his holdings redistributed to the families of those who’d served in the battle.

Varric was escorted out in chains. The hall buzzed, then settled.

Then it was Cass’s turn.

The side doors opened, and the guards brought her in.

Serena’s stomach dropped.

Cass looked like she hadn’t slept in days. Her wrists were bound in iron, not silver, but the cuffs were too large for her and they’d rubbed the skin raw.

Serena’s own wrists ached in sympathy. She pressed them together in her lap, trying to push the sensation away, but it stayed, phantom pain for a woman she wasn’t allowed to help.

She was a seamstress. Not a lord. A woman who sewed clothes for a living and raised a daughter alone.

The guards placed her in the defendant’s box. She gripped the iron rail with both hands, and Serena could see them shaking from across the hall.

Tiberon’s voice filled the chamber. "Cassandra Thorne. You stand accused of lacing the Crown Princess’s combat garments with a lethal alchemical poison. The garments were worn during the Battle of Drakenfell. Had the poison not been detected, the Crown Princess would have died. How do you answer?"

Cass’s voice came out thin and fractured.

"I didn’t do it."

The hall broke out in whispers.

"I was given the poison," Cass continued, her grip white on the railing. "Agnes Viremont gave me a vial and told me to work it into the lining of the combat suit. She told me if I didn’t, my daughter would..." She stopped. Swallowed. "She threatened my daughter."

The murmuring grew louder.

"But I didn’t lace the suit," Cass said, and her voice broke on the word. "I flushed it. Every drop. Down the drain in my workshop. I would never... Serena is one of the kindest people I’ve met. She treated me like a person and learned my daughter’s name. She asked about her." Cass’s eyes found Serena in the gallery. They were red. Desperate. "I would never hurt her."

The hall was quiet for exactly two seconds.

Then the whispers started again, and they were not kind.

Serena could feel the room’s verdict forming like weather. The sideways glances. The folded arms. The slight shakes of heads among the noble families. A seamstress, accused by a confessed criminal, with no evidence beyond her own word.

No one believed her.

Tiberon’s face was stone. "You claim you disposed of the poison. Do you have witnesses?"

"No, Your Majesty. I was alone in my workshop."

"Do you have any evidence to support your claim?"

"No, Your Majesty."

"Then you are asking this court to accept the word of an accused poisoner against the physical evidence of a poisoned garment."

"I am asking this court to believe me because it is the truth."

The silence that followed was brutal.

Tiberon let it stretch.

Dex sat rigid, jaw locked. He kept his gaze fixed on his father’s profile, his expression already accepting the outcome.

Hale stared straight ahead. Elara’s hand found Serena’s knee under the table and squeezed.

The entire room had already decided.

Serena looked at the noble families with their folded arms and their certain expressions. They only saw a defendant. Not a hardworking mother who’d been cornered.

"My daughter is eight. Her name is Lira. She doesn’t know I’m here. She thinks I’m working," Cass said, very quietly.

That did it. Serena’s hand flew to her mouth, and she fought tears, blinking them back. But they fell anyway, fast and hot, rolling down her cheeks before she could stop them. She looked at Tiberon through the blur, searching for something. Anything. Some crack in that granite expression that suggested he saw what she saw.

There was nothing.

The room was cold. The proceedings were cold. The iron bars around that box were cold. And a woman whose only crime was being too afraid to say no, and brave enough to say no anyway, was going to lose everything because no one in this room cared enough to look closer.

Every second of Tiberon’s silence added to the heavy weight of wrongness sitting in her chest.

Beside her, Dex felt it come through their matebond like a knife. Serena’s grief. Her fury. Her helplessness. The sensation of watching something unjust happen in a room full of people who could stop it and choosing not to.

His heart cracked.

He looked at her. Saw the tears. Saw her hand pressed to her mouth, her shoulders pulled in tight, trying to make herself small enough that no one would notice she was falling apart.

Dex took her hand. Lifted it to his lips. Kissed it. Not quickly. Not for show. He pressed his mouth to her knuckles and held it there, his eyes closing, his thumb running over the back of her fingers.

Every person in the hall noticed. The whispers shifted. Some saw devotion, a relationship repairing against all odds. While others wondered if it was a repeat of Agnes. The older nobles only saw Serena, the new Crown Princess crying for the defendant of a treason trial.

The only thing the room agreed on was that they couldn’t look away.

Tiberon noticed.

His gaze moved from Cass to his son, then to Serena, then back to his son. Something passed behind his eyes, too fast to name.

He lifted his hand. "Recess. One hour."