Chapter 256: Nobody Touches What’s Mine & Walks
Three whiskeys was Tiberon’s version of a warning shot.
Dex sat in his father’s study, the chair still warm from whoever had vacated it before him. Hyran occupied the leather seat by the hearth, legs crossed, a glass balanced on his knee with the practiced indifference of a man who had survived enough of these briefings to know that the whiskey was the kindest part.
Tiberon poured the third glass and set it in front of Dex without ceremony.
"You’ve been unconscious for seven days," he began, his voice carrying the warmth of a glacier calving into the sea. "During that time, decisions were made in your absence."
Dex’s jaw tightened. He drank.
"Gavriel has been checking on Serena throughout the week. On my order."
The glass stopped halfway to the table. Dex’s fingers locked around it, and for one full second, the study was so quiet he could hear the fire breathing in the hearth.
Gavriel. Checking on Serena. For seven days.
On his father’s order.
Tiberon continued, oblivious to the specific, catastrophic chain reaction those words had initiated inside his son’s skull. "She was distraught over what happened to you and refused to leave your side. That boy has always been able to lighten things when it comes to her."
The whiskey glass in Dex’s hand exploded.
Amber liquid and crystal shards detonated outward from Dex’s fist in a burst so sudden that a shard pinged off the far wall.
Tiberon looked at his son’s hand. Then at the ruined glass. Then at the whiskey pooling on his desk, two inches from a document he had spent the better part of three days drafting.
He opened a drawer. Produced a second glass. Poured. Slid it across the desk without comment.
Typical.
Dex took it. Blood welled from two cuts on his palm. He ignored them.
Aegon: Lightening things. A gift. That’s what we’re calling it now.
Dexmon: I’ll handle it.
"Moving forward, if I am not available, Hale or Elara are the go to people for Serena. If they aren’t around, then Hyran. Gavriel at the bottom," Dexmon said flatly. "He has enough on his plate."
He added the last bit there because he didn’t want to answer questions.
Aegon: Stop protecting him.
Hyran swirled his drink. "For the record, your mate is stubborn. Alaric and I both tried to reason with her. I need her focused on those scrolls but she refused until you woke up. Both of your Betas sat with her everyday and didn’t bother trying to convince her of anything." He paused, debating if he should say what he was thinking. Dexmon caught the look, so Hyran continued with the thought.
"Sterling has been a bit off lately. I think he was upset at her for knocking you out and just didn’t want to be the jackass to say that. They didn’t speak at all the times I went to check on her and he was there. He would pop in and leave."
"Guinevere Ashford is Gavriel Sterling’s fated mate," Tiberon continued.
The second glass survived, but only because Dex set it down before the sentence finished landing. His knuckles went white on the arm of the chair instead.
"You’re joking."
Guinevere. The woman who had crawled into his bed wearing Serena’s mother’s necklace. The woman who had chased him nude through a corridor making cat noises. The woman who had clawed Serena’s neck open over her mark and thrown her mother’s only heirloom into a fire.
That woman was his Gamma’s fated mate. The universe had a sense of humor, and Dex was going to find it and break its jaw.
"I’m not." Tiberon replied. "Serena also declined to press charges."
The study went cold.
Dex’s eyes lifted to his father’s with a precision that had nothing casual in it. "She did what?"
"The decision was offered to her and she declined."
"On what grounds?" Dex asked, already knowing the answer.
"Sterling, obviously."
Dex leaned back in his chair. The fire in the hearth popped once, filling a silence that was doing more work than any words could.
The woman who had drawn her blood was now permanently tied to Gavriel Sterling, and Serena Drakenfell would rather swallow her own fury than cause pain to someone she cared about. Again, she was protecting everyone in the room except the one person who deserved protection most, which was herself.
It was the most Serena decision she had ever made. Absorb the wound. Protect the people she loved from the fallout. But the governance was his. Not hers.
Aegon: Her forgiveness is not ours to honor.
Dex: No. It’s not.
"Your mother and I both disagreed," Tiberon added, reading his face. "But it happened to your mate, and I left the decision to her."
"And my mate chose wrong." Dex’s voice was quiet. "Her forgiveness does not cancel my authority. It never has. I love her for it, but this isn’t up to her. She falls under me, as Crown Prince."
"That it does," Tiberon confirmed.
"We are pressing charges. End of story. That woman assaulted me and drew blood on Serena in front of witnesses."
Dexmon drained the second whiskey before continuing. "Letting Agnes walk two months ago has set a precedent that I am stopping right now. Being a woman doesn’t change the crime. I don’t care whose mate or cousin she is."
Tiberon studied him.
The look lasted three full seconds. His father’s face flickered between understanding and something else Dex could identify but only barely, buried beneath the granite and the discipline and the thirty years of kingship that had turned Tiberon Drakenfell’s emotions into a language only his family could read.
It looked like relief.
"Understood." Tiberon set his glass down. "Do you want to tell your Gamma that you are sentencing his fated mate to a trial? Because once you do, there is no reversing it. She will never be permitted to serve as his mate in any capacity of rank. And the death penalty will be enforced."
Dex exhaled through his teeth. "My choices are to sentence an insane woman to die for drawing blood on my wife, or initiate the most insane Gamma Luna in Skardos history. I want a third option."
Hyran’s mouth twitched. The twitch of a man who found the phrasing accurate and the situation entertaining and saw no reason to hide either.
"There is no third option," Tiberon said.
Silence.
The fire cracked. Somewhere in the castle, a clock marked the hour with a chime that Dex did not hear, because every frequency in his brain was occupied by the arithmetic of what his father had just laid on the table.
He had already decided the answer was yes. He’d decided it the moment his father said Serena declined. He’d decided it the moment he felt her grief through the matebond seven days ago, standing in a corridor with his trousers on backwards while a woman wearing her dead mother’s necklace tried to bite his neck.
The answer had been yes since before the question existed.
This wasn’t her battle. It was his. It became his the moment Guinevere Ashford’s claws broke skin on the woman he’d sworn before gods and wolves to protect. Serena could choose her wars. Dex chose who paid for the ones waged against her.
The weight of it was still there. Gavriel Sterling. His Gamma. His best friend, or whatever was left of that word after a kiss in a temple and a confession that had rewritten the architecture of everything between them. Gav, who loved a woman he could never have and was about to lose the one fate had given him instead.
There was no version of this where he honored Serena’s wishes. None.
"Dexmon?" Hyran’s voice cut through the silence. The mage had been quiet up until now, content to observe from behind his steepled fingers with the patience of a man watching a chess match where he already knew the final position. "What are you thinking about?"
Then Dex caught it out of his peripheral vision.
A vase. On the shelf to his left. Floating.
It hovered three inches above the wood, rotating slowly, as if gravity had politely excused itself from the conversation and the vase had accepted the invitation.
He turned his head.
The vase dropped. Hit the shelf with a ceramic crack that split the base and sent a hairline fracture racing up one side.
"Well that’s odd."
When he turned back to Hyran and his father, more objects were floating.
A quill. A leather folio. A brass inkwell that had been on Tiberon’s desk since before Dex was born. Two books from the side table. The iron fire poker, which was rotating slowly near the hearth with the lazy menace of a weapon that had decided to audition for a new role.
And Tiberon’s favorite whiskey glasses. His father’s single most valued possession in this study that had never touched whiskey a day in their existence. Display only. Dex had been told at age six not to touch them.
They floated in a loose formation above the table, catching firelight, rotating gently, as if they were being examined by an invisible hand that was curious about their craftsmanship.
Tiberon’s eyes tracked them. His expression did precisely nothing.
Without looking at the glasses, he reached up with one hand and pressed all four back down to the table with the flat of his palm. Held them there. Returned his attention to his son.
The fire poker was still floating.
Dexmon: Is this me?
Aegon: I was going to ask you the same question. Which is concerning for both of us.
Hyran looked like a man who had just woken up on Solstice morning and found every gift he had ever wanted arranged beneath the tree, wrapped in gold, with his name on each one. His palms came together. Rubbed. Slowly. The friction of a mind that was already making plans so large they needed their own wing of the castle.
His eyes were bright.
Dex gave him a look.
Flat. Unimpressed. The exact caliber of expression Hyran himself deployed when lesser minds presented obvious conclusions as revelations.
It was a look that said: I see the plans forming behind your eyes and am going to shut that down in its tracks.
Hyran was undeterred. If anything, the look fueled him.
"Magnificent," he repeated, quieter, and the word came out like a promise.
The fire poker completed one final, lazy rotation, and dropped to the stone floor with a clang that echoed through the study like a punctuation mark on a conversation that was very far from over.
