The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 321

Chapter 321: The Line Between Killing And Fucking

BELLATRIX’S PARLOR - THREE HOURS BEFORE EXECUTION

Tiberon closed the door behind him.

"Gavriel Sterling is dying."

Bellatrix turned a page. "Yes. I heard."

"He is dying from dark magic that was seeded into his body before the matebond was formed. His healers are unable to identify the origin. His organs are failing. His eyes have gone dark. He has two days."

Another page. "That does sound dire."

Tiberon studied her. The study was thorough, the kind of assessment he usually reserved for foreign diplomats and enemy commanders, aimed now at the woman he had married thirty years ago and had understood for approximately zero of them.

"Your son’s best friend. Your son’s age. A boy who ate at our table, trained in our yard, bled for our house. And your face has yet to move."

Bellatrix’s hand paused on the page. The pause lasted one second. Then she turned it.

"What would you like me to do, Tiberon? Weep? Shall I rush to his bedside and hold his hand? The boy made his choices. He chose to break a matebond. He chose to create a political liability that I have been managing in private for months while you pretended to see nothing from your throne."

"Managing. Is that what you call it."

"I call it what it is. Damage control. A skill I have been performing in this marriage since the day it began, without acknowledgment, without gratitude, and without the luxury of pretending that the feelings of a Gamma rank anywhere on my list of priorities."

Tiberon’s voice dropped. Lower. Quieter. The register he used when the personal entered a conversation and the political left.

"You had an affair with that boy."

The words landed in the room and the room absorbed them the way rooms absorb things that have been true for a long time and spoken aloud for the first time.

Bellatrix closed the book. "Define ’affair,’ Tiberon. Because in this marriage, that word has always been flexible."

"You seduced a boy your son’s age. A boy who believed you when you told him the arrangement was mutual. You used his loneliness and his loyalty and his particular inability to see cruelty in the people he loves, and you took something from him that he cannot get back."

"He was an adult."

"He was twenty-two."

"Twenty-two is an adult."

"Twenty-two is a boy who has been living under your roof since his entire life and who trusted you because you were the closest thing to a mother he had in this castle. You know that. You knew it when you took him to your bed, and you knew it when you sent him away, and the fact that you are sitting in that chair discussing his death with the same expression you use to discuss wallpaper is the cruelest thing I have seen from you in thirty years of cruel things."

Bellatrix stood. The motion was unhurried, controlled, the rise of a woman who had been seated long enough and intended to deliver the rest of this conversation at full height.

"Cruel." She tasted the word. "You married me because your court demanded it. You kept me because your kingdom required it. You visited my bed with the regularity of a man filling a prescription and the enthusiasm of one taking medicine. And you call me cruel."

"I tried, Bellatrix."

"You tried." The word came back at him carrying acid. "For years, he says. He tried. Shall we discuss what trying looks like from my side of this marriage, Tiberon? Shall we discuss what it feels like to lie beside a man who closes his eyes and sees a different face? Every night. Every year. For thirty years."

"That is finished. It was finished a long time ago."

"It will never be finished." Bellatrix’s voice hit a register that Tiberon had heard exactly twice in three decades, the register that lived beneath the ice, beneath the performance, beneath the woman the court saw and feared. This was the raw thing underneath, and it was burning. "It’s been years and you still think of your fated mate. The woman you loved before you were forced to love me. The woman whose bed gave you Dexmon."

The room went still.

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