Shattered Bonds A Second Chance Mate (by Yui) novel Chapter 185

Chapter 185

Chapter 185

The first time I heard it, I thought it was the wind.

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It came as a soft, traveling thing–half–syllables and doubt–edging through the square and changing the faces of people I had greeted with bread only days before.

I was returning from the infirmary, a small bundle of folded linens in my hands, Monica’s herbal satchel bumping at my hip, and the market had the usual small chaos of bartering and gossip.

Yet under the clatter there was a new undertone, thin and eager.

“…because the King chose a mate before he chose justice…”

“… the Luna walks free while the wounded are tied and questioned–where is the justice?”

“They say she was protected by the King. How can Luna be law when she is safe and they are not?”

The sentences were like tinder thrown onto the slow–burning embers of the Isolde incident. They took it quickly.

At first I tried to keep my face calm. I smiled at pottery sellers, nodded to children with sticky hands, took a loaf from a baker who grinned when he saw me because bread and Luna make a good morning. But every smile found an echo of suspicion. A woman I’d hugged three mornings ago crossed the square to drop a curt bow and then leaned to tell her neighbor in a voice pitched so others could hear: “They say the King’s mate escapes blame.” The neighbor gave a little nod that was all eyes.

I felt the barbs through the bond almost as quickly as I felt the prick of the words.

Francesco’s hand tightened on my elbow where it rested, measuring the space we took. He could sense the tide the pack’s temperature – as precisely as he could sense the weather.

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He lowered his voice to the thought–level hush we use in private. They will believe what is easiest to swallow. They will choose the story that makes their small lives make sense.

“They don’t know us,” I whispered. “Many of these people are not our people. Not all of them are from Florence, they come from other places so they don’t know us well. They just see titles and they pick at them like a scab.”

Francesco’s jaw softened, the black in his eyes melting to a color like warm metal. “Then we will teach them.” He didn’t say how. He never said how offhand. The how was the work that sat heavy in his hands.

The thing about rumor is that it always finds the poorest, the proudest, and the most frightened first.

It asks them to take a side and promises that the choice will make them right.

Tonight it began at the wells. A woman whose child we had treated for fever last month spat at my back as I passed. “Where is justice?” she demanded. “My boy was questioned for stealing grain for medicine. He spent two nights with the soldiers in the stocks while your guard took Isolde in, and you let Luna walk free. How is that just?”

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Chapter 185

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Her eyes weren’t cruel. They were raw. Hunger and fear make sharp things of people. I knelt in the dust and lifted her chin with the gentleness I reserve for infants and broken animals.

“We answered the call,” I said. “Your boy was moved because he stole at night. That is not what we do in Valmont unless we have no other way. We asked him why. We listened. He will not be punished if he cannot feed his family; he will be given work. We do not bind hunger when other options remain.”

She didn’t relax. “Words,” she said, and the word was a stone thrown into water. “Words are cheap.”

Mothers will test the weight of your words as soon as they hear them. If you can’t prove you will keep their children from starvation, you have nothing.

It was not only the poor. Men who’d been brought into the territory under promises of work muttered in the lanes about fairness, their mouths full of old resentments. Many of them carried the bitter memory of their old pack–a city of deals where people who knew how to shout loudest took everything. They did not yet trust a Lycan king who built schools, though their children were the first to sit at our desks.

Isolde’s theater had done more than threaten me with a blade. It had worked like a wedge. It showed how easy it is to turn people toward outrage when they have not had reason to know mercy is possible.

“Let us call hearing in the square,” Francesco said after I returned from the woman at the well. His voice had the gravity of someone pulling on his boots to wade into cold water. “We will answer them in daylight with our faces and our words. We will be seen to act. We will not be corralled into making a spectacle, but we will make the place where facts can breathe.”

Alfonso’s ledger crackled as he nodded. “A public hearing. We will call witnesses. We will let people speak. Justice is what men can see happen; they need to see it.”

It is one thing to proclaim justice in a hall with curtains and loyal faces.

It is another to lay that justice out in the square and let the market hawkers hear you so plainly their ears have no choice but to receive it.

There is a good terror in that kind of exposure. It’s the kind that cleans; it’s also the kind that can bleed.

We set the time for the afternoon.

Word ran like a thread through the markets and stalls: Come and see. The King will speak. The Luna will be

seen.

People came with the kind of curiosity that first brings children to a fair–they wanted to be part of something public and true. They brought questions on their tongues. They brought insults wrapped in umbrellas and grief in their pockets. They brought the restless energy of those who have been promised things and not given them.

The square filled. I stood beside Francesco on the low step that once had been used for proclamations and weddings and edicts. We did not stand on better ground; we stood alongside them, because justice from a step makes it a thing to be looked at rather than a thing to live.

Francesco spoke first.

He has a way of placing his voice into the air and letting it find ears without pleading for them. “Valmont,” he

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Chapter 185

said, “hear us.”

And they heard.

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“We are a small place,” he continued, “and not without wounds. Last night, in this yard, a woman was injured. We are treating the wound. We will let the law speak.” He paused, scanning faces–hard mother eyes, men squinting with suspicion, boys who knew enough to find this interesting. “But justice is not revenge. It is the truth placed where it can be found. If anyone believes Luna’s safety should be traded for the pain of another, then tell me now your name and your reason so we can answer it.”

Someone shouted that justice was for the wronged.

A voice rose to say the Luna should be punished as a spectacle so the pain of the poor would look satisfied.

Another small woman who knits for extra money said simply, “My work is steady because you came. That steadiness is justice to me.”

Francesco let them speak.

He let them tug at the thought that justice looks like revenge to those who have been wronged for a long time.

When he took the floor again, his voice had the patience of a bell. “We will call witnesses,” he said. “We will look at what happened. We will not let one incident eat the whole of our law. But I will also say this: our Luna did not need to be hidden. If you think she is walked free because of love, then ask yourselves if love is a crime, or if fear is.”

I felt the tension shift.

That rhetorical question is sharp; it forced the crowd to decide whether their rage was at the King’s generosity or at the fact they’d been used by someone else.

Some staggered, their anger losing purchase.

Some dug their feet in because the question asked of them more than they had.

We called witnesses. Bakers and the children who played near the yard gave the facts that matter most–who saw what, which direction people moved, what was said. Isolde’s wound was examined by Monica in plain sight. Her voice was steady but measured; she told people what she had found without accusation, simply the truth of the cut and the dressing.

Then we let Isolde speak.

You would expect a woman who had screamed for a king to sway the crowd. Instead, she stood small and would not meet the faces of those she had once shared bread with. When she began, her voice shook, but then steadied like a bow finding its string.

“He told me the King never loved her, the.. the Luna” she said, words a thin paper in the wind. “He said that if I made a scene… they would-” Her voice broke. “He said… I would be rewarded.”

A man near the back started a rough indictment: Dorian’s men- and before the thought was formed, a younger trader shouted back: How do we know? Who says men from the south want us each to be their

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pawns?

There was a fear in their question that cut at the heart.

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We had lived under a man–Henri–whose reach had been as small–minded as a cage. These newcomers carried that memory. When you live by a stranger’s promise, you grow suspicious of kindness; you learn to sniff a rope for knots. They had reason to hold their breath.

Alfonso as the Beta presented his lists. Marlow presented the report of the night patrols. Monitors gave testimony about the person in the shadows and how quickly they had escaped.

The evidence was messy, like evidence tends to be when humans are involved–smudges of scent, a torn sleeve, a coin with a scratch–not the tidy clean line of a perfect story. And rumors do not care for mess. They prefer neatness. Neatness blankets cruelty.

One man, a weaver new to our fields, stood and asked a question that was the knife at the center of the whole thing. “Why is she not in a sling?” he said. “Why is the Luna up and selling bread in the morning and my cousin is in the stocks and bleeding for stealing to feed his children?”

It was a fair question because fairness does not bow to status.

I wanted to answer with all the things we’d done–how we had offered work, how we had fed families, how we had tried to find the places where hunger sits like an unwanted guest.

But more than that, I wanted the man to feel seen for the grievance he carried that was easily made true. You cannot wave away pain with words.

So I stepped down from the step.

I walked into the press of people, not as a Luna wearing the King’s shadow, but as a woman who kneaded bread in the morning and had once carried packages to a neighbor in need.

I took the weaver’s hand in mine the way I would hold a young sapling. He flinched at first as if he expected the touch to be hot. “Show me your cousin,” I said simply.

He named a poor row further from the square. I went with him.

We walked, and as people saw me go–knees bent, shawl gathered–something odd happened: the rumor’s fuel sputtered.

Someone muttered that a Luna who would meet a weaver in his lane could not be as cruel as the story said.

Another, quieter woman decided she had a kettle to heat and spent the time to send word to her sister.

The rumor was hungry but not unstoppable; it needed a conduit, and sight is the strangest of disinfectants.

I found the cousin slumped on a pallet, sweat and blood sticky on his wrist where he had been bound. He was not dying. Neither was he a martyr. He was scared, raw, and embarrassed.

I unbound him while someone fetched clean water. I asked what had happened, listened while he told me about stealing a sack of grain to feed a fever, and then I took the only tool that matters in such moments-

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practicality.

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