The Rejected Beast Bride's New Mate novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: The Hearing

The Council chamber is on the second floor of the old customs house.

You get there up a marble staircase worn into dips by a hundred years of kin feet.

On Monday morning there wasn't a seat left in it.

Reporters lined the back wall.

The three brides sat together in the front row of the gallery, in their best coats, their hands in each other's laps.

Wilda sat behind them with a box of buns on her knees.

She said nobody could be cruel to her while she was holding baked goods.

Orrin stood at the end of my table.

He'd worn a jacket with a slit in the back for his wings, and a tie that looked like it was strangling him.

"You look like a bouncer at a funeral," I whispered.

"You look like you're going to bite someone."

"I might."

"Good," he said.

Across the aisle, Leander sat at the other table in a gray suit, his mane tied back, a lawyer on either side of him.

Bettany sat right behind him in the first row, in a cream coat, with her phone face down on her knee.

She smiled at me when I looked.

Then the side door opened and the Council came in, seven kin in black robes.

Leonie Hallam came last.

She walked to the center chair under the Registry seal and sat down in it, silver-gold hair perfect, pearls perfect, and picked up the gavel.

"In the matter of Saxby against Hallam," she said, "and the related petition for the bride's care, this Council is..."

I stood up.

My chair scraped so loud the reporters looked up from their phones.

"Madam Chair," I said.

Leonie looked at me over her glasses.

"You'll have your turn, Mrs. Hallam."

"My name is Saxby," I said. "And I'd like my turn now, before you say anything else from that chair."

The room went dead quiet.

"You're the respondent's mother," I said. "You arranged my bond to pay off my father's debt to your company. You filed the petition to lock me in your house. Your company's healer signed the letter. You moved this hearing up four days so three brides couldn't be heard."

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