OPERATION WINTERSPINE (Strings Between Us Book 2)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: OF VERDICTS, GHOSTS, AND THE DAY TRUTH STOOD

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: OF VERDICTS, GHOSTS, AND THE DAY TRUTH STOOD TRIAL

RIYEE's POV
IMPERIAL WING – HIGH CHAMBER OFFICE
Broadcasted Live to the Entire Academy

The floor was too polished. The air was too sharp. It smelled like judgment. Like dust and steel. Like something sacred had been broken and rearranged just for the purpose of watching it shatter again.

I sat with my hands folded neatly in my lap, like I had something to pray to. The obsidian chair beneath me didn't creak or shift. It wasn't a seat—it was a warning. Cold, rigid, unforgiving. A reminder that here, even breathing out of turn could be turned into a weapon.

Around me, everything was glass and chrome. Power made tangible. The High Chamber Office wasn't designed for comfort. It was designed for collapse.

And today, someone was going to.

Red lights blinked overhead. Broadcast status: live. The entire school was watching.

Across the chamber, the fifteen seats of the High Chamber loomed like thrones. Fourteen were filled. The fiftteenth—occupied by Khaizer Dylan Dela Vega—was the one that mattered. He didn't look at me. Not even once. His hands were still on the desk, fingers interlaced, the same way you'd fold your hands for a funeral.

KD sat beside the Disciplinary Head, but it was obvious who controlled the weight of the room. His silence didn't just speak—it ruled.

Behind me, the Ardent Court sat like shadows carved from precision. Lyle. Tofer. Saichel. Alexie. Seb. Keryn. Thres. Xythe. None of them spoke. None of them moved. They didn't need to.

Because this wasn't a trial about guilt. Not really. It was about memory. About power. About who got to tell the story of the Sovereign Chase.

Headmaster Antonio cleared his throat. "Let the hearing commence."

The formal charges rang out like gunshots.

"Deployment of unauthorized high-risk traps during the Sovereign Chase."

"Simulation tampering."

"Targeted aggression against recognized Court members."

"Bypassing of internal safety systems using elite council override codes."

The words rang out like they were laced with steel.

No one reacted. Not even the accused. But I saw Tofer shift his chair by a single inch. A mechanical twitch. The kind of movement that meant he'd just triangulated something.

Across from us, the accused wore their arrogance like armor. Bianchi Madriaga. Lucian Ortega. Rowan Lopez. All three seated like they still believed this room belonged to them. Like they hadn't already lost.

Lucian was the first to rise. "This was a controlled field test," he said, his voice calm, clinical, like the near-miss on our rookies hadn't happened under his tech lead. "We were evaluating battlefield adaptability. The results were merely...unexpected."

Controlled. Unexpected. Like civilians almost getting caught in kill-boxes was a technical error.

Rowan slammed his hand down. "No. This wasn't some mistake. They turned the crowd against us. They edited footage, they staged failure—they manipulated the entire game to make us look incompetent."

"You needed no help looking incompetent," Saichel said, too quiet for the room but loud enough for every mic to catch. Somewhere in the feed room, Tofer was already syncing the whisper to the academy-wide stream.