Chapter 81: Chapter 81: THE VENUS QUESTION

VALORIA WILDEROSE

We’re both left panting, staring into each other’s souls with an intensity that feels like it could burn the entire world down around us.

A stretch of awkward, suffocating silence follows, and we both turn away from each other uncomfortably, unable to face whatever truth is sitting heavy in the space between us.

I wipe my lips roughly, as if I can erase the feeling of him, looking desperately for a means of escape amidst the chaos and internal turmoil raging inside my chest. Silently cursing myself for giving in to him yet again like some weak-willed fool.

I’m about to make a run for the bathroom door and lock myself in there until morning when he breaks the silence.

“Did you strip me?” he asks suddenly, finally noticing the different clothes he’s wearing now—clean ones that don’t reek of blood and death.

“I had to. You were filthy.”

Bloody, to be exact. Covered in gore and other things I didn’t want to think too hard about.

I couldn’t work with all that blood everywhere, and I definitely wasn’t going to let it stain the sheets either.

A beat of silence passes before curiosity gets the better of me.

“What was that about earlier?” I ask carefully, hinting at the whole convulsing, dying thing I witnessed.

Partly to fill the uncomfortable silence still lingering between us, but also because I genuinely need to know what’s happening to him. What he’s dealing with.

He bites his lips, looking away into the darkness, and I’m immediately hit with embarrassment for asking such a sensitive question mere minutes after he woke up from whatever hell he was going through.

“If you don’t want to talk about it, it’s fine,” I add quickly, giving him an out. “I shouldn’t have—”

“You asked me before how I aim to become a god,” he interrupts, responding instead of retreating into silence like I expected. “It’s through chaos. Through harnessing the very thing that unmakes the world.”

I look at him more intently now, trying to make sense of words deliberately structured to reveal everything and nothing all at once.

“Just like the god who created me from his deepest, darkest, most twisted desires, I can harness chaos and convert it into raw energy. Power.” His voice is distant, like he’s reciting something he’s explained to himself a thousand times. “I’ve been gathering enough of it for centuries—enough chaos, enough suffering, enough pain—to finally become something more than what I am. To transcend this curse. The chaos I collect keeps the worst effects of the curse at bay most of the time and powers my magic, fuels every spell I cast… but using too much of it at once can be detrimental. Dangerous, even for me. The curse can activate and try to drag me under.”

“Oh.”

“I’m sure you know the stories by now,” he continues, almost bitterly. “The curse placed by the goddess on the first Lycan. Doomed to live for eternity and suffer endlessly for the sins and deeds of his master. Never allowed to die, never allowed to truly live.”

I recall the stories I read during my research, the dark tales Elodie and Calliope had whispered to me in hushed tones. Until now they had all felt like fairytales—distant myths that couldn’t possibly be real.

But hearing him confirm them, hearing the resignation in his voice, makes everything feel too real, too raw, too sudden.

“Who is Venus?” The question slips out before I can stop it.

He freezes. Completely. Visibly. His entire body goes rigid, and his head snaps toward me with such surprise that it’s like I’ve just spoken a name that should never have passed my lips.

A name that holds more weight than I could possibly understand.

“Where the fuck did you hear that name?” His voice is sharp now, guarded in a way I haven’t heard before.

“You looked right through me earlier and called for her. When you were… whatever that was.”

“That’s not exactly your business, Valoria.” He turns his head away sharply, his jaw clenched tight, ending the discussion before it can even properly start.

I frown, frustration bubbling up again.

“What part of any of this is my business then?” I shoot back. “You tell me half-truths and fragments of stories, you kiss me like it means something, you save my life and then act like it was an inconvenience—what am I supposed to do with any of that?”

“The more you know about certain things, the more danger you’re in.” His voice is strained now, like the words are being pulled from somewhere deep and painful. “There are things in this world—people, forces—that would destroy you just for knowing their names. For being connected to me.”

“What are you trying to protect me from? Why are you even protecting me in the first place?”

The question hangs in the air between us, heavy with all the unspoken things we’ve been dancing around for weeks.

“I don’t know.” He looks at me again finally, and the raw confusion bleeding into his expression catches me completely off guard. Like he’s giving me an answer he himself hasn’t been able to figure out despite trying.

“I have been trying to figure that out for a while now. Why do I want to protect you when I should want you dead… why do I want to slaughter every single man that’s ever laid a hand on you, even the ones from your past…”

He trails off, staring at me with an intensity that makes my heart stutter painfully in my chest.

The silence that follows is different this time—charged with something heated and dangerous that flickers in the space between us like a living thing.

But I’m too terrified to dig deeper into whatever it might be. Too mentally and physically exhausted to bother trying to untangle this mess tonight.

“Okay,” I finally respond, my voice barely above a whisper as I turn away and settle into my side of the bed, pulling the covers up like they can shield me from everything I’m feeling.

“Okay?” He sounds genuinely offended now, like my non-reaction is somehow worse than if I’d yelled at him. “That’s it? That’s all you have to say?”

But I don’t look at him. I can’t, for reasons I’m not ready to examine.

Instead, I settle for closing my eyes and pretending to sleep, forcing my breathing to slow and even out, holding perfectly still long enough that he’ll eventually give up and do the same.

I feel him watching me for what seems like forever before he eventually shifts, turning away with a frustrated sigh that sounds almost like defeat.

And we both lie there in the darkness, painfully aware of each other, neither of us actually sleeping.

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