Chapter 102: Is she breathing?

Chapter 102

The chalk in Clara’s hand had long since crumbled into a fine, pale dust that coated her palms, a stark contrast to the frantic heat flushing her face.

She was pacing the length of the East Wing’s, her shoes clicking against the floor. Every few seconds, her eyes would dart toward the blank stretch of stone wall where the rift had been.

It had been over an hour. An hour since she had looked into Lucian’s crimson eyes and seen a man ready to be unmade.

“Foolish, stubborn King,” she hissed under her breath, her fingers trembling as she wiped a stray lock of hair from her forehead.

“Trapped in a folding reality with a myth. A nightmare.” Her mind was a whirlwind of impossible questions.

How? The word echoed in her skull like a bell. Everyone who had encountered Isabella knew the “wolfless” girl.

The human-adjacent anomaly. And yet, the creature Clara had seen through that rift wasn’t just a wolf; it was a Lycan.

The gold-threaded fur, the celestial heat, the sheer, staggering size of a predator that the Moon Goddess had supposedly wiped from the face of the earth centuries ago.

Why would the Goddess create a being she herself feared? And why, in the cruel irony of the Fates, would she mate that beast with another—the King of the Unholy himself?

“She’s the most powerful shifter recorded” Clara whispered, stopping her pace to stare at the wall.

“And she was hiding behind a foul mouthed girl who couldn’t even shift a claw.” She looked down at her spell book, an antique clock on the cover.

The ticking felt like a hammer. The Veiled Space was a pocket dimension—a temporary bubble of reality that required constant magical stabilization.

With Elena and her dark energy gone, that bubble was more than just unstable; it was a death trap.

It would be collapsing by now, the dimensions folding in on themselves like paper in a fire. “I can’t wait anymore,” she decided, her voice cracking the heavy silence of the hall.

Clara didn’t have Elena’s ancient, eyeless power, but she was a scholar of the old ways. She stepped toward the wall, her hands moving in a desperate arc.

She began to chant, the words thick and heavy, pulling at the very roots of her energy. The air shivered. A hairline fracture of light split the stone, widening into a shrieking tear as she forced the realm open one last time.

The sight that met her made the air die in her throat. The realm was screaming. The ceiling of the Veiled Space had disintegrated into a void of white nothingness, and chunks of rock the size of carriages were raining down into the mist.

But in the center of the carnage, Lucian wasn’t being shredded. He was being held. The Lycan was draped completely over him.

Her weight looked enough to crush a normal man’s ribs, but Lucian’s hands were buried deep in the thick fur of her neck, his face pressed against her shoulder.

The beast was motionless, its terrifying golden eyes closed, its breathing slow and ragged.

“Lucian!” Clara screamed over the roar of the collapsing dimension.

The Sovereign King looked up, his face pale and smeared with blood, yet his expression held a strange, haunting peace.

“Clara…?” he started, but stopped mid-sentence. The air around them began to hum with a different frequency that signaled the end of the Lycan’s manifestation.

It started at the extremities. The massive, ivory claws that had been buried in the stone floor began to retract, softening into delicate, human fingertips.

The thick, silver-white fur didn’t just fall away; it seemed to dissolve into light, receding into the skin.

Clara watched, paralyzed, as the six-and-a-half-foot engine of destruction literally shrank.

The massive muscle mass smoothed out into the slender curves of a woman. The heat dissipate and In the span of a dozen heartbeats, the beast was gone.

Lying on top of Lucian’s battered, bare chest was Isabella. She was human again—or at least, she looked it.

Her pale skin was stark against the dark, blood-stained stone, her naked form limp and utterly vulnerable.

Her white hair, no longer shimmering with golden heat, fell in tangled waves over Lucian’s shoulders.

She looked small. Impossibly small compared to the nightmare she had just been. “Isabella,” Lucian breathed, his hands shaky as they shifted from the thick fur of a predator to the soft, cool skin of her back.

He pulled her closer, his arms wrapping around her unconscious form as if he could shield her from the very void that was swallowing the room.

The floor beneath them let out a final, violent groan, disrupting Lucain from the sight of Isabella.

“Lucian, you have to move!” Clara shouted and

With effort, Lucian forced himself up, clutching Isabella’s naked form to his chest.

He staggered back toward the rift just as the center of the Veiled Space plummeted into the white abyss.

They tumbled through the tear in reality, falling onto the cold, solid floor of the East Wing just as the violet light winked out behind them.

The silence of the mansion was deafening.

Lucian lay on the floor, gasping for air, his body a map of healing scars and fresh bruises from the fall.

Isabella remained motionless in his arms, her head tucked under his chin, her breathing shallow but steady.

Clara collapsed onto her knees beside them, her chest heaving from the intense ritual. She looked at the girl—the “wolfless” girl who had just survived a goddess’s transformation—and then at Lucian, who looked like he had been through a war and won a tragedy.

“She’s back?” Clara asked but Lucian didn’t look up. He just tightened his grip on Isabella, his jaw set in a line of iron.

“I don’t know yet.” he rasped, adjusting his grip again, pulling Isabella’s limp body higher against his chest, shielding her nakedness.

His fingers brushed against her spine, half-expecting to feel the coarse silver fur of the beast return, but there was only smooth, cold skin.

“Is she breathing?” Clara asked as she moved closer on her hands and knees. Lucian didn’t answer with words. He leaned his ear down to Isabella’s mouth, closing his eyes as he felt the faint puff of her breath against his cheek.

It was weak, dampened by the sheer exhaustion of the transformation, but it was there.

“Yes,” he whispered, more to himself than to Clara. He stood to his feet, his knees buckling for a moment under the combined weight of his own injuries and her dead weight.

His vampiric healing had closed the surface wounds, but the internal toll—the drain on his essence from the rapid regeneration and the crushing pressure of the Lycan’s weight—left him swaying.

He looked down at Isabella’s face. In her sleep, she looked so peaceful, her features devoid of the “foul-mouthed” fire she usually carried. She looked like the wolfless girl again.

But he knew better than to underestimate her now.

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