Chapter 109: I deserve it.

Chapter 109

“Lucian…” Isabella murmured, her voice losing its edge of panic and sharpening with a new dread.

She pulled back just enough to look up at him, her hands still clutching his shirt. “You’re burning. You’re never this warm. Your chest… it feels like it’s on fire.”

Lucian froze, his breath hitching in his throat as he fought the instinct to push her away. He could feel the unholy resonance between her newly awakened Lycan blood and the poison he carried in his wounds.

The heat she felt wasn’t his life force—it was the mark of the beast, reacting to its master’s proximity.

“The room is simply warm, Isabella,” he lied, his voice sounding like iron grinding against stone. He tried to pull her hands away, but she was persistent, her fingers brushing against the top button of his shirt.

“No, it’s not that,” she insisted, her eyes searching his haggard face, finding the sweat-beaded brow and the dilated, pained crimson of his gaze.

“You’re hurt. I can feel it. When I leaned on you, you hissed… I thought it was just exhaustion, but it was pain.”

The guilt she had been feeling for her rejection of him suddenly morphed into a terrifying realization.

She looked at his shirt—fastened so high, so tightly—and then back to the exhaustion in his eyes.

She didn’t know about the claws. She didn’t know about the shift. But she knew that something was deeply wrong with her mate.

“Lucian, let me see,” she whispered, her voice trembling as she reached for the collar.

“Isabella, don’t,” he warned, his hand closing over hers with a sudden, firm finality that made her heart skip a beat.

It wasn’t a push—Lucian was still holding her with a desperate, protective strength—but he deftly caught her wrist, intercepting her fingers before they could undo the second button.

With a calculated, fluid motion that cost him every ounce of his remaining composure, he diverted her hand away from his chest, pressing it instead against the velvet quilt of the bed.

“It is nothing but a lingering heat from the rift,” he lied again, the words sounding shallow even to his own ears.

He didn’t let go of her wrist, anchoring her hand far from the high-buttoned collar that hid his ruin.

“You are disoriented. Your senses are playing tricks on you in the wake of such a long sleep.” Isabella went still, her hand resting uselessly against the mattress.

She didn’t fight him. She didn’t try to reach for the shirt again. Instead, she felt a cold blade of rejection slice through the remaining warmth in her chest.

He won’t even let me touch him, she thought, the voice in her head sounding small and utterly defeated.

In her mind, the silence in the room began to scream. She looked at his haggard face, at the way he refused to meet her eyes, and she didn’t see a King protecting a secret.

She saw a man who was repulsed by the woman who had doubted him. She felt the weight of her choice in that orange room—the way she had practically cut the thread of their bond to listen to Caleb’s poisonous whispers—and she decided, right then, that this was her penance.

I deserve this, she told herself, her throat tightening with a fresh, dry ache. I called him a monster.

Why would he want me to see his pain now? I’m the one who put it there, one way or another.

I’m the one who broke the trust. He has every right to keep me out. He has every right to hate me.

She felt like a ghost on the bed, a trespasser in a sanctuary she had forfeited the moment she let Caleb into her head.

She didn’t blame Lucian for the coldness or the redirection of her hand. If she were him, she wouldn’t want her touch either.

Lucian sensed the shift in the bond—the sudden drop from frantic panic to a hollowed-out despair—and it nearly broke him.

He wanted to pull her back, to tell her that his rejection had nothing to do with her heart and everything to do with the jagged tracks on his skin, but his voice failed him.

The hunger was a roaring beast in his gut now, and the scent of her skin was making his vision blur.

“You need sustenance,” Lucian managed to grind out, finally releasing her wrist. He shifted, his movements stiff and mechanical as he moved to create distance between them before he lost his grip on his fangs.

“I will bring you water. You must be thirsty… your body has been through an ordeal.” He stood up, the bed groaning as he withdrew his weight.

He looked down at her for a fleeting second—at her pale, tear-stained face and the way she was staring at her own hands as if they were stained with ink.

“Stay there,” he commanded, though the authority was brittle. “I will be back momentarily.”

Isabella didn’t look up. She just nodded, her fingers curling into the velvet sheets, feeling the lingering, unnatural warmth of the spot where he had been sitting.

Go, she thought bitterly. Go and get away from the girl who was stupid enough to believe a creepy stranger.

As Lucian turned toward the carafe of water on the far table, his hand went instinctively to his chest, clutching the fabric of his shirt as a fresh jolt of agony flared from the unhealed marks.

The simple act of standing had pulled at the edges of the wounds, sending a hot reminder through his nerves that he was far from recovery.

Every step felt like walking through glass, but the physical pain was a distant second to the crushing weight of the bond.

He could feel her. Isabella sat like a statue on the bed, her presence an ache of self-loathing. Through their connection, her thoughts were a toxic sludge of regret, each one a stone she was using to build a wall between them.

He wanted to scream to her to get those ideas out from her thoughts, that it hat it wasn’t true. He wanted to turn back, pull her into his arms, and let her see the truth—even if the truth was a set of claw marks that would haunt her dreams.

But the scent of her jasmine-and-fire blood was too potent. If he turned back now, in his weakened state, he wouldn’t be a comfort; he would be a predator.

His fingers trembled as they poured the water and turned back to Isabella. He didn’t walk back to the bed.

He couldn’t risk the proximity. Instead, he set the glass down on the edge of the nightstand, just within her reach, before retreating a safe distance to the shadows of the window.

“Drink,” he managed to say. Isabella finally looked up, her eyes red-rimmed and hollow. She looked at the glass of water, then at Lucian, who stood silhouetted against the moonlight, his posture rigid and distant.

“Thank you,” she whispered, the words like lead in her mouth. She reached for the glass, her fingers brushing the condensation.

She didn’t feel thirsty but she took a small sip anyway, the cold water doing nothing to quench the strange, electric heat still humming in her veins.

“Lucian…” she started, her voice breaking. She wanted to ask him if he was mad at her.

She wanted to ask if the bond was broken and how he had saved her from her own destruction.

But the words died in her throat when she saw the way his jaw was clenched, his eyes fixed on the door as if he couldn’t wait to escape her presence.

I really did it, she thought, a fresh tear trailing down her cheek. I finally pushed everything out of my miserable life.

Lucian didn’t see the tear, but he felt the ripple of it through the bond. He had to leave. He had to find Clara, or Marco, or anyone who could provide the nourishment he needed to heal, before he did something he could never take back.

“I must… check on the perimeter,” he lied, his hand gripping the windowsill so hard the wood began to groan.

“Clara will be in shortly to check your vitals. Do not leave the bed, Isabella. The house is… unsettled.”

Without waiting for her response, without daring to look at the wreckage of her expression one last time, the King of the Unholy turned and vanished out of the room and into hall.

Left alone in the sanctuary of the master suite, Isabella slowly set the glass back down. She curled her knees to her chest, burying her face in the silk of Lucain shirt.

The room was silent once more, but the heat in her blood remained—a constant, pulsing reminder that even if Lucian had left, the storm she had started was only just beginning.

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