Chapter 115: Coward.

Chapter 115

The silence that reclaimed the room after Marco’s departure was not merely an absence of sound.

It was suffocating with the discordant echoes of a history that logically should not exist. It was a history written in blood and betrayal, yet here it sat, pulsing in the very air he breathed.

Lucian stood like a pillar of shadow in the center of his expansive office, his lungs drawing in the scent of aged, dusty parchment and the lingering, intoxicating sweetness of Isabella’s unique aromaa.

In his fragmented mind, he was no longer confined within the black walls of his sanctuary.

He was transported back to that damp, lightless forest. He could still feel the terrifying, electrifying rush of lust and raw life that had surged through his veins the exact moment his fangs had first pierced the velvet of her skin, a sensation so potent it had nearly shattered his fractured mind.

He remembered with agonizing clarity the way her white hair had felt like spun silk threading through his blood-stained fingers.

He remembered the cold horror of seeing his own mark glowing with a haunting light on the neck of a “little abomination” he had fully intended to discard like a used, broken cup.

He had been a monster then—hollow-cheeked and starving, a scavenger in his own right. He had lied to Marco that night, the words like ash in his mouth.

“I drank from an animal,” he had claimed, wiping the evidence of her life from his lips with chilling indifference.

Now, centuries of carefully woven lies and a thousand years of supposed “purity” had led them to this precipice.

He looked down at his desk, but his eyes were blind to the fawning letters of praise from the Lesser Houses or the strategic maps of his vast, unholy territory.

Instead, his vision was fixed on his own hands—the same hands that had been stained a deep, dark crimson with her life-force amidst those thorns.

For days, he had been a man possessed by a singular, desperate mission: to find a way to sever the tether. He had spent countless hours researching, pacing, and plotting how to rip the bond out by its roots and rid his life of her presence.

He had spent so much time convincing himself that the mark was a fluke, a glitch in the cosmic order, a tragic accident born of a starving man’s lack of restraint.

But standing now in the oppressive quiet of his office, with the crushing weight of everything that had recently transpired, a new, undeniable truth began to form in his mind.

He realized with a jolt of profound clarity that the mark on her neck was not accidental. It was never an accident.

Fate was at its play in it. He thought back to her pale, sweating skin in the trap, the way her scent had called to him from miles away, dragging him through the city and into the woods.

If he had been a second later, or if he had truly killed her in his frenzy, he would have spent an eternity wandering the void, never knowing that his soul was missing its other half.

A wave of belated, bone-deep terror washed over him—the realization of how close he had come to extinguishing the only light his dark world had ever known.

Thank the heavens she survived me, he thought, the sentiment a rare prayer in a heart that hadn’t prayed in centuries.

He should have treated her better. He should have seen the Queen in the “abomination” from the very first breath.

The bond was not a curse to be broken, but a destiny he had finally, truly accepted. He wasn’t just at peace with it; he was anchored by it.

The time for rejection was over. The time for protecting his own pride was dead. He looked at his hands again, but this time, he didn’t see the blood of a victim—he saw the strength he would use to shield the woman who had, quite literally, brought him back from the grave.

Yet, despite this profound revelation of destiny and the fierce, protective fire beginning to kindle in his chest, an agonizing guilt remained, clawing at his insides with more ferocity than the physical wound.

He stood there, feeling like a coward of the highest order. He was hiding. He, who had faced down armies and stared into the abyss of a thousand-year slumber, was retreating behind heavy doors and maps of stone, all to avoid the gaze of a girl who had once been his prey.

His fingers instinctively moved to the buttons of his shirt, tracing the uneven ridges beneath the fine silk.

He could still feel the heat of the deep claw mark that spanned his chest and he was terrified for her to see it. He was terrified that the sight of that scar would break her already fragile spirit, that she would look at the raw, mangled tissue and believe she had truly ruined something.

He knew Isabella; she would carry that guilt like a stone around her neck, convinced that her “stupidity” had permanently defaced a King.

And he couldn’t bear to see that look in her eyes. Not when he was the one who had truly failed her first.

But his cowardice ran deeper than a mere scar. The thirst—that erratic, pulsing demand for the very essence that kept her heart beating—was still a wild thing within him, barely holding by his waning restraint.

He was avoiding her because he didn’t trust the monster that still lurked beneath the black silk. He feared that the moment he stepped into her presence, the moment her stabilized, potent scent hit his senses fully, he would lose the battle he had been fighting since the forest.

He should be there, should be the one holding her while her world shifts into this new reality but here he was leaving her to the coldness of Clara and the awkward, dutiful visits of Marco.

He was letting her sit in that vast master suite, likely spiraling into the dark thought that she had destroyed their bond, that she was a burden he no longer wanted.

He could almost feel her through the thin, fraying thread of their connection—a sense of isolation so profound it made his own chest ache in sympathy.

She must think he loathed her. She must think he was repulsed by what she had become, when the truth was that he was repulsed by himself.

He shouldn’t be a coward hiding in an office, playing with parchment and ink while Isabella was blaming herself.

He was her mate, the one who had claimed her in the thorns before they even knew they had history. Every second he spent away was a betrayal of the very fate he had finally decided to embrace.

The Council, the letters, the politics—none of it mattered if he lost her heart to the silence he had created.

He looked toward the door, his pulse increasing right beneath that deep, ugly scar.

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