Chapter 128: Chosen

Chapter 128

Isabella let the heavy, yellowed pages fall open, the ancient parchment feeling brittle, dry, and almost electric against her sensitive fingertips.

She had been flipping through the thick, leather-bound volume for the better part of an hour, her patience wearing thin as she sat curled deeply into the velvet depths of Lucian’s massive wingback chair.

Most of the entries she had encountered thus far were endless, sprawling passages detailing the cold superiority of the unholy race over every other living creature.

Each Chapter she passed felt like a redundant repetition of the last: meticulous, heartless instructions on the most “efficient” ways to drain a human dry without wasting a single, precious drop of life; grisly anatomical diagrams illustrating exactly where the pulse beat strongest; and arrogant, blood-soaked manifestos on their divine right to hunt.

It was a monotonous, nauseating cycle of blood and ego that she began to skim with bored eye until she turned a page, and the very air in her lungs hitched.

Unlike the cramped notes on slaughter that preceded it, the ink here was dark and scripted in an elegant, flowing hand—looking as if it had been written with a heavy quill dipped in liquid shadow.

“The Bond of an Unholy,” the heading read. The boredom vanished instantly, replaced by a stinging alertness.

Her posture straightened, the previous pages of gore and anatomical violence forgotten as her interest finally peaked. Her eyes scanned the lines greedily, searching for the secrets hidden within the ink.

But as she read, the air in the library seemed to grow colder, a different kind of dread settling like lead in the pit of her stomach.

In the werewolf community, the “Mate Bond” was a law of nature, a divine and inescapable decree from the Moon Goddess that no wolf, no matter how powerful or defiant, could escape.

It was a fated, mandatory connection—you were born with a missing piece, and the Goddess eventually handed it to you at the age of eighteen, whether you were ready for it or not.

You didn’t choose your mate; the Moon chose for you, weaving your souls together before you even took your first breath.

But as Isabella’s eyes raced across the ancient, mocking script, she realized that the Unholy played by entirely different, far more terrifying rules.

“Unlike the beasts of the moon who are shackled by celestial whim,” the text read, its tone dripping with a familiar, high-born vampire arrogance,

“the unholy of the Night is the master of their own tether. A bond is not a gift received; it is a choice made. An Unholy may exist for a millennium in solitude, acknowledging no soul as their equal, for the bond is a deliberate act of the will—a conscious decision to tie one’s eternal existence to another.”

Isabella’s breath hitched, her throat tightening until it hurt. She read the passage again, her fingers trembling so hard the parchment crinkled.

A choice. In her world, a mate was destiny. In Lucian’s world, a mate was a preference.

Her mind began to spiral, the absolute silence of the library suddenly feeling heavy and suffocatingly loud.

If the bond wasn’t a divine, unbreakable decree, then that meant Lucian had chosen her? He had looked at a wolfless, broken girl from a hateful, low-ranking pack and decided, out of all the thousands of souls he had encountered in his centuries of cold life, that she was the one he wanted to be permanently tethered to?

The questions began to swirl around her head in a chaotic storm. She remembered how he had treated her before.

Before she had turned eighteen—the rightful age of a wolf finding their fated half—Lucian hadn’t cared about her at all.

In fact, he had seemed to despise her presence. Even when she had dared to bring up the desperate possibility of them being mates, he had shut her down with a cold, cruel finality, stating they would never be mates.

He had wanted her out of his life, out of his mansion, and out of his sight. But then, the night of her eighteenth birthday happened. The night in the grove.

The memories of the forest flashed through her mind like shards of broken glass. She remembered the world tilting as Lucian violently yanked her from that lying Caleb’s steady embrace.

She remembered his eyes—twin vortices of maddening red, burning with a possessive, terrifying fury.

He had slammed her against his chest, his fingers digging into her arms with bruising strength. Everything had changed. The air had shifted, thick with the scent of sandalwood and rain-drenched earth, underscored by that sharp, dark sweetness of blackberries.

“You smell… sweet,” he had whispered, his pupils dilating in a realization that looked like vulnerability. “Mate. It’s you.”

In that moment, it had felt like a fated collision. It had felt like the Moon Goddess’s play. But if vampires choose their mates, why did Lucian only “choose” her the moment her wolf blood reached maturity and she began to project that intoxicating scent?

Why did he go from wanting her gone to claiming her with a roar of “I accept it, Isabella!” the second the clock struck eighteen?

The realization didn’t bring her comfort; it brought a burning spark of insecurity. If he chose me based on a whim or a scent, does that mean he can un-choose me?

The thought was a cold blade driven straight into her heart. With a wolf mate, the bond was anchored in the soul by a higher power—it was permanent and unyielding.

But if Lucian’s bond was fueled solely by his own formidable will, what happened if that will eventually flickered?

What if one day he woke up, looked at her scarred history, her lack of a wolf, and her fragile human heart, and simply decided he didn’t want the burden anymore?

What if he realized that a girl like her was nothing more than a temporary distraction for a King who had lived through empires?

“He chose me,” she whispered, her voice cracking and sounding small in the vast, echoing room. “But why? Why now?”

She looked down at the oversized silk shirt she was wearing—his shirt, which held his scent and his warmth. It had felt like armor only minutes ago, a sign of his protection, but now it felt like borrowed time.

She thought of Selena and Aleric back at the Blackwood Pack. By now, they were likely locked in the primal, guaranteed certainty of their Moon-given bond.

They didn’t have to wonder if their mate would wake up and change their mind. They were stuck together by the laws of the universe.

But Isabella was standing on shifting sand. She was tied to a man who didn’t follow the Goddess, a man who made his own laws and chose his own bonds.

She turned the page frantically, her eyes searching for any mention of “forever,” for some small reassurance that an Unholy’s choice was as final and binding as a wolf’s destiny.

But the more she read about the “calculated selection” and the “willful tethering,” the more she felt like a guest in his life rather than a part of it.

Was she just a whim? A temporary fascination for a Sovereign who was bored with eternity and happened to like the way she smelled once she turned eighteen?

The over-thinking was pulling her under. She clutched the book to her chest, the scent of sandalwood on her sleeves suddenly feeling like a taunt.

She was free to move around the mansion, but she had never felt more like a prisoner—not of Lucian’s walls, but of the terrifying uncertainty of being ’chosen’ by a monster who had the power to simply walk away.

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