Chapter 31: Choice

Chapter 31

The silence that followed was heavy, thick with the scent of lavender and the metallic tang of Isabella’s half-finished brew.

Isabella’s hand trembled, the stone cup clinking against her teeth as she took a shaky breath. She looked at Lucian, waiting for him to object, to say that Clara was exaggerating, or that he would never let that happen.

But fuck, he remained perfectly still on the velvet couch. His eyes were fixed on the blue flames of the hearth, his profile as cold and immovable as a statue.

He wasn’t surprised. He had known. “You knew,” Isabella whispered, the realization cutting deeper than any of the injuries she’d sustained in the woods.

“You brought me here knowing that ’fixing’ this meant hollowing me out.” Lucian finally turned his head.

His crimson eyes were dark, “I brought you here to find a solution. Clara is prone to dramatics.”

“Dramatics?” Clara let out a sharp, mocking laugh as she began grinding silver powder in a mortar.

The sound of stone on stone was like teeth gnashing. “I am a weaver of truths, Lucian. Don’t lie to the girl just because you’re afraid of the look in her eyes. You knew the law of equivalent exchange. To untie a knot, someone has to lose a string.”

Clara leaned over her table, her white eyes fixed on Isabella. “He’s a King, Isabella. His soul is heavy with centuries of power. If I try to cut you away, the vacuum left behind will collapse you. You’ll breathe, you’ll eat, you’ll walk… but you’ll never feel a spark of joy or a flicker of anger again. You will be an empty room with the lights turned off.”

Isabella felt a surge of that familiar, hot rage, but this time it was tempered with a cold, sharp blade of betrayal.

She looked at the man she had saved—the man whose blood was currently flowing because of her blood—and felt a sickening sense of irony.

“Is that the plan then, ’Your Highness’?” Isabella snapped, Lucian didn’t answer immediately. Deep in his mind, the cold, calculating gears of a King were turning.

Everything Clara said was true. He had known the cost the moment he thought of seeking a witch.

He knew that unlike vampires who chose their fate, werewolves were at the mercy of the Moon and he knew the agonizing price of a rejected bond.

But there was a variable he hadn’t accounted for. Isabella was wolfless. He was secretly shocked that Clara hadn’t simply told them the girl would die.

Without a wolf soul to absorb the shock of the severing, Isabella was essentially standing naked against a hurricane.

He looked up at her, meeting her burning gaze. At first, she had been nothing more than a convenient meal.

Then, she had become an irritating inconvenience, a smudge on his royal lineage. But then… she had saved him.

She had stood over his broken form about to be a bait to that hound and she had helped him by dragging his body to shade before the sun could have him.

She had even offered her own life force, her own blood, to drag him back from the void.

He wanted his freedom. He wanted to be unburdened, unbonded, and beholden to no one.

But as the furnace of her rage poured through the bond, he realized he couldn’t do it. Not to her.

Lucian shifted his gaze to Clara, who was leaning against her table, wearing a smirk that suggested she was watching a particularly entertaining play.

“Let me be the hollow,” Lucian said and the grinding of Clara’s mortar stopped instantly.

Isabella’s breath hitched, her anger faltering into pure confusion. “Lucian?” Clara’s eyebrows arched toward her hairline, her white eyes wide with genuine shock.

“You are a King. Your soul has survived millennia. You would risk becoming a mindless shadow for a mortal who was a stranger to you two days ago?”

Lucian stood up, his height dwarfing the room as he stepped toward the center of the cabin. “I am the one who made the mistake. If a price must be paid in spirit, it will be mine.”

He turned to Isabella, his expression unreadable but his crimson eyes fixed on hers with an intensity that made her skin crawl and burn all at once.

Through the bond, for the first time, his icy resolve cracked, and she felt a wave of something that wasn’t guilt—it was a fierce, possessive protectiveness.

“I won’t have you hollowed out for my sake,” he whispered. Isabella stared at him, her heart hammering.

“You’d really do that? You’d spend forever as a ghost just so I can… what? Go back to a life where everyone hates me anyway?”

“It is my choice,” Lucian barked, his old authority returning.

Clara’s shock curdled instantly into a sharp, icy disdain. She slammed the mortar down onto the table, the silver dust puffing up like a cloud of spite

“Absolutely not,” she hissed, her voice losing its melodic charm. “I will not perform a ritual that lobotomizes a King for the sake of a stray. Lucian, look at her!”

She pointed a trembling finger at Isabella, who was still reeling from Lucian’s declaration. “She is nothing,” Clara spat, her white eyes flashing with two thousand years of accumulated bitterness.

“She is a nobody. She has no wolf, no status, and no family that would even bother to claim her corpse. She is a glitch in the Moon’s design, a disposable little mortal whose greatest contribution to history was being a blood-bag for a few days. You are a Sovereign. Your people need you. Your world needs you. She? She wouldn’t even be missed by the forest floor.”

Isabella felt the words like lashes across her skin. It was the brutal, unvarnished truth of her life laid bare by an ancient being who saw her as nothing more than an insect.

Clara stepped closer to Lucian, her voice softening into a desperate, pleading whisper. “Don’t do this. Don’t throw away eternity for a girl who is already half-broken. Let the vacuum take her. She has nothing to lose, Lucian. You have everything.”

Lucian didn’t flinch. He didn’t even look at Clara. Instead, his gaze remained anchored on Isabella, watching the way her jaw set and the way her eyes mirrored the hurt Clara was trying to inflict.

“Enough,” Lucian said. The word wasn’t loud, but it carried the weight of a mountain falling.

The air in the cabin seemed to vibrate, the blue flames in the hearth shrinking back in fear. He turned his head slightly toward Clara, his eyes glowing with a fierce, crimson warning.

“This is not your concern, Clara. I did not come here for your counsel on who is worthy of a soul. I came for your skill. This is my choice, and I have made it. You will perform the ritual as I have ordered, or I will find another way to get what I want—starting with the secrets you’ve kept buried beneath this cabin.”

Clara recoiled as if he had struck her, her face pale and twisted with a mix of rejection and fury.

She looked at Isabella, and for a moment, the mask of the ethereal witch slipped, revealing the jealous, scorned woman beneath.

“You’re a fool,” Clara whispered. “You’re choosing a gutter rat over a crown.”

“I am choosing to pay my own debts,” Lucian countered coldly.

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