Chapter 34: Shards

Chapter 34

“Strip.” The word cut through the haze of Isabella’s pain like a blade, sharp and impossible to ignore.

She blinked, chest tightening, certain she had misheard. “What…?” she rasped, her voice fragile against the ringing in her ears.

Lucian didn’t answer. His focus had shifted entirely. Kneeling over Clara, he pressed a careful hand to the witch’s pulse, scanning for any sign of life, his crimson eyes dark with the weight of blood, silver, and shared agony.

“The water,” he clarified, his voice a guttural scrape as he looked back at Isabella. He rolled Clara onto her side and began forcing the water from her lungs.

A heavy stream of obsidian water spilled out of Clara’s mouth, splashing onto the rug with a sound that was far too dense for a liquid.

It hissed against the floorboards, smelling of iron and old secrets. “It’s not just water,” Lucian repeated, his voice strained as he pushed against Clara’s ribs to clear her lungs.

He looked back at Isabella, his eyes flashing with a desperate, sharp edge. “It’s a magical anchor. If it dries on your skin while those shards still inside you, it will seal the wounds like iron. You’ll rot from the inside out before the sun reaches the horizon.”

He stood up, swaying slightly, his own bare back a map of silver-laced agony. “I can feel it starting on you,” he hissed, his hand twitching as he felt the sensation of the water tightening on her skin through their bond.

“It feels like cold lead hardening in your pores. Strip now. Before I have to tear the clothes off you myself.” Isabella looked down at her hands.

Her hoodie was soaked through, the fabric clinging to her with an unnatural, suffocating weight.

But as her gaze drifted back to Lucian, the sight of the silver glittering in his muscle stopped her heart. “I will,” she whispered, her voice gaining a sudden, stubborn strength. “I’ll strip. But first… let me help you.”

She didn’t know when protecting him had stopped feeling optional—but it had. Lucian let out a sharp breath. “You can barely sit upright.”

“And you have a thousand pieces of poison in your spine!” she snapped back, her eyes flashing amber.

She gestured to the ruin of his back. “I feel yours, too, remember? Even if it’s not much, I still do. It feels like a hive of hornets stinging me every time you breathe. If I strip, I’m just a wet girl with a cut face. If you don’t get that silver out, you’re a dead King.”

She reached out, her fingers trembling but determined, toward the nearest shard buried in his shoulder.

“Sit. Let me pull them out. I’m not letting you rot just so you can play the martyr.” Lucian stared at her, his jaw clenching so hard it looked like it might shatter.

The bond flared between them—a chaotic mix of his regal pride and her fierce, newfound defiance.

He wanted to argue, to command her back into submission, but the silver was winning. His legs gave out slightly, and he was forced to sink onto the edge of the coffee table, his back turned toward her.

“Do it quickly,” he rasped, his head bowing. “And do not—under any circumstances—break the shards. If the silver stays in the bloodstream, I’ll be paralyzed.”

Isabella moved to the edge of the couch, her hands hovering over his skin. The heat coming off him was intense, a furnace of immortal rage fighting a metallic plague.

“On three,” she whispered. Isabella reached out, her fingers hovering just inches from the first jagged sliver of glass.

“One,” she counted, her voice barely a breath. She gripped the base of the shard. Lucian’s entire body went rigid, the muscles in his back cording like iron cables.

Through the bond, a spike of cold, electric agony shot through her own spine, making her vision blur a bit.

“Two.” She braced her other hand against his shoulder. His skin felt like sun-baked floor. She could feel the vibration of his low growl of pain deep in his chest, a sound that felt dangerously close to her own heart.

“Three!” She yanked. The shard came free with a sickening, wet slide. Lucian let out a strangled sound, his fingers digging into the edge of the coffee table until the wood groaned and splintered.

Isabella gasped as a secondary wave of pain hit her, the ache in her own shoulder that made her arm go momentarily numb.

She stared at the shard in her hand. “Keep… going,” Lucian hissed, his head hanging low, some strands of hair shielding his face. “Don’t stop. If the blood cools, the skin will knit around the rest.”

Isabella didn’t hesitate. She became a blur of frantic, focused movement. She pulled another, then another, dropping the bloodied silver shards onto the floor where they chimed like funeral bells.

With every extraction, the bond between them flared, weaving their nervous systems into a single, agonizing pain.

She was crying now—silent, burning tears streaking her scarred cheeks—but her hands never faltered. She reached for a particularly large fragment buried near his spine.

As her fingers brushed the skin around it, something strange happened. The angry, greyish tint of the silver poisoning seemed to recede wherever her fingertips touched him.

Lucian’s breath hitched, not in pain, but in shock. “What are you doing?”

“I’m just pulling it out,” she whispered, tugging the large piece free. Lucian braced for the usual agonizing aftermath of a silver extraction—the lingering burn, the slow, sluggish knitting of dead flesh—but it never came.

Instead, as Isabella dragged the last jagged shard from near his spine, a strange, cool clarity washed over him.

The draining that usually followed silver poisoning never came. Instead, a sharp rush of immortal strength slammed back into him at an impossible speed.

Isabella pulled back, her chest heaving, her hands stained with the shimmering, dark violet of his blood.

She watched with fascination as the ruined mess of his back began to ripple. The deep gasps in his flesh pulled together, the skin weaving itself back over the muscle with fluid grace.

Within seconds, the greyish tint of the poison was gone, and his skin was smooth and pale once more—as if the silver rain had never happened.

No scars, no marks, not even a trace of the trauma remained.

He’s truly powerful, she thought, a shiver running down her spine. To her, it was simply the awesome, terrifying nature of a King’s healing.

She didn’t realize that her own touch had been the catalyst, scrubbing the poison from his veins before he could even begin to heal himself.

Lucian didn’t know it either, but he felt the difference. He felt… clean. He felt dangerously alive.

He turned slowly to face her, his bare chest glistening in the firelight. The shock in his crimson eyes had sharpened.

The bond between them was screaming now, not with pain, but with the high-voltage proximity of two souls that had almost been torn apart and were now fused.

“Your turn,” Lucain said.

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