Chapter 39: He’s mine.

Chapter 39

The quick splashing of water had stopped. Ten minutes had bled into twenty, and the silence of the woods had reclaimed itself.

Isabella floated near the edge of the lake, arms wrapped loosely around herself, chest-deep in the dark water.

Her fingers were numb but her skin finally free of the stinging grit of the obsidian salt. A few yards away, Clara was a silent statue, her head tilted back as she watched the steam rise from her own shoulders.

Lucian was gone. The moment he was sure they wouldn’t turn into salt pillars, he had vanished back toward the cabin to take care of the disaster.

Through the bond, Isabella could feel him moving with a restless and irritated energy. Isabella cleared her throat. “So,” she dragged out.

“I’m guessing the ’bathroom’ doesn’t come with towels.” Clara huffed a weak breath and said nothing. She didn’t look at Isabella. Didn’t rise to the bait.

Just stayed there, half-submerged and stubbornly silent, as if ignoring her was the last scrap of power she had left.

Isabella watched as the water around the witch rippled—a tiny, hopeful shimmer of heat—only to go flat and cold a second later.

Clara’s hands were submerged just beneath the surface, her fingers twitching in desperate patterns. She let out a low, frustrated snarl, her teeth clicking together.

She tried again, her face contorting with the effort to pull just a spark of warmth from the air, but all she got was a pathetic string of bubbles that vanished instantly.

Isabella felt a pang of pity that she knew Clara would hate. To bridge the awkward, icy gap, she tried for the one thing that usually anchored her in the real world.

“I, um… I realized I haven’t actually introduced myself,” Isabella said, her voice sounding small against the vast, dark backdrop of the trees. “I mean, I know your name. Obviously. And I know his name. But you don’t really know mine, right?”

Clara didn’t even flinch. She was staring at her own hands as if they were traitors, her breath hitching every time a new incantation died in her throat.

“It’s Isabella,” she continued, wincing at how cheerful she sounded in a literal swamp. Clara finally turned her head. Her white eyes were bloodshot, and the look she leveled at Isabella was so sharp it could have bled her.

“Do you truly think,” Clara rasped, her voice trembling with a mixture of exhaustion and rage,

“that I care what the pet calls itself? You are a girl without a wolf, bound to a King without a conscience. Your name is a footnote in a tragedy that hasn’t finished writing itself yet.”

She turned back to the water, her fingers clawing at the surface as she tried one last time to heat it.

Nothing. A single, cold tear tracked through the wet grime on her cheek. “I have no magic, and a stomach full of my own blood. I do not have the time, nor the mercy, to play house with a wolfless girl.”

Isabella bit her lip, she wanted to snap back—to tell Clara that being a wolfless girl didn’t mean she wasn’t a person but seeing how pitiful Clara was without her magic made Isabella take deep breaths before replying.

“Why are you so hateful to me?” Isabella’s voice was a demand, cutting through the damp mist of the lake.

“I have done nothing to you. I didn’t ask to be brought here, and I certainly didn’t ask to explode your house.”

Clara sighed deeply, sound that seemed to drain the last of her strength. She dropped her hands, giving up on the failed incantation, and let them float limply on the surface.

She raised her head slightly, her gaze as sharp as a razor despite her exhaustion. “You exist,” Clara replied, her voice dangerously low.

“You are the reason my magic is failing. You are the catalyst for everything that broke today.”

“No,” Isabella countered, her jaw setting. “You were hating on me even before the ritual went south. You looked at me like I was dirt the second our eyes met. Honestly, Clara, you seem to hate me even more than Lucian does and he’s the one who’s actually stuck with me.”

Clara went still. The silence stretched between them, thick and heavy, until the witch began to move toward her.

She didn’t stop until she was inches away, her pale, bloodshot eyes boring into Isabella’s red ringed ones.

“Let’s get one thing clear, Isabella,” Clara whispered, the name sounding like a curse on her tongue.

“I don’t hate you. Hate requires an investment of emotion you simply aren’t worth. But I don’t like you. I don’t like what you represent—a glitch in the natural order, a leash around the neck of a King who was meant for greatness.”

She leaned in closer, her cold breath fanning over Isabella’s face. “And don’t you think for a single second that because my magic is gone, you’ve won. Don’t think you’ll have him just because I’m weakened. I will scour every dark corner of this world, I will bleed myself dry to find a way to break this bond. And when I do…”

Clara’s hand suddenly shot out of the water, her wet fingers gripping Isabella’s chin with a strength that shouldn’t have been possible.

“Lucian is mine,” Clara hissed, her eyes wide and terrifyingly focused.

“He has always been mine. You are just a temporary distraction, a parasite on his power. I was his council and his confidante while your ancestors were still shivering in caves. I will get my magic back, and I will tear you out of his life like a weed.”

Isabella didn’t cower. She didn’t pull away. She stared back, her heart drumming against her ribs, but her gaze was steady.

“You’re pathetic,” Isabella said softly. “You’re more obsessed with a man who barely looks at you than you are with your own life. If he’s yours, why are you so afraid of me?”

Clara’s grip tightened for a heartbeat, her eyes landing to the mark on Isabella’s neck, she wanted to scratch it with her nails but that would be a death sentence so she shoved Isabella’s face away instead.

“I’m not afraid of you,” Clara rasped, turning her back. “I’m disgusted by the waste of him to not see what has been in front of him for years”

On the shore, the crunch of boots signaled Lucian’s return. He stood there, two heavy blankets draped over his arm, his eyes scanning the two women with a look of icy impatience.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep