Chapter 54: Surviving on his blood.

Chapter 54

Isabella woke into pain. Not the sharp, screaming kind, but the heavy, distant ache of something already lost.

Cold stone pressed against her cheek. She tried to move and couldn’t. Her body felt wrong—disconnected—as though it belonged to someone else entirely.

When she opened her eyes, she wasn’t in the ruins of Clara’s cabin. She was lying on an unfamiliar floor, the marble smooth and pale, bleached by centuries of spectral footsteps.

She tried to lift her head, but her limbs felt like lead had been poured into her veins. Looking down, she didn’t see the modern clothes she had been wearing.

She saw tattered fabric, stained with red so bright and thick it looked like fresh paint. She was bleeding. Blood pooled beneath her ribs, spreading as if the ground itself were thirsty—drinking her in.

Her breath came shallow. Each inhale burned; each exhale felt thinner than the last. Then came the footsteps.

Above her, shadows flickered. She looked up, desperate for help, but the figures standing over her were a nightmare of anatomy.

They had no eyes. No mouths. Just smooth, pale surfaces where faces should have been, watching her life leak into the cracks of a castle that felt a thousand years away.

Fear crept in, settling into her chest like a familiar, crushing weight. “Help…” The word left her lips without sound.

One of the faceless figures stepped closer. Another turned away. A third raised a hand as if in silent judgment.

Then, just as suddenly as they had appeared, the world shattered. The floor vanished. The blood evaporated. The watchers dissolved into smoke.

Isabella was standing now. The air was violent, whipping her hair across her face. She stood on the edge of a jagged cliff, the ground dropping away into a churning, midnight sea.

The sky was a bruised purple, and the moon hung massive and bloody—low enough to touch, as if the Moon Goddess herself were leaning down to witness the end.

Her heart ached with a grief she didn’t understand. She wasn’t alone. Footsteps crunched on the gravel behind her.

Isabella turned. A man was walking toward her. He was tall, his silhouette familiar enough to make her heart stutter, but his face was a blur of shifting shadows.

The place refused to grant her the mercy of his features, but she felt him. The sheer gravity of his presence.

The way the space between them thrummed with the electricity of something unfinished. “You shouldn’t be here,” he said, though his lips didn’t move.

The faceless man reached out a hand. The air between them vibrated with a longing so intense it made Isabella’s physical heart ache in the waking world.

She wanted to run to him. She wanted to scream his name, but she didn’t know it—not this version of it.

The wind howled, tugging at her clothes, pulling her toward the abyss. Below, the darkness stirred, restless and hungry.

She reached for him without thinking, her soul reaching for its anchor, but just as her fingers brushed the shadow of his cheek, the cliff crumbled.

Isabella fell.

“Ahhh!” She plummeted into a void that smelled of copper and ancient fire, the weight of a thousand years pressing the air from her lungs.

“Isabella!”

Her eyes flew open with a scream of terror. Her fingers clawed at the silk sheets, desperate to catch herself from a fall that had ended centuries ago.

“Isabella?” Clara’s voice was a thunderclap, grounding her. Isabella’s back arched off the mattress, her lungs burning as she dragged in a desperate, rattling breath.

“Breathe,” a deeper voice commanded. Lucian was there, holding her like a lifeline. His weight pinned her down, his hands locking onto her wrists with bruising strength to stop her from clawing at the mark on her neck.

Isabella’s eyes darted frantically around the room. Her vision was swimming. The faceless man on the cliff was still superimposed over the man pinning her to the bed.

She saw Clara standing back, clutching a cup; she saw Marco by the door, his face a mask of uneasy duty. Finally, her gaze landed on Lucian.

“Lucian?” she wheezed. His name felt heavy, like a secret she wasn’t supposed to carry. The crimson in his eyes was vivid, pulsing with a raw, unshielded fear he couldn’t hide through the bond.

“I’m here.” His thumbs stroked the insides of her wrists, trying to steady her racing pulse. “What happened? What did you see?”

Isabella didn’t pull away. She leaned into his touch, her forehead dropping against his chest, seeking the heat of him to drown out the cold stone of the dream.

“Nothing,” she lied. She didn’t understand the images herself, and she didn’t want to sound like a fool or worse, a madwoman.

“Nothing,” she repeated, her voice muffled against the cold silk of his shirt. Lucian’s grip tightened on her wrists for a heartbeat—not in anger, but in a silent, frustrated protest.

Through the bond, he felt the lie, he knew the difference between a nightmare and a memory, but as he looked at the sheer exhaustion in her eyes, he found he couldn’t push.

“You don’t lie to a King, Isabella,” he whispered, his breath ghosting over her hair.

Isabella froze. The air in her lungs seemed to vanish for an entirely different reason. It was the first time—the very first time—he had ever called her by her name.

The sound of it echoed in her mind again, Isabella. He hadn’t called her “Wolf,” or “human,” or “Abomination” or “girl.” He had used her name.

Lucian didn’t push for the truth. He shifted his weight, and slid an arm behind her shoulders to help her sit up against the dark headboard.

“Marco,” Lucian said, his voice regaining its sharp, regal edge.

Marco moved slightly, but it was Clara who stepped forward, she looked exhausted, her eyes darting between the King and the girl he was treating with such terrifying tenderness.

She handed the cup to Lucian, who took it and held it to Isabella’s lips. The smell hit isabella before the liquid did.

It was thick, metallic, and cloyingly sweet, a scent that made the back of her throat seize. Isabella’s head jerked back, her eyes widening as she stared at the dark red liquid.

“Is that… blood?” she whispered, her voice laced with revulsion.

“It is,” Lucian answered simply. He didn’t pull the cup away. “Drink.”

Isabella looked from the cup to him, her stomach churning. “I’m not a vampire, Lucian. I don’t drink blood. I won’t.”

“This isn’t for hunger, Isabella,” Clara chimed in from the foot of the bed. She looked at the lavender veins on Isabella’s neck, which were beginning to throb with a dull, sickly heat again.

“The blight… it’s parasitic. Lucian’s blood anchored you in the cabin, but it’s being consumed. It’s fighting to get back to your heart, to turn your breath into ash again.”

Isabella’s hand went to her throat, feeling the unnatural heat beneath her skin. “My blood is the only thing the shadows fear,” Lucian said, his gaze dropping to the cup and then back to her.

“In the cabin, I gave it to you to save your life. Now, I give it to you to keep it. Every few hours, until we find a way to rip that filth out of you, you will take what I offer.”

The realization settled over her, She wasn’t just bonded to him by a curse or a mark; she was being kept alive by his literal essence.

She was becoming a part of him, one cup at a time. “I can’t,” she breathed, the image of the faceless man on the cliff flashing in her mind.

Was that Lucain? Was this why the longing felt so familiar? Lucian leaned in closer, his shadow falling over her.

His crimson eyes were steady, unyielding. “You can, and you will. I did not pull you back from the gates of death just to watch you walk back toward them because you find the cure distasteful.”

He pressed the rim of the cup against her lower lip, forcing the blood into her.

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