Chapter 60: Age

Chapter 60

The air in the office was suffocating—heavy with the smell of old paper and the faint, metallic edge of Lucian’s fraying temper.

He did not speak. He did not look at Marco. He did not need to.

The silence itself was jagged, broken only by the frantic whisper of parchment as Lucian tore through volume after volume, ancient spines cracking beneath his hands.

Books on werewolf ancestry, lunar rites, forbidden bonds—he dragged them from shelves and cast them aside with growing impatience.

Marco stood guard by the heavy oak doors, his expression hidden behind his helm. He watched his King—a being who had stood unshaken before armies and gods alike—pace and search like a man chasing a truth that refused to be caught.

To Marco, it all felt unnecessary.

He had smelled the girl.

There had been no pine, no musk of the wild. No spark of the Moon’s favor. No trace of the beasts Lucian now buried himself in texts to understand.

Isabella, by every instinct Marco possessed, was human. A fragile thing of glass and bone that had somehow survived a blight that should have reduced her to ash.

And yet…from what he tried understanding…Lucian had marked her. Marco’s gaze followed the way his sire’s fingers clenched around the edge of a hide-bound book, knuckles whitening as if he might tear the cover clean in two.

Whatever Lucian was searching for, Marco knew it had everything to do with that girl—and the living mark burned into her neck.

Lucian stopped abruptly. His eyes fixed on a passage in a tome titled The Lunar Shadow.

When two non-fated souls form a bond—

His finger dragged slowly beneath the line, as though pressure might force the truth to bleed from the page.

—the only method of severance lies in the discovery of the true fated pair, once the bonded party comes of age.

Lucian stilled.

“Of age?”

The words left his mouth as a low, dangerous murmur. His brow furrowed, jaw tightening as irritation bled into something colder, something far less familiar.

He had lived for centuries. He understood power, conquest, the brutal arithmetic of sovereignty. But the intricate, almost fickle biology of werewolves—their bonds, their rites, their Moon-cursed thresholds—had never interested him.

Until now.

“Age,” he repeated, quieter this time. He did not know hers. He had never asked. To be precise he had never cared to.

She had been prey. Nothing more. A body to drain, a life to extinguish to steady his own hunger. There had been no intention beyond survival, no design beyond blood.

And yet….The texts before him suggested something far worse than an accident.

If Isabella had not yet reached the age then what he had done was not merely a misstep. It was a violation of timing. A bond forced too early. A graft made before the soul had finished forming.

Like tearing open a bud and demanding it bloom. Lucian’s grip tightened until the ancient paper groaned beneath his fingers. He had never wanted a bond.

Certainly not one forged without consent, without intent and never with someone so far beneath his power, his station, his world. He paced again, fury now threaded with something sharp and unfamiliar. Confusion. Calculation. Consequence.

Marco remained silent, an unmoving body, watching the tension carve itself into the set of Lucian’s shoulders.

His King was brilliant—a master of war and manipulation—but here, surrounded by lunar laws and half-myths, Lucian looked like a man trying to navigate a map of a country that did not exist.

“Marco,” Lucian said at last, not lifting his gaze from the page. “What is the age of transition for the Moon-worshipers?”

“Eighteen, Sire,” Marco answered without hesitation. “They call it the Awakening. Before that, the soul is considered unfinished—nothing but breath and the hope of love.”

Lucian went still. If she had not yet crossed that threshold, then her true bond—her destined one—remained veiled. Untouched. Waiting.

And until that day came… The mark he had never intended to give might pull them both to a mistake neither of them had chosen forever.

A bond born not of fate but of hunger. Lucain’s hand tightened. There had been no ritual. No moonlight. No conscious choice to claim.

Only the primal roar of his own hunger and the terrifyingly sweet pull of her pulse. So why did the mark take root? Why did the universe decide that his dark, sovereign essence was the perfect filler for her empty space?

He stood up abruptly, the heavy chair scraping against the stone floor with a screech that set the room’s stagnant air vibrating.

He didn’t return the book back to the table Instead, he kept it clamped in one hand, his knuckles white against the dark binding.

“Eighteen,” he repeated, the word tasting like ash as he paced the room. “A fledgling.” His voice dropped. “I marked a child of the Moon before she could even howl.”

He said it aloud—for Marco to hear.

Marco remained silent. Too silent. Lucian stopped mid-step. “Speak,” he said without turning, his voice stripped of command but not authority. “State whatever is in your mind, Marcos. I don’t bite.”

Marco stiffened at the use of his full name. It wasn’t a threat. It was an invitation.

Lucian felt it—the hesitation. The weight of unsaid words pressing against the air like a held breath.

Marco’s face was composed, but his eyes were sharp with something dangerously close to curiosity. “You want my thoughts, Sire,” he began slowly, “or my honesty?”

Lucian’s mouth twitched. “If I wanted comfort, I would summon a priest. Speak plainly.”

Marco exhaled through his nose. “Then I will say this: nothing about what happened follows known law. I have guarded you since your awakening. I have seen you feed, kill, enthrall, and discard. You have never marked prey. Not once.”

Lucian’s jaw tightened. “You were weakened when you took her blood,” Marco continued, emboldened now. “Starved. Newly awakened from your slumber. Your control was… not at its peak.”

“And how,” Lucian cut in sharply, turning at last, “would you know what happened when you were not there?”

Marco met his gaze evenly. “Because you have never said what really happened that day and from there on our you had been in a foul mood.”

The words landed heavier than accusation ever could. Lucian looked away. The room felt smaller now. Claustrophobic.

Lucian didn’t respond to Marco’s assessment. He didn’t have to. The truth was written in the way the air seemed to boil around him.

Marco was right; Lucian had been a creature of pure, unfiltered instinct that day. He had been a predator returning from the grave, and in his desperation to fill the hollow ache in his own soul, he had accidentally marked her.

He shoved past the heavy oak doors of the office. Marco followed a half-step behind.

He needed to go see Isabella and ask for her age.

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