Chapter 67: Peace

Chapter 67

The room felt too small. The air of the North Wing, usually so cold was suddenly thick with the heat radiating from Lucian’s body.

His hand remained a heavy, grounding anchor on her shoulder, his fingers twitching as if he wanted to pull her closer but was forcing himself to stay back.

“Breathe, Isabella,” he repeated, his gray eyes searching hers with a terrifying intensity. “You seemed to be gone. Your eyes were open, but your were frozen in state.”

Isabella couldn’t stop the trembling. The feeling of her doppelgänger passing through her like a winter draft still lingered in her chest, making her own skin feel like a costume she didn’t fit into.

She looked down at the blackened, burnt-out halves of Clara’s stone in her lap. They were cold now. No light or warmth coming from it.

“I saw… myself.” Isabella whispered, her voice sounding like dry parchment. Lucian’s looked confused at her words but he didn’t ask if she was okay.

He didn’t ask if she was hurt. He reached out, his thumb catching a stray tear she hadn’t realized had fallen, his touch surprisingly calloused and hot against her skin.

“And where did you see yourself?” he asked, genuinely curious to what she would say. Isabella shook her head slowly, the frustration of the blurred image still stinging.

She didn’t want to sound crazy but she didn’t want to keep this to herself anymore, what if something is seriously wrong with her.

“I saw myself on a bed.” Lucain looked over to the bed in the room but Isabella quickly continued “No…not this bed, it was different,” Isabella hurried to explain, her words tumbling out as she tried to catch the fading fragments of the vision.

“The room was older, colder. And there was a man. He was with me—not with me now, but with that other version of me. He was holding me like… like he was afraid the world would end if he let go.”

Lucian’s hand dropped from her shoulder as he stood up, his height once again casting a long, intimidating shadow over her. His brow furrowed, and a flicker of skepticism crossed his face.

“Isabella, you have spent Four days in this room,” he said, his voice regaining its cool, measured tone.

“My blood is a powerful narcotic for a human body. It is ancient, dense, and carries the weight of a thousand years. It is common for the mind to fracture under its influence—to hallucinate, to weave together dreams born of fever and the ’Void’s’ hunger.”

“It wasn’t a hallucination,” she snapped, her frustration flaring. “I wasn’t just dreaming, Lucian. I could feel the silk. I could smell the jasmine in the air. I felt the floor beneath my feet.”

Lucian let out a sharp, dismissive exhale. “You felt the stone in your hand. Your mind simply filled in the blanks to escape the reality of your confinement. It’s a defense mechanism. Your brain is trying to protect you from the ’Blight’ by taking you somewhere else.”

“This wasn’t the first time!” The admission stopped him mid-turn. Lucian froze ashes looked back at her, his eyes narrowed into shards of flint. “What do you mean, the first time?”

Isabella swallowed hard, the memory of the cliff-side rising up to haunt her. “It wasn’t a narcotic dream, Lucian,” Isabella said softly, her voice dropping to a low, trembling register as she looked up at him from the floor.

She gripped the blackened fragments of the stone so hard the soot smeared into her palms. “I lied to you. Back then, when I woke up from that first vision… I told you it was nothing. But I saw myself, not really saw it like this one but it was me, I was in the body the first time, laying on a floor covered in blood, my blood.”

Lucian froze. The skepticism that had been hardening his features only moments ago shattered, replaced by a stillness that was far more unnerving.

He didn’t move to help her up this time; he stood like a statue carved from winter ice, his gray eyes narrowing until they were mere slivers of silver.

“Your blood?” he whispered, the words barely audible.

“Yes,” Isabella pressed, her heart hammering against her ribs. “My blood but that scene quickly changed to me standing on a cliff and I saw that same man whose face I can never quite reach. The man. He told me I shouldn’t be there. He reached for me, and I felt a longing so deep it made my real heart ache.”

She crawled a few inches closer to him, her voice desperate. “And today, I saw this again. In a room that smelled of jasmine and cedar. They were happy, Lucian. They were mated. It wasn’t just a bond of blood or survival; it was a love so deep that I could taste it and when she passed through me, I felt her peace. I felt the health in her skin that I haven’t felt in years.”

Lucian’s reaction was not what she expected. He didn’t scoff. He didn’t tell her she was losing her mind.

Instead, he turned away from her, his boots clicking sharply on the stone as he paced toward the window.

Lucian stood with his back to her, his large frame silhouetted against the pale morning light filtering through the glass.

His knuckles were white where they gripped the masonry, and for a long moment, the only sound in the room was the ragged cadence of Isabella’s breathing.

He didn’t know what to believe. To call it a vision was to acknowledge a psychic link he hadn’t sanctioned; to call it a memory was to admit that the girl before him might be the vessel for a soul far older and more dangerous than a simple wolfless human.

The logic of a King warred with the instincts of a predator. He wanted to dismiss her words as the ramblings of a mind poisoned by the Blight, yet the conviction in her voice—the way she described that “peace”—tapped into a dark, buried fear he had carried since the moment he marked her.

He wasn’t just feeding her blood to keep her heart beating; he was feeding her the history of a Sovereign line.

And if that history was waking up, it was doing so with a face he didn’t recognize and a love he didn’t provide.

“A love so deep you could taste it,” Lucian repeated, his voice barely a rasp. He turned slowly, his eyes no longer just gray, but swirling with a violent, possessive storm.

The confusion was gone, replaced by a cold, hard clarity that made the air in the room turn brittle.

He crossed the distance between them in two long strides. He didn’t kneel this time. He looked down at her, his shadow swallowing her small form where she sat on the floor amidst the soot and broken stone.

“You speak of peace and health as if they are gifts from a ghost,” he said, his voice dropping into a dangerous, vibrating register. “You look for comfort in a cliffside that wants to swallow you and a man who has no face. You think you are seeing a sanctuary, Isabella, but you are only seeing a lure.”

He reached out, his hand hovering near her face before he pulled it back, clenching it into a fist at his side.

The scent she had described—the jasmine, the cedar, the rain—seemed to provoke him, causing the very shadows in the corners of the suite to writhe.

“The Council is at my gates, whispering of galas and hidden weaknesses,” he continued, his eyes locking onto hers with a piercing intensity.

“The Blight is trying to rot you from the inside out. And you are here, chasing shadows of a life that isn’t yours.”

He stepped back, his posture rigid, the regal mask sliding back into place with a terrifying finality.

He looked at the window, then back at her, his expression twisting into something that looked like a warning and felt like a sentence.

“The cedar, jasmine, and rain you smell… it isn’t good,” he stated, his voice flat and devoid of the confusion from moments before.

“It is the scent of the grave opening for you. Forget the cliff. Forget the bed. If you want to survive the eighteenth, you have to stay in the present. With me.”

He didn’t wait for her to argue. He didn’t offer his hand to help her up from the cold floor. He turned and strode toward the door.

The lock clicked into place with a heavy finality, leaving Isabella alone in the silence—still smelling the rain that Lucian insisted was death.

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