Chapter 69: It will not start with me.

Chapter 69

The blue-black shadows of the room hadn’t yet retreated when Isabella’s eyes snapped open. The air felt charged, thick with a pressure that made the very oxygen feel heavy in her lungs.

Usually, the bond between her and Lucian was a one-way street of his cold dominance or her own frantic hunger.

But this morning, it was different. A restless vibration was leaking through the link—a cold, sharp spike of unease that didn’t belong to her.

Isabella sat up, her heart performing a slow, heavy thud against her ribs. She had felt Lucian angry, she had felt him possessive, and she had felt him terrifyingly calm. But she had never felt him uncertain.

What could possibly make a King feel like this? she wondered, her gaze drifting to the heavy oak door.

Is it because of tomorrow? Or is it because of what I kept seeing? Isabella days had been filled with visions of her doppelganger and that faceless man.

The “Void” in her chest was quiet, sated by the heavy dose of blood from the day before, but the silence was eerie. It felt like the eye of a hurricane.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed, her feet hitting the cold marble floor. She didn’t call for Clara.

She didn’t reach for the silk robe draped over the chair. Clad only in Lucian’s oversized shirt, which now felt more like a uniform than a garment, she walked toward the full-length mirror standing in the corner of the room.

The glass was foxed at the edges, reflecting the bruised light of the pre-dawn. Isabella stopped before it, her breath hitching.

She looked different again. It wasn’t just the paleness of her skin or the way her collarbones stood out like bluffs of ivory.

The blackened veins on her neck—the ones that had once looked like a spreading infection—had shifted.

They were elegant now, weaving into an intricate, lace-like pattern that hugged the curve of her throat, pulsing with a faint glow that matched her heartbeat.

But it was her hair that made her reach out and touch the glass. The tips of her white tresses were fading, turning a stark, ghostly gold that crept upward toward her shoulders.

It was the exact shade of her eyes. She leaned in closer, her fingers trembling as she pulled her hair back to see the mark more clearly.

Through the bond, a sudden wave of Lucian’s anxiety crashed over her—a mental image of a clock, its hands ticking toward midnight.

Tomorrow was her eighteenth birthday. The day they all have been waiting for when miraculously her fated mate would show and save her.

Tomorrow, the universe would decide if the blood he had poured into her was enough to overwrite her destiny.

The heavy click of the latch cut through the silence like a blade. Isabella jumped, her fingers instinctively clutching the collar of the oversized shirt.

She pulled the fabric tight, yanking it up toward her chin to hide the glowing lace of veins that now climbed her throat.

Lucian stepped into the room, dressed in a dark shirt and trousers but his hair was slightly disheveled, and his eyes carried a weary, fractured light.

He held the cup, the metallic scent of his blood preceding him like a dark shadow. He didn’t speak. He set the cup down on the small table near the mirror with a muffled clink, but his gaze never left her.

He walked toward her with a slow, deliberate gravity, stopping when the heat radiating from his body began to melt the chill on her skin.

They stood chest to chest, their reflections caught in the foxed mirror—a dark King and his ghostly mirror-image.

The unease she had felt earlier through the bond was deafening now; it was a physical vibration between them, a frantic ticking of a clock only he could hear.

Without a word, Lucian reached out. His fingers were cold as they brushed against her knuckles, which were still white from gripping the shirt.

“Don’t,” she whispered, but her voice lacked conviction. He ignored her, his hand moving with a slow, agonizing persistence until he pried her fingers away from the fabric.

He pushed the collar aside, baring her shoulder and the curve of her neck to the dim morning light.

His breath hitched. The veins hadn’t just changed color; they had migrated. They were no longer just on her neck; they were spreading like ivy across her collarbone, glowing with a ethereal pulse.

“They’ve increased,” he rasped, his voice sounding raw, as if he hadn’t spoken in hours. He traced the edge of the pattern with his thumb, and the bond in Isabella’s chest gave a sharp, longing thrum.

“The blood is no longer just anchoring you. It’s seeking the source. It’s trying to finish the bridge before the sun sets.”

Isabella looked at his reflection, seeing the way his jaw was set in a hard, desperate line. The uncertainty she had felt through the bond was pouring off him in waves now—a fear of loss that he was trying to choke out with silence.

“You feel it too, don’t you?” Isabella asked, her voice trembling as she finally looked him in the eye through the glass. “The ticking. The pressure.”

She turned in his arms, forcing him to look at her instead of her mark. The golden tips of her hair shimmered in the twilight, a stark contrast to his midnight gloom.

“Lucian,” she said, her heart hammering against her ribs. She swallowed hard, the question she had been terrified to ask finally burning its way out.

“Do you think… honestly… do you think I have a fated mate out there? Someone whose name is already written in my blood? Someone who could save us both from this bond?”

The silence that followed was suffocating. Lucian’s hand stayed on her neck, his thumb pressing into her pulse point as if he could hold her heart in place by sheer will alone.

His eyes searched hers, before he tore them away and walked back to the cup on the desk. He picked it up, his fingers tightening around the metal until his knuckles turned as white.

He stared into the dark, swirling depths of the liquid—his own essence, his own life—as if the answer were written in the reflection.

For a long moment, the only sound was the low whistle of the wind against the stone eaves. Lucian turned back to her, the weight of his gaze almost physical.

He didn’t answer right away. He walked back to her, the cup held out like an offering, or perhaps a shield.

“There must be,” he said, his voice dropping to a low rumble. The admission hung in the air, heavier than the silence that had preceded it.

It was the first time he hadn’t dismissed the possibility with a sneer or a display of royal arrogance.

“You goddess doesn’t create a soul like yours without a corresponding anchor,” he continued, stepping back into her personal space.

The scent of iron from the cup filled her senses, but the scent of cedar and jasmine still flickered at the edges of her mind.

“A space that large, a hunger that deep without a wolf… it was made for someone. It was carved out of you to fit a specific soul.”

He held the cup to her lips, his hand steadier than his voice. “But the universe is a cruel architect, Isabella. It gives us a name, but it doesn’t always give us the person. Sometimes the mate is born in the wrong century. Sometimes they are killed before they can find you. And sometimes…”

He paused, his gray eyes darkening until they were the color of a winter sea. “…sometimes, they are too weak to take you.”

He tilted the cup slightly, the warm liquid touching her lower lip. “Drink,” he commanded, though the sharp edge of his usual authority had been replaced by a quiet, desperate intensity.

Isabella took the cup, her hands shaking as she guided it to her mouth, she swallowed the metallic heat while watching Lucian’s face.

“What if it’s you?” Isabella laid out the possibility out. She had thought of it throughout her days of isolation. What if the mark wasn’t a mistake. But Lucian’s expression immediately hardened, the vulnerability vanishing behind a wall of cold, royal granite.

He took the empty cup from her hand “It would never be me,” he whispered, leaning in until his lips brushed against the shell of her ear, “Never in a million years would an unholy creature like me be bound to a moon worshiper. And it will not start with me.”

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