Chapter 72: Love.

Chapter 72

The driveway was a void of wet gravel and receding mist. The taillights of the King’s car had long since vanished into the darkness, leaving the North Wing in a silence so profound it felt as though the very stones were leaning in to eavesdrop on her heartbeat.

Isabella pressed her forehead against the cool glass, her breath blooming in a pale, fading cloud.

“I know you’re there,” she breathed, her voice barely a tremor. “I’ve felt you all day.”

For a long, agonizing moment, the woods remained a wall of black and gray, indifferent to her plea.

Then, as if the darkness itself had decided to exhale, the shadows beneath an oak began to shift.

The figure manifested into thin air. It was closer now—startlingly close, standing just where the manicured lawn surrendered to the wild rot of the forest.

It was a creature born of soot and nightmare, a silhouette that refused to hold a solid shape. It had no legs to tread the earth, drifting instead like a column of sentient smoke that refused to be scattered by the wind.

Its torso was a swirling vortex of charcoal vapors, and where arms should have been, tendrils of grey mist curled and lashed like slow-motion lightning.

The face was a blur, a featureless smudge of shifting fog, save for the eyes. Two orbs of deep, arterial red burned through the haze.

They weren’t mere lights; they were focal points of an ancient, terrifying intelligence. They locked onto Isabella with a softness that made the marrow in her bones turn to ice.

Isabella’s breath hitched. As the smoky entity drifted a few inches nearer, the mark on her neck erupted in a searing heat.

It wasn’t the sharp, iron-stinging pull of Lucian’s blood—it was deeper. It was the sound of a drum being struck in a vacuum. It was the feeling of a missing piece of her soul finally screaming in recognition.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

The clock in the distant hallway chimed the half-hour. Eleven-thirty. The countdown had reached its final, desperate stretch.

Isabella looked back at the heavy door, thinking of the doubled locks and the fading witch standing guard on the other side.

She could feel the “blight” in her chest expanding, but for the first time, it didn’t feel like it was rotting her.

It felt like it was acting as a vacuum, pulling the cedar-scented smoke through the glass, through the stone, and into her very lungs.

The figure in the yard raised a limb of shifting vapor, pressing a “hand” of smoke against the air.

Though no sound crossed the distance, a low, guttural vibration hummed in the back of Isabella’s skull—a voice that sounded like shifting earth and rising tides.

“Isabella.” Isabella backed away from the window, her gold-tipped hair practically luminous in the gloom.

She looked at the shadowy creature in shock, this wasn’t that voice that invaded her head and disappears, this wasn’t Lucain’s either.

This one felt close, real, anchoring. The shadowy creature drifted another inch closer, the edges of its form fraying into the mist like ink dropped in water.

It stopped just at the line where the garden’s torchlight died, a movement of smoke and red embers.

“My dear Isabella,” the voice vibrated again. It didn’t travel through her ears; it bloomed inside her chest, right in the center of the hollow ache she had carried since the day she was born.

Isabella pressed her trembling fingers against the glass, her voice coming out as a fractured whisper. “Who are you? How do you know my name?”

The creature’s red eyes flared, pulsing in time with the mark on her neck. “It is me, my love. I have waited through the silence of centuries to hear you speak again.”

“My love?” Isabella staggered back, her heart performing a frantic, irregular rhythm. What the heck is he talking about?

In her head, the word felt heavy, dangerous, and utterly wrong for a creature that looked like a nightmare.

Was this her fated mate? Was this what the moon goddess felt was her soulmate? Isabella watched as the figure shifted, the smoke swirling faster for a moment before it went still once more, anchored to the dark earth of the forest.

“I don’t know you,” she said, her voice rising with a desperate edge of defiance. “I don’t know what you are. You’re a shadow. You’re… you’re smoke.”

“Am I?” The vibration in her mind softened, turning into a low, melodic hum that made her knees feel weak.

“Have you forgotten the cliff, Isabella? Have you forgotten the scent of the rain before the storm breaks? You’ve searched for me in every dream, just as I have searched for you in the dark.”

Isabella froze. Her mind raced back to the faceless man. The one who stood on the edge of the world.

The one who had watched her doppelgänger with a devotion so fierce it had made Isabella weep in her sleep.

A strange, terrifying calm began to wash over her—the exact same peace she had felt when her double passed through her.

It was a stillness that felt like home, a silence that felt like a sanctuary. But as she looked at the swirling, legless vortex of vapor outside, the logic of her waking mind fought back.

“You don’t look like him,” she whispered, her eyes searching the blurring fog of the creature’s face.

“The man in my dreams… he had a body. He had arms to hold her. He stood on the ground. You… you aren’t him.”

“This form is but a veil, a remnant of what the Unholy King has tried to burn away,” the voice replied, tinged with an ancient, echoing sorrow.

“He feeds you his blood to blind you, to anchor you to his stone and his iron. But your soul remembers the truth. Your soul remembers us.”

The creature leaned forward, and for a split second, the smoke seemed to settle into the ghost of a human silhouette—broad shoulders, a tall stature, the hint of a hand reaching out.

“I am the rain you smell in a dry castle, Isabella. I am the cedar in your winter. I am the mate the stars promised you before the first King ever drew a breath.”

Isabella’s breath hitched. She looked at the red eyes, and for the first time, she didn’t see a predator.

She saw a reflection of the same loneliness she felt. Outside, the wind picked up, howling through the trees, but inside the room, the temperature plummeted.

Frost began to creep across the windowpane in the shape of delicate, silver ferns. “Eleven-thirty-five,” the voice murmured. “The King is at his feast, drinking to a future that does not belong to him. Come to me, my love. Let me show you what had happened to our love.”

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep