Chapter 86: Motive

Chapter 86

Lucian’s hand closed around nothing but the vanishing tendrils of black smoke. He let out a sound that was less a scream and more the roar of a wounded animal. it was so loud that it ripped through the quiet of the estate.

He stood at the place, head bowed. “Why?” he whispered into the dirt, his voice trembling with a vulnerability that would have terrified his kind.

“I accepted you… I accepted the Bond.” Lucian rasped, he stood in the center of the scorched earth, his regal suit tattered, looking like a king who had just watched his throne turn to ash.

It was a cruel irony that tasted worse than the blood at the gala. He was the Sovereign; he was the one who should have been the judge of their fate.

He should have been the one to decide if she was worthy, the one to potentially reject a bond that linked his ancient soul to a girl barely out of her teens.

“I was supposed to be the one to choose,” he snarled at the empty air, his fists clenching until his claws drew blood from his own palms.

He remembered the way she had looked at him just hours ago—the way she had tentatively asked if it was possible they were mates before she reached her eighteenth year.

She had been the one searching for a reason to belong to him, the one looking for a sign from fate.

And now, at the stroke of midnight, when the universe finally gave them what she had once seemed to crave, she had thrown it back in his face.

She had rejected him. Not for freedom, not for a new life, but for a dead man. “How?” he hissed, the word fueled by a terrifying confusion.

” How is he breathing when I burned the world he lived in?” The soft crunch of leaves and a familiar, steady heartbeat signaled an approach.

A footstep came to his side, hesitant yet persistent. “Lucian.”

Clara stood beside him, her face pale, her eyes wide with a mixture of fear and pity. She had watched what went down, hiding behind a tree as everything unfolded.

She had never seen the mighty king of the unholy like this—unguarded, broken, and vibrating with a raw energy that threatened to level the remaining trees.

Lucian didn’t turn to her. He didn’t even know his claws were plunged into his palm. The physical pain was nothing compared to the agony surging through the bond.

“She called me a murderer,” Lucian whispered, his voice sounding small in the vastness of the woods. “She called me a rapist. Who… who does she think I am?”

He turned his red, blazing eyes toward Clara, seeking a denial he couldn’t find in his own memories.

The centuries of blood he had spilled, the way he had accidentally marked Isabella captive, the blood he had forced her to drink to stabilize the Blight—it all rushed back to him, no where in his memories had he killed in front of her nor violate anyone.

Through the bond, he could still feel her panic, her desperate need for Caleb to take her further away. It was a cold, sharp blade twisting in his gut.

“Why…Why Clara?”

“He arrived before the stroke of midnight,” Clara whispered, her voice trembling as she looked at the scorched circle where the shadows had recently danced.

“I was watching from the terrace. I thought… I truly thought he was the one the universe had sent for her. Her mate. He didn’t walk through the gates, Lucian. He bled out of the air like ink in water. I watched him transform from a column of smoke into… a human”

She took a shaky breath, her eyes darting to the empty space, giving Lucain space. “He seemed like a demon. The power he radiated—it wasn’t like that of an unholy nor of the moon worshipers.”

Lucian’s head snapped toward her, his jaw tight as he fought to suppress the shuddering breath that threatened to reveal his total undoing.

His pride was a wounded thing, bleeding internally just as his palms bled externally. “Hea is no demon,” Lucian said, his voice dropping into a low, lethal register that made the grass frost over. “He is my brother. My dead brother and you of all people should had known demons don’t have mates.”

Clara flinched, bowing her head. “…I didn’t know… I thought if he was her mate, I had no right to interfere with fate. I didn’t think he was a demon then.”

Lucian turned away, staring at his blood-stained hands. The word murderer echoed in his skull, overlapping with the memory of the sword sliding through Caleb’s neck centuries ago.

“I keep remembering I was the one who killed him but I don’t know why.” Lucain muttered, more to himself than to Clara.

He squeezed his eyes shut, forcing his mind back into the corridors of his past. He could see it all—the flickering torchlight of the old stone corridors, the smell of damp earth and iron, the way Caleb had looked at him with those same piercing blue eyes.

He remembered the weight of the sword in his hand and the sickeningly smooth slide of the blade through flesh.

He remembered the act perfectly. But the reason was a void.

“I remember the blood on my boots,” Lucian whispered, his voice sounding hollow, as if he were speaking from the bottom of a grave.

“I remember the way the wind howled through the courtyard when he fell. But I don’t know why I was holding the sword, Clara. I don’t know what he said to me. I don’t know what I said to him.”

Clara remained silent. She watched the man who claimed to be the master of all history and had lived it all looked genuinely lost.

“I remember every battle,” Lucian continued, his eyes snapping open, glowing with a frantic, desperate light. “I remember the face of every peasant I drained in the First Age. I remember the smell of the smoke when the kingdom burned. I remember my life before the Change—before I was ever a blood-sucker. I remember our mother’s voice. I remember Caleb’s laugh.”

He let out a sharp, bitter breath, his hand moving to his temple as if he could claw the truth out of his skull.

“But the moment I struck him… the lead-up to that moment is just… gone. Like a page torn out of a book.”

He looked at the spot where Caleb had stood just minutes ago, holding Isabella with such natural, undisputed authority.

The word murderer that Isabella had hurled at him wasn’t just a label anymore; it was a riddle he couldn’t solve.

If he didn’t know why he killed Caleb, how could he be sure Isabella’s accusation was wrong?

“Lucain,” Clara whispered, her eyes growing wide as an intense sense of power surged into her.

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