Shattered Bonds A Second Chance Mate (by Yui) novel Chapter 183

Chapter 183

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CID

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The air was cool that night, carrying the faint perfume of wet grass and distant pine.

Lanterns along the courtyard guttered, their flames dim against the pull of the moon above. I had walked this path a hundred times – from the kitchens to the training yard, across the stones worn smooth by centuries of wolves drilling their bodies into weapons. Tonight it felt different. Too quiet.

I should have trusted Mika’s unease sooner.

My wolf had stirred the moment I stepped onto the yard’s edge, restless, pacing just beneath my skin.

And then I heard it.

“…if she will not fall to poison, then perhaps to something sharper.”

The words hissed through the night, sharp enough to cut.

My heart slammed into my

ribs.

I spun, my pulse crashing, and out of the shadows she came — Isolde.

Her hair was unbound, her eyes wild, her beauty twisted into something feral.

And in her hand, gleaming beneath the lantern light, was a blade.

The scent hit me before her arm swung. Metallic. Bitter. Wrong.

Wolfsbane.

‘Move!‘ Mika roared inside me. “That blade means death!‘

My body jerked back, instincts screaming, but I wasn’t fast enough. The silver gleam streaked toward me-

Steel met steel. Sparks flew.

Audrey.

She had been only steps away, as she always was, my shadow in the dark. She slammed into the path of the strike, her sword raised, her eyes blazing.

Clang!

The clash rang across the yard, a scream of metal that echoed in my bones.

“Traitor,” Audrey spat, forcing Isolde back with a surge of strength.

Isolde shrieked, twisting her blade, trying to break free, trying to get to me. Her face was twisted with

Chapter 183

“She doesn’t deserve him!” she screamed, spittle flying. “He was mine! Mine! Before she ever-”

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The words broke into a guttural cry as Audrey shoved harder, sparks bursting where their blades locked.

“You dare raise a weapon against the Luna?” Audrey’s voice was low and lethal. “I’ll cut your tongue out before you finish the sentence.”

But then she does something unthinkable, she stabs the blade to herself, much to make me and Audrey frown

in shock.

What?

What is she doing?!

Then she screamed so loud, asking for help.

The scream split the night like a struck bell.

For a heartbeat the yard stopped being a place of stone and night air and became nothing but sound jagged, and all aimed at me.

—

raw,

Isolde’s cry climbed and climbed until lungs that had known only the quiet of a life in which she’d been tolerated now bared themselves to the moon: “HELP! HELP! NO, PLEASE LUNA, DON’T KILL ME, PLEASE!”

Time bent.

The sharp flash of steel and the scent of wolfsbane were there, but behind everything else I felt the infinitesimal shift: the moment she stabbed herself was not sloppy. It was practiced into a wound.

Audrey’s sword rang on the cobblestones.

– an accusation made

She staggered back a hair, eyes wide with a combination of shock and fury. For a breath I saw the impossible

–

– the woman who had been between my ribs and the world, my defender, looking suddenly like an

accomplice in a story written by someone else.

Faces appeared in the doorway as if called by the very pitch of Isolde’s cry: sentries, servants, two soldiers, Marlow racing down the steps and then spurred into motion with an unstoppable chemistry.

A dozen pairs of eyes fixed on us all, ears straining for the story they wanted to believe.

In their faces I read the same immediate, stupid human question everyone asks when they see a woman scream and a weapon: Who is the villain here?

Isolde collapsed in a heap, clutching at her chest where a red bloom spread between her fingers. Her hair clung wet to her forehead.

She made a spectacle of pain with a devotion so theatrical it might have been training had it not been heartbreaking to watch. She looked up at the first faces that leaned close the ones whose children she might have once soothed, the men who had watched her in the square – and she painted them the picture

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Chapter 183

they’d been primed to see.

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“She stabbed me!” she sobbed, eyes wide and wet, guilt drained from her face and replaced with cunning sorrow. “The Luna–she tried to kill me! She and her guard–look how she held the blade–she used her guard to pin me-” Her voice became a high keening. “She tried to kill me!”

The first cries I heard were not of horror but of outrage.

Someone shouted that Luna should be brought to answer. Heads twisted toward me. The air around my shoulders thickened with a dangerous heat. I had a moment – a narrow, thin, impossible moment to step back, to show the world who I really was.

–

I knew what she wanted: an image people could carry to their hearths and cluck their tongues at: the Luna who harmed a woman in his name.

That image would be carried like a torch and fed gossip until it was a bonfire.

—

That was the point: to make me the accused and to send people away from asking the right questions- where did the blade come from? Who had given Isolde the powder? Who had fed her the words that made her believe she was a victim and not the maker of her own misfortune?

I saw it all in a flash between the placements of sentences and the pattern of Isolde’s sobs. She was acting to – but because people trap me. Not because I was fragile – though fear had a way of seeding itself in bones prefer the story that is simple. People would rather take a picture than hold a mirror.

“Get her away from him!” someone cried.

A dozen voices answered with the single–mindedness of a mob. Accusation gives people a purpose. Purpose is intoxicating.

Francesco moved then, but not like a man who needs to cross a yard to be present.

He moved like a tide that knows how to fold itself around a stone.

His arrival was soundless at first; then his boot touched the stone and the yard remembered what it meant to be under a king’s watch. The same black eyes that could hush a hundred men went straight to me, and the surge of relief that followed was so hot it hurt. He was the place I went to be stitched.

He did not move to me first the way some men do. He came to me and then past me like a compass finding true north. He took one look at Isolde’s hands, at the cloth already reddening, and the way her eyes rolled for effect, and his jaw tightened as if he had been given a blade and chosen not to swing it.

“Hold,” he said, and the single short word was a law.

Marlow had already hurtled forward,

He was two steps from Isolde when the soldiers reached the woman half collapsed on the stones.

They moved with trained care; two of them folded their cloaks under her head, one kept a hand at the back of her neck as if it were a pulse they intended to steady. The scene looked like charity. That was Isolde’s entire design: to make the act of sheltering her look like confession against me.

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Chapter 183

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“Isolde-” Marlow’s voice was neither kind nor cruel. It was the voice of a man whose life is habitually devoted to finding the truth of a fight. “What did you do?”

She wailed harder. “She did this! She stabbed me! Don’t let her-” Her voice collapsed into a keening that was tuned perfectly to the human ear. “Please, someone–tell him–tell the King!”

That last sentence was the nail.

So, this is what she aims for.

She wanted the king, my Francesco and his courtiers present to see her fall and the Luna standing over her with a weapon in hand. The theater of betrayal is always best staged with royalty in attendance.

Francesco returned to my side fast but controlled, taking my face in his hands the way a man steadies a map.

The bone in his palm brushed my cheek, and I felt the tremble of him beneath the skin.

His eyes found mine and said, You are not alone.

I answered with a breath that said, I am here.

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