Shattered Bonds A Second Chance Mate (by Yui) novel Chapter 199

Chapter 199

Chapter 199

55 youchers.

It was the winter council, a night of snow like torn silk at the windows and heat like breath over a cup of wine in the hall.

The council tables were set with maps.

Totti had sent scouts east; they returned with word of Franco’s men gathering in a ravine where stags wintered.

The king turned to his sons.

“Franco looked at me,” Francesco said. “He said: ‘We can still end this with words. My father told him no more words. He sent me to the ravine to break the assembly. He kept Franco close.”

I could hear the next beat before he spoke it–the way Franco would never let himself be kept where eyes could weigh him.

“He came to my father’s chamber after council,” Francesco said. “He carried wine and an apology and a story about boys who shared a cradle. My father let him in. He did what fathers do–he chose love over suspicion one more time. The witch’s oil was in the cup. The poison was shaped like patience; it needed a cut to wake it.”

Francesco’s throat worked; the bond shivered hot and cold.

I slipped closer, pressed my forehead to his temple.

He breathed once toward me, gathered, and went on.

“My father’s Beta found him on the floor at dawn,” he said. “Still breathing. Barely. He had crawled from the desk where the wine waited to the window where the sky might be kind. The guards had not heard; the oil was quiet. I arrived before the healer.”

He closed his eyes.

He was not the King now, not the Executioner–just a son kneeling in a room that would never smell of cedar again.

“He looked at me,” Francesco whispered, “and put his hand on my face like I had fallen as a boy and scraped my knee. He said my name the way only my mother had. And then he said: ‘I was wrong about envy. I was wrong about blood. Listen to me now. You must end him.“”

He would never call it an order, but I heard the weight of a last will in those words.

The king had not asked his son to be merciful.

He had asked him to finish what he had not wanted to see begin.

“He died as the sun cut the snow to diamonds,” Francesco said. “His blood was not a flood. It was a line. It led to the window where there were footprints in the snow beneath. Franco’s.”

8:58 Mon, Sep 29 d

Chapter 199

I pressed my fingers to my mouth.

The fury was a clean thing; it tasted like iron.

But it was a poor cousin of the grief in his voice.

“And… What did you do?” I asked, though I knew.

77

55 vouchers.

“I did what I had been trained to do,” he said. “What I had been named to do. What he asked me to do.”

So, he went to war.

*****

The story of that war is written in the roots of trees from Italy to the Iron Mountains.

Witches told it bitterly to their daughters.

Wolves told it in howls that broke flocks and kept men from sleep.

It is not a story of clean lines and honor.

It is a story of brothers who shared a face and a mother and a season of laughter and then became weather aimed at breaking each other.

Franco moved like smoke through the packs that had bent to his promise.

He called himself a liberator.

He stood on stones in courtyards and spoke about the right of wolves to name their own kings.

He sent witches to curse river crossings and salt seeds in fields that fed Lycaon men. He burned the markers that set borders between wintering grounds.

Francesco moved like a river, quiet until it was a flood.

He did not speak in courts.

He went where Franco had promised freedom and found the knives those promises had placed in boys‘ hands. He disarmed them. Sometimes he killed them. He made a map of grief and duty and moved through it until other men’s pride had no more days to stand on.

“They say you took heads,” some Alpha would snarl years later in a tavern, arrogant with beer.

They would mean to curse him with the word.

They would not understand the mercy in the swiftness of it, the way he did not let men bleed for hours to make a point. He had been the Executioner. He had learned not to play with death. If a man must die, he must die once.

Towns fell.

Chapter 199

Alliances shifted like flocks when a hawk casts a shadow.

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Men who had cheered for Franco began to murmur about famine; men who had held to Totti remembered winters with grain.

Witches grew fewer at Franco’s side; the price of their magic came due in their bones.

The war grew tired of itself.

“And Isolde?” I asked quietly, because love is always the battlefield with the best strategy.

“She stayed,” Francesco said. “That’s part of how I know she wasn’t only a blade Franco held. Or perhaps she was faithful to her role. She saw what I returned as. I wanted to hide that from her; she would not permit it. She washed my hair when I could not lift my arms. She took a basin from a healer and made herself a wall between me and the eyes that would name me monster. She loved some story about me. Maybe the man. Maybe the idea that she could redeem a name.”

“Franco used it,” I said.

“He did,” Francesco answered. “He sent letters with her seal. He wrote words to me in a hand that pretended to be hers. He signed my name to promises I had not made. He made both of us a script.”

There was a battle the bards later called the Blue Field because the cornflowers had come early and were smashed under the feet of men and horses until the field looked like a saint’s broken window. Franco was there. Francesco was there. Totti was in the ground, and the monarch of a house of wolves had become two sons bleeding their father’s prayers into dirt.

“Did you meet him then?” I asked, breath thin.

“No,” Francesco said. “He let his generals stand and made himself smoke again. He wanted me angry enough to pursue without looking down. He wanted me to fall into a hole he’d cut in the ground and call it fate.”

He did not.

He had learned patience at a different library than Franco had chosen.

He let Franco’s army run its course until its ankles swelled and its lungs burned and then he chased.

He chased for months.

The war moved north, then west, then south again. Men who had never seen a Lycan learned why their fathers had taught them to fear.

Men who had never seen Franco realized a liberator who eats is just another king.

And then, finally, Franco grew tired of running–or grew certain he could end what he had started.

He chose ground and wrote to Francesco in his own hand for the first time.

“Brother,” Francesco said, reciting from memory. “Come and belong to the history you think you protect. I will stand on the red hill. You will know me by the sword, since you never knew me by the heart.”

0.30 Mon, Sep 29

Chapter 199

“The red hill,” I whispered. “Where is that?”

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“South of Lyon,” he said. “It was spring. The poppies had come. I remember thinking it was obscene to bleed where things had come to flower. But it was right for us.”

He did not bring an army.

Neither did Franco.

They brought witnesses. Betas. Priests. A few witches, thin and bright as needles.

No one would be able to lie about it later.

The brothers would write their end where the world could hold it with both hands and call it true.

“What did he look like?” I asked, though he had told me before–mirror.

“Like me,” he said. “But thinner. Hungrier. The smile was wrong at the edges. He had sharpened it too often.”

“Did he speak?”

“He did not stop speaking.” Francesco’s mouth tugged–half–grimace, half–pity. “He told me I had stolen his fate in the cradle. He told the priests that the gods had mistaken our names and I had traded bracelets with him and pretended to be the elder. He told the Betas that our father had loved him more and had given me the blade to save his favorite from dirty hands.”

“And you?” I asked softly.

“I told him nothing,” he said. “I did what I had always done. I listened. And then, when he raised his sword, I raised mine.”

He did not dress it in poetry.

He did not give me the fancy footwork of heroes.

He told me the truth as if it were a bowl he had learned to carry without spilling: Franco was fast. Francesco was steady. Franco burned hot. Francesco waited. Franco always believed the first blow is the story; Francesco had learned the last is.

“He cut my face,” Francesco said, touching the faint scar near his jaw that most people mistake for a line the sun left. “He laughed.” He looked at me. “He had the same laugh as a boy when we stole pears. It made me sick.”

“How did it end?” I whispered, though my heart had begun to run ahead of me and knew.

“He made the same mistake he had made all his life,” he said. “He believed I wanted the crowd to see me win. He circled to place the sun at my eyes so I would turn and give him my throat for the applause. I stepped into the light instead. I took the sun in my eyes and the shadow in my hands and I put my blade where his pride lives.” He swallowed. “He fell.”

I kept my breath in my chest so it would not betray him by shaking.

Chapter 199

EBB Voucher

“He said my name,” Francesco whispered. “Not the one the court used. The one my mother used when we were mud and knees. He said it like a question. And I-” His voice broke.

He bent his head, and I pressed my mouth to his temple and closed my eyes against the sting in mine.

“I answered the only way I could. I ended him.”

He did not say I killed my brother.

He said I ended him, because this was not a hunter boasting of his quarry.

It was a son of a house extinguishing his own mirror because a man dying in a room of winter had asked him to keep honor from rotting.

“The priests wrote it as justice,” he said after a long time, voice hoarse. “The witches wrote it as curse. The wolves wrote it as proof that Lycaons eat their own. I wrote it as obedience.” He opened his hand, palm up, and stared at the lines there as if they might take the weight from him. “And then I went home alone.”

I slid my hand into his, interlaced our fingers, and pressed them against his heart.

“You did not go home alone,” I said. “You carried an entire house home with you, and that is loneliness disguised as duty. But it’s not the same as being alone.”

He turned his face then, and what looked back at me was the boy the world had made executioner too early.

Gold filled with wet light.

I kissed the corner of his eye and tasted salt.

“And Isolde?” I asked softly, because stories choose their own timing and sometimes healing needs the whole of it..

“She stayed long enough to make the court believe love had survived the winter,” he said, and there was no spite in him, only a brittle mercy. “Then the wolves who had pledged to Franco began to slither into negotiations with me and her interest thinned. She said the history in my house was too heavy for a girl who wanted to be light.” His mouth made an old, tired shape. “She said she deserved a life that wasn’t written in my father’s blood and that she found her fated mate. Then, she left.”

“Franco sent her?” I asked.

“Franco was gone,” he said. “But he had taught her to look at me like a door. Once she realized it opened to more graves than gardens, she sought a different house.”

I lowered my forehead to his.

Mika breathed warm in my bones, sorrow and pride twined.

We stayed like that for a long time.

The fire slept, the room listened, the night outside lay like a calm dog at the threshold.

8:59 Mon, Sep 29

Chapter 199

I pressed my fingers to my mouth.

The fury was a clean thing; it tasted like iron.

But it was a poor cousin of the grief in his voice.

“And… What did you do?” I asked, though I knew.

1450 Vouchere

“I did what I had been trained to do,” he said. “What I had been named to do. What he asked me to do.”

So, he went to war.

The story of that war is written in the roots of trees from Italy to the Iron Mountains.

Witches told it bitterly to their daughters.

Wolves told it in howls that broke flocks and kept men from sleep.

It is not a story of clean lines and honor.

It is a story of brothers who shared a face and a mother and a season of laughter and then became weather aimed at breaking each other.

Franco moved like smoke through the packs that had bent to his promise.

He called himself a liberator.

He stood on stones in courtyards and spoke about the right of wolves to name their own kings.

He sent witches to curse river crossings and salt seeds in fields that fed Lycaon men. He burned the markers that set borders between wintering grounds.

Francesco moved like a river, quiet until it was a flood.

He did not speak in courts.

He went where Franco had promised freedom and found the knives those promises had placed in boys‘ hands. He disarmed them. Sometimes he killed them. He made a map of grief and duty and moved through it until other men’s pride had no more days to stand on.

“They say you took heads,” some Alpha would snarl years later in a tavern, arrogant with beer.

They would mean to curse him with the word.

They would not understand the mercy in the swiftness of it, the way he did not let men bleed for hours to make a point. He had been the Executioner. He had learned not to play with death. If a man must die, he must die once.

Towns fell.

8:59 Mon, Sep 29 d

Chapter 199

:

Alliances shifted like flocks when a hawk casts a shadow,

vouchers

Men who had cheered for Franco began to murmur about famine; men who had held to Totti remembered winters with grain.

Witches grew fewer at Franco’s side; the price of their magic came due in their bones.

The war grew tired of itself.

“And Isolde?” I asked quietly, because love is always the battlefield with the best strategy.

“She stayed,” Francesco said. “That’s part of how I know she wasn’t only a blade Franco held. Or perhaps she was faithful to her role. She saw what I returned as. I wanted to hide that from her; she would not permit it. She washed my hair when I could not lift my arms. She took a basin from a healer and made herself a wall between me and the eyes that would name me monster. She loved some story about me. Maybe the man. Maybe the idea that she could redeem a name.”

“Franco used it.” I said.

“He did,” Francesco answered. “He sent letters with her seal. He wrote words to me in a hand that pretended to be hers. He signed my name to promises I had not made. He made both of us a script.”

There was a battle the bards later called the Blue Field because the cornflowers had come early and were smashed under the feet of men and horses until the field looked like a saint’s broken window. Franco was there. Francesco was there. Totti was in the ground, and the monarch of a house of wolves had become two sons bleeding their father’s prayers into dirt.

“Did you meet him then?” I asked, breath thin.

“No,” Francesco said. “He let his generals stand and made himself smoke again. He wanted me angry enough to pursue without looking down. He wanted me to fall into a hole he’d cut in the ground and call it fate.”

He did not.

He had learned patience at a different library than Franco had chosen.

He let Franco’s army run its course until its ankles swelled and its lungs burned and then he chased.

He chased for months.

The war moved north, then west, then south again. Men who had never seen a Lycan learned why their fathers had taught them to fear.

Men who had never seen Franco realized a liberator who eats is just another king.

And then, finally, Franco grew tired of running–or grew certain he could end what he had started.

He chose ground and wrote to Francesco in his own hand for the first time.

“Brother,” Francesco said, reciting from memory. “Come and belong to the history you think you protect. I will stand on the red hill. You will know me by the sword, since you never knew me by the heart.”

8:59 Mon, Sep 29

Chapter 199

77

55 vouchers

“The red hill,” I whispered. “Where is that?”

“South of Lyon,” he said. “It was spring. The poppies had come. I remember thinking it was obscene to bleed where things had come to flower. But it was right for us.”

He did not bring an army.

Neither did Franco.

They brought witnesses. Betas. Priests. A few witches, thin and bright as needles.

No one would be able to lie about it later.

The brothers would write their end where the world could hold it with both hands and call it true.

“What did he look like?” I asked, though he had told me before–mirror.

“Like me,” he said. “But thinner. Hungrier. The smile was wrong at the edges. He had sharpened it too often.”

“Did he speak?”

“He did not stop speaking.” Francesco’s mouth tugged–half–grimace, half–pity. “He told me I had stolen his fate in the cradle. He told the priests that the gods had mistaken our names and I had traded bracelets with him and pretended to be the elder. He told the Betas that our father had loved him more and had given me the blade to save his favorite from dirty hands.”

“And you?” I asked softly.

“I told him nothing,” he said. “I did what I had always done. I listened. And then, when he raised his sword, I raised mine.”

He did not dress it in poetry.

He did not give me the fancy footwork of heroes.

He told me the truth as if it were a bowl he had learned to carry without spilling: Franco was fast. Francesco was steady. Franco burned hot. Francesco waited. Franco always believed the first blow is the story; Francesco had learned the last is.

“He cut my face,” Francesco said, touching the faint scar near his jaw that most people mistake for a line the sun left. “He laughed.” He looked at me. “He had the same laugh as a boy when we stole pears. It made me sick.”

“How did it end?” I whispered, though my heart had begun to run ahead of me and knew.

“He made the same mistake he had made all his life,” he said. “He believed I wanted the crowd to see me win. He circled to place the sun at my eyes so I would turn and give him my throat for the applause. I stepped into the light instead. I took the sun in my eyes and the shadow in my hands and I put my blade where his pride lives.” He swallowed. “He fell.”