Shattered Bonds A Second Chance Mate (by Yui) novel Chapter 204

Chapter 204

Isokle’s eyes glittered, she get what she wants.

Our attention…

“Do you think she told me that?” She laughed, a low, cracked sound. “I don’t need the story, Luna I only need the instructions.”

“Which were?” Alfonso again, relentless.

“Touch the Lycaon’s blood to the fen,” she said, calm as a prayer. “Bring me a drop, a handful, a summer’s river if you can. The more you bring, the more beautiful you will be. The longer you will wear your borrowed skin.”

“Did you- Monica began, then stopped, breath catching.

Isolde looked almost bored. “No,” she said. “Not then. Not at first. I did not need to bring her blood to pay the first bill. I paid with errands. I paid with lies. I paid by standing in a library with the Executioner and making him believe a story about himself that he wanted to believe.”

I felt the blow land where it always did in me–on the tender place that still grieved for the man he had been, the boy who had knelt on winter stone. “Franco knew,” I whispered.

“Franco did not know how deep the fen is,” Isolde said. “He thought he had hired a pretty knife. He did not realize he had hummed a witch’s name to the air and the air had a good memory.” She looked past me, as if seeing around me the shape of the man we both knew. “I did not, either. Not at first.”

Audrey exhaled, a hiss of air. “So you seduced a king to pay a witch.”

Isolde’s lip curled. “Don’t flatter me or him. I seduced a man who hadn’t been looked at without fear in ten years. I warmed myself at his fire and told myself I was the one feeding it.” She shrugged, and for the first time I believed she truly did feel a small, sour pity—for herself, perhaps, for the girl she had been. “And then the war came. And then Totti died. And then the boy with the gold eyes cut the mirror’s throat and went home alone.” She lifted her chin. “Séverine did not ask for blood then. She is not impatient. She said a feast tastes better the second day.”

Alfonso’s jaw tightened. “So when did she ask? Because she did ask, or you wouldn’t be here. You don’t still look twenty, and you don’t smell like spring.”

That almost made me laugh, the ugly humor of truth. Isolde took it without a flinch.

“After,” she said. “Years after. The Lycan had become a king and a ghost. The wolves had learned to tell their children two kinds of bedtime stories–one where he saved them, one where he came to eat them when they lied. I left. I chased other rooms. I learned that nothing tastes like the table you left behind. The dress began to pinch.” Her mouth went hard. “I went back to the fen.”

“And she sent you again,” I said softly.

“She sent for me,” Isolde corrected. “That is different. The water peeled back like lips and the reeds whispered my name. Séverine smiled. She said: Now. She said she would make the youth fit again if I brought her my

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Chapter 204

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original price. A drop. A mouthful. A cup. A bowl.” Isolde’s gaze burned. “I told her I would bring her a river”

“Francesco,” I said, and the syllables were ash and vow and love.

Isolde’s face did not soften. “Lycaon,” she said. “Names change, blood does not.”

“So you came back,” Audrey said. “You came back to finish the debt.”

Isolde turned her head and looked at Audrey the way a cat looks at a sword. “I came back because I wanted the dress to fit again.” She paused, and something flickered across her mouth–faint as gnats, gone before I could swat it. “And because…” She stopped herself, shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. Want is a hallway with too many doors.”

“Because what?” I pressed.

For once, the mask slipped without calculation. She looked at me, woman to woman, cruelty subsiding into something like truth. “Because it is hard to leave a place where you were almost loved,” she said, very quietly. “Even if the person was a fiction you built.”

Silence. Even Audrey did not breathe.

Isolde blinked hard, annoyance at her own softness snapping the mask back into place. “In any case,” she said briskly, “I came. I made a mess. I paid part of what I owed. Not with blood–that trick with the wolvesbane was mine, not hers. Mother Séverine prefers cleaner lines.” She tilted her head. “But she is impatient now. She can smell his blood even when he is not in the room. Your King has made himself conspicuous again.”

“How?” Alfonso asked.

“By being seen,” Isolde said. “By eating with his wolves. By opening windows.” Her mouth twisted. “By letting his Luna put flowers on a table in a house that was cold for so long it forgot how to breathe.”

Monica looked at me then, eyes wide, as if to say your rosemary woke the old things. I shook my head. “No,” I said aloud. “My rosemary told the living to come back. The dead are angry because they have to make room.”

Isolde shrugged. “Dead, not dead–words. Séverine is neither.” She leaned forward slightly, expression sharpening. “Do you want to know the worst of it?”

Audrey’s blade whispered a warning against its scabbard. “You’re still here to gloat. That is the worst of it.“”

Isolde ignored her. She spoke only to me. “The price for youth was not just Lycan blood,” she said. “That was the crown jewel. The rest…” She smiled, terribly calm. “The rest was feeding Séverine the girls who wanted to be me.”

“Gods,” Monica breathed, hand to her mouth.

I felt the cold all the way to my teeth. “The missing girls,” I said. “The ones Henri’s pack whispered away and called runaways.”

Isolde looked bored again, as if the conversation had run out of toys. “Some ran. Some were taken by rogues. Some were swallowed by fen. It’s all the same from where you sit, isn’t it? They’re gone.”

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Chapter 204

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“No,” I said, and my voice was so steady it scared me. “It is not all the same from where I sit. It never will be” I leaned forward, every word a bead laid on a string, “What does she want now, Isolde? A drop? A river? A sea?”

Isolde watched me for a long time, the flame of something like respect guttering and flaring and guttering again. At last, she smiled like a woman watching a wave she knows will break.

“She wants a name,” she said. “True and old. The one that unlocks the promise your ancestors wrote and then hid.”

“What name?” Alfonso demanded.

Isolde shook her head once. “If I knew, I wouldn’t be in your pretty ward, Luna. I’d be at the fen wearing a younger face.”

“Then what do you know?” Audrey snapped, patience gone.

Isolde’s eyes slid to mine again, and the chill there was a hand around a throat. “I know she sent others when I failed,” she said softly. “Men with knives that don’t shine. Women who look like widows. Birds that are not birds. I know she will keep sending them until the window stands open and the blood spills like wine into her water. I know she hates your King because he reminds her of the first one who refused to kneel.”

“And me?” I asked, before I could stop myself.

Isolde’s smile sharpened. “She does not hate you. Not yet.” She cocked her head. “She is interested. She does not like new pieces on old boards.” Her gaze skimmed me like a hand finds a hidden blade beneath fabric. “White Wolf.”

The room seemed to constrict around those two syllables. Audrey went as still as a statue. Monica’s fingers tightened on my sleeve. Alfonso’s gaze flicked to the door, calculating how sound travelled in this corridor, how fast a rumor could run.

I did not flinch. “Go on,” I said.

“Séverine thought Lycan was enough,” Isolde said. “She did not account for a wolf like you. Old and bright. You complicate the recipe.” A glint of malice lit her eyes. “She likes complications. They make better stories. They taste better when she eats them.”

I let the insult slide by; truth mattered more than her need to stick hooks in my skin. “What else?”

Isolde leaned back against her pillows, suddenly very tired. “That’s all,” she said. “For now. If I think of more, I’ll tell you. I like hurting kings.”

Alfonso’s mouth curled. “You like thinking you still matter.”

She laughed, and it was an ugly, honest sound. “That too, Beta.”

I stood. The chair scraped stone, loud and human in a room that had held too much inhuman.

“Monica,” I said, never taking my eyes from Isolde. “Double the ward guards. Move two of Marlow’s men to the south corridor. No one enters without my voice or the King’s. No one.”

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Chapter 204

“Done.” Monica said, healer’s calm restored by orders she could fold into her hands.

“Audrey,” I said. She was already beside me. “We tell Francesco. Now,

Alfonso winced, a little theatrical. “You promised to protect me.”

“From his temper,” I said, and I couldn’t help the sideways smile that tugged my mouth. “Not from the truth”

We turned for the door.

“Luna,” Isolde called, sweeter now, the voice she’d used in a thousand rooms to make men look back.

I did not turn, but I let my head tilt enough that she knew I was listening.

“Ask your King,” she purred, “what name his father whispered when he died. Not his son’s…. The other one. The one that tasted like old storms. If he tells you, you’ll know where to find the fen.”

My heart tripped.

Damn it!

I walked out without answering–past Monica’s fierce set face, past Alfonso’s coiled readiness, past Audrey’s quiet boiling anger–and into the corridor, where the air at least had the decency to be ordinary.

We didn’t speak until the door was closed and the latch set.

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