Shattered Bonds A Second Chance Mate (by Yui) novel Chapter 232

sull Francesco Pum of views

The youth to the cellars is a vein

The air is damp with old wine and the pride of a house that survived men better than I am. I could chain myself here and

Machow woubt au with me muil my wrists learned the shape of restraint and my wolf forgot that the door is only wood. Andrey would slip bread through the gap with the same hands she used when I arrived in Florence with snow inside my lungs and rags hui a blanket. Ellaine would stand at the threshold and not cross. She would look at me with a hurt I have no want for because it is softer than pain and sharper than any blade,

I do not chain myself. Not because I am too proud. Because I do not trust what a man becomes when he learns to love his

Justead I ind the old cistern. The water is black to the eye but tastes of stone and coins. I strip the shirt I forgot I was wearing and wade und the cold squeezes language out of me, I sink. The body makes its animal protest and then remembers that drowning is simply a long, inconvenient breath. I stay. Ten counts. Twenty. The headache becomes a white room. The hum under the mark is a blade against a whetstone, Sparks, then nothing. I break the surface and it feels like birth

The voice does not follow me here. Perhaps curses dislike honest cold. Perhaps Severine’s grief respects one mercy in world she has made merciless. I do not ask. I take. Again. And again until my skin is a map of winter and my heart beats so loudly even the old stones approve.

I dress with hands that are almost steady. When I climb back toward the sleeping halls the first weak blue is waking the windows. The house is full of the noises I love best–distant ladles, the throat–clearing of a guard embarrassed that he is still human, the sigh of a stair that holds more weight than it did yesterday and complains the way elders do when they are proud of the ones who make them ache.

I do not go back to the room. Not yet. I would like to lay beside her and borrow whatever dream her body is giving her, the one that makes her mouth relax at the corners and her hands unclench as if she has put the basket down. But I am not safe to lie beside. Not with the ribbon still on the table like a gift I refuse to open and cannot throw away.

I take the long corridor to the chapel–the small French room that pretends to be older than it is because men pray with more sincerity when the wood looks tired. The door is half stuck; I ease it rather than break it. Inside, the pews smell of wax and pine, Someone–Bethany, perhaps has left a bowl of last night’s roses before the cracked icon. Red, like they’re ashamed to be there and proud that they are. I sit on the last bench not because humility is becoming but because old habit is a stern tutor

I do not pray for rescue. I do not ask for ease. I make a list of the things my hands will not do.

They will not strike first when fear is the only thing across from them.

They will not shake the woman I love no matter what the voice suggests.

They will not sign papers that sell boys to war because paper is clean and sand is not.

They will not hold a blade that wants to impress my ghosts.

They will not learn to love chains.

Then I make a list of the things my body will do.

It will run until the old songs loosen.

It will climb until the small coward in the ankle learns bravery again.

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12:28 Wed, 15 Oct

Chapter 232

It will hit until the hitting is not rage but craft.

It will breathe like a man who trusts that breath belongs to him and not to those who tried to buy it with fear.

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It will lie down beside Ellaine when it is safe to, and not before, even if loneliness is a wolf and my chest is a door I cannot bar against it.

I speak these lists aloud. The empty room is a good listener. It does not lie to me about absolution. It gives me echo and echo is enough. A vow spoken to wood is still a vow.

There is a mirror in the hall that I avoid. Today I look. The man there is not the king the stories prefer. He is older than his father at the end. He is younger than his grief. His mouth is an apology and a promise and a hunger that has learned the difference between food and fire. In his eye there is a small animal that looks like hope and refuses the leash.

‘Leave her,‘ the voice says, as if it could be gentle.

“Follow me,” I answer, and it does not know what to do with that.

I go to the yard again because repetition is my sacrament. The sand takes my feet like a friend who forgives a long absence with a shrug. I stretch until the hip sings the good song. The staff returns to my hand as if it went nowhere. The sky brightens in that way the French sky does, reluctantly, as if dawn is a favor paid back late.

I move.

The sequence is no longer to exhaust. It is to engrave. This is what I am. This is what I am not. The muscles write the letters. The breath dots the i. The sand reads and approves. I do not perform rage. I court accuracy. Obedience to the form is a rebellion against every ghost that mastered me with spectacle. It is impossible to be theatrical when the center of your foot is busy telling the ground the truth.

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