Shattered Bonds A Second Chance Mate (by Yui) novel Chapter 233

Chapter 233

Chapter 233

Go back to Ellaine Point of View:

I know…

Before the door opens, before the morning admits itself, before the kettle thinks of singing–I know.

The bond is a river that lives under my ribs; when it swells, the whole house leans to listen.

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Tonight it rose in the dark and pressed against my lungs until breath had to make room for sorrow. Not fear. Not exactly. Something heavier that wears fear’s coat.

He thinks he could hurt me.

The thought is not a sentence he speaks; it is the taste of iron when I swallow. It is the way heat gathers at my collarbone where his mark lives, and cools too fast, like a hand pulling away from flame. I lay still and let it wash through.

Love is not rescue when it is loud.

Love is rescue when it can be quiet for as long as it takes.

When he leaves the room, the air forgets to be warm. The mattress remembers his shape and grieves. I press my palm into the hollow he left, as if touch could teach absence to behave, and a little of the ache loosens.

“Stubborn man,” I whisper to the ceiling beams. “My stubborn, beautiful man.”

The house is still the way an old dog is still–alert in its bones. I dress without waking the floorboards more than necessary and move through the corridor where dawn turns stone to the color of a held breath. Rosemary clings to my sleeves from yesterday’s planting. I breathe it in. Monica says it steadies the heart; I have never argued with a woman who has held more lives in her hands than I have held cups of tea.

I don’t go to him first. I go to the window that sees the training yard and become part of the curtain. Watching is a discipline. It hurts if you do it right. I learn where his breath stumbles and where it insists. I learn the way he chooses forms that ask the body to obey when the mind wants to run. I learn the sound his staff makes when he means craft instead of rage–a low, sure ribbon of air.

He is all edges at this hour–cut from black stone and moonlight. The mark beneath his collarbone glows faintly, a coal under cloth. When he runs, the yard is a circle of sand and prayer. When he climbs, the wall is winter and will not flatter him. When he fights the post, straw bursts like summer and doesn’t apologize.

Pain passes through the bond like a drumbeat three rooms away. Not a blow, a message: still here, still mine, still fighting. I take it in and send back warmth the way a hearth sends it–to the room, not to a specific chair. You cannot force comfort down a throat you love.

He doesn’t know I’m at the window.

He doesn’t see the woman who loves him making herself smaller than a shadow so he can be larger than his ghosts.

But the bond knows. Twice he stumbles and does not fall, and the second time the not–falling feels like my name said under his breath.

There is a moment–thin as a blade’s light–when the old magic inside him tries to rise.

I feel it like ice sliding along the inside of my wrist. The headache with light in it presses against the back of his eyes and against mine. The mark burns. The curse remembers its recipe: hunger, fear, isolation. I taste salt that isn’t on my tongue.

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4:33 pm

Chapter 233

I do nothing

Than is the hardest magh I know.

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Not nothing reactly Terand m the window send become heat 1 become a chair pulled close to a fire I become the memory of bread in a cold hand 1 do not push love into him. I make a room inside myself and open the door. If he wants it, he can step in If he does not, the room still exists when he needs it later. That is how you love a soldier whose enemy lives under

his vi

Something answers. Not loud. A shift in the bond like a muscle unclenching. The glowing under his skin dulls by a shade. His breath finds its count again. He changes form from spectacle to craft, from punishment to practice. And the house- dem, old, watchful house–exhales with me.

When he leaves the yard. I leave the window. He goes down to the cellars, to the cold that tells the truth. I go another way. There are rituals we have that we do not share because sharing would make them less ours. I light a candle in the small chapel where the pews smell of pine and stubbornness. Bethany’s roses lean in their chipped bowl like old saints pretending not to listen. I write a list in my head because paper is slower than the heart.

What I know

He is not Severine’s story.

Blood remembers, yes–but love writes in the margins, and margins change how a page is read.

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