Shattered Bonds A Second Chance Mate (by Yui) novel Chapter 234

Chapter 234

Chapter 234

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When I blow the candle out, the smoke curls like a question mark and then like a ribbon letting go.

I take that as an omen only because I choose to.

The kitchen is thunder by the time I pass it. Maria’s spoon is a scepter. She sees me and her mouth arranges itself into the line that means cat now or we argue in a way that makes men leave the room. I take the bread she presses into my hand and the slice of cheese that makes the bread feel chosen. “For him,” she says, softer. I nod. Words would do harm to the shape of this kindness.

I find him again through quiet. Not with eyes. With the small pull the bond makes when two magnets remember they were once the same nail.

He is in the chapel now, last pew, shoulders bowed without shame. I do not go in. I have never loved him more than when I have let him be alone well.

I set the bread on the bench outside his door and lean my head against the frame a moment–just long enough for the wood to know my skull and for my skull to remember walls were made to hold more than roofs.

He leaves the chapel before the sun has decided which color it wants to try first. He passes the bread and stops.

The bond warms, curious. He looks around and sees no one and smiles anyway, the kind that lives mostly in the eyes. He eats like a man receiving communion from a god he trusts but will argue with later. The honey leaves a shine on his lip. I feel it sweeten the back of my throat and nearly laugh at the intimacy of that small thievery.

He goes back to the yard, and I, to the library.

There is a book that called to me yesterday from behind a fallen tapestry, the leather stained the green of old seawater. De Sanguine Lycaon: The Heart of the Mermaid. The title made my stomach turn as if a boat had remembered it was also a mouth. I bring it into the light and set it on the long table where the dust keeps its own calendar. Lira will scold me for reading alone. I will accept the scolding and continue to read. Sometimes the right knowledge must meet you before you are ready to share it.

The script is Latin and something older with fishbones in it. My tongue shapes the sounds without noise. Diagrams lie on the page like crimes pretending to be mathematics. There is an ink circle around a paragraph written in a hand that leaned on the pen as if it were trying to make the future hear its insistence:

Amor datum sanguini maledicto, cor utriusque alligat. Unus cadit, alter ardet.

-The love given to cursed blood chains the heart of both. One falls, the other burns.

I close my eyes. The bond lifts like a bird startled into the rafters, then settles.

Another line:

Somno pietatis sopitur; timore excitatur.

12TY FI, Oct 17 W

Chapter 234

-It sleeps in devotion; it wakes in fear.

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So simple I want to be angry. So true I cannot be. My thumb rubs the margin until a small galaxy appears. where dust makes constellations of uncertainty.

I could take this page to him. I could say Sec? It is only this: stay brave and we survive.

But courage isn’t a switch. It is a practice. It is what he is doing in the yard right now, teaching breath and tendon to be citizens of a country not ruled by fear. It is what I am doing here–learning the structure of the spell so I can untie it knot by knot, not with drama but with patience.

Through the bond, a flare. Not danger. Effort turning to praise. He has finished a sequence and the world applauded in the small way it does when a man chooses accuracy over spectacle.

I press two fingers to my mouth and to the mark and send the simplest thing I have: I see you.

It reaches him. I know it by the way the hum in my chest answers with a low yes. I know it by the way the light under his skin softens one shade. He doesn’t look for me.

That is how I know we are getting this right. He doesn’t need to find the body to trust the soul.

I keep reading until letters blur and become shoreline. In the blur, an image rises uninvited: Severine at the broken window of a foreign chapel, touching the cracked glass as if it were a sleeping beast. Her mouth says Let them love, and her eyes say Teach me how. I am not foolish enough to forgive a curse because its maker wept. But I am exactly foolish enough to imagine a world where grief chooses something other than teeth.

The door whispers. Audrey leans her shoulder against the frame like a question trying to be casual. She scans the pages, then me, all in that slow blink she learned in a room that trained her to see danger where kindness tried to hide it.

“Report?” she asks, meaning Are you well? Is he? Do I sharpen the blade or the patience?

“Both,” I say, and her mouth twitches. We have built a language where both means we live.

She doesn’t come in. She keeps watch with her back to me, face to the corridor, like the hinge on a door that does not permit drafts. I love her for it. I love him for trusting her to decide which threats deserve to die and which deserve to be taught good manners.

Hours softens their teeth. The house finds its rhythm: children chasing a cat that has chosen this as its profession; Alfonso arguing with a ledger as if numbers can be embarrassed into kindness; Maria making soup with the authority of a woman who knows that boiling water is civilization. From the yard, once, a laugh -the rare kind from him that starts deep and surprises even his throat on its way out.

I let myself smile into the page.

Toward noon, the bond grows quiet. Not empty–resting, the way a violin rests between songs with the bow still in the player’s hand. He has spent what he meant to spend today. He has not spent me. I close the book and lay my palm on its cover until the salt–smell in the leather fades to dust and practicality.

On my way back to our room, I pass the bench outside the chapel. The bread crumbs glitter like ordinary stars. I think of the boy who asked me once if I had been a nobody, and how I told him the truth and watched his shoulders stop pretending to be mountains. There is magic in letting things be small and still deserving.

12:19 Fri, Oct 17 M

Chapter 234

There is magic in porridge.

A

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At our door, I pause. The bond makes that small tug again the way tides nudge boats into humility. I enter.

He isn’t here yet. The room holds the light as if it is practicing for when he arrives. I cross to the table and find the charcoal he lifted and set down–one black thumbprint on the wood like a signature from a man who would prefer to sign with his breath.

I sit where he sits and close my eyes. I send him the smallest possible promise.

I am watching without weighing. I am near without asking. I am yours without fear.

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