Shattered Bonds A Second Chance Mate (by Yui) novel Chapter 235

Chapter 235

Chapter 235

“STOP IT!”

His voice tore the dark like a blade.

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I was already half–awake–one foot in sleep, one in listening–and sat bolt upright before the echo died.

The room had the color of deep water. Curtains breathed. The coals in the hearth kept a faint red eye open.

For a heartbeat I didn’t move, because sometimes stillness is the only way to hear what isn’t sound.

The bond told me first.

Pain. Not the sharp kind—a flooding. Cold through hot, hot through cold, a braided current that made my mark flare and dim like a frightened lantern.

It’s Francesco, he was dreaming hard again, the way a man drowns: silently until he doesn’t.

“It’s been two weeks,” I whispered to the timbered ceiling, to Mika inside me, to the old stones that pretend not to listen. “Two weeks worse than the weeks before, and you still won’t tell me because you don’t want me to worry. Stupid, stubborn man.”

Beside me, Francesco thrashed once, barely, as if the nightmare had put iron on his wrists.

His breath came wrong–too fast, then not at all for three counts, then a groan torn low from his chest as if someone were tightening a rope inside him.

“No,” he whispered to the dark, voice hoarse. “No, I won’t let you-”

“Francesco,” I said gently, my hand already on his shoulder. “Wake up, love.”

He didn’t wake.

His head turned away like a man hiding from light, the muscles in his jaw jumping as if he were clenching against a scream.

The bond pulsed–two, three, four–and then a spike of cold cut through my throat like winter air swallowed

wrong.

“Francesco.” I leaned over him, smooth palm to brow, the way Maria taught me when fevers raved and the only language was skin. “It’s me. You’re safe. Come back.”

He fought me–and not me, and that was the worst of it.

The body I loved moved like an enemy’s for the space of a breath, shoulders knotting, ribs caging, hands searching for something that wasn’t there and finding what was.

His fingers locked around my neck.

13:07 Sun, Oct 19

Chapter 235

Everything narrowed to his grip.

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It wasn’t total–no crushing rage, no intention written in his face the way it would be if he were awake.

This was blind, a reflex pulled through him by some other hand.

Even so, my breath stuttered. I choked once, twice. The edges of the room went gray.

Slap him, Mika snapped inside me, all pragmatism and panic. ‘Break the hold. He’ll hate it, but he’ll forgive what kept you alive.’

No.

1 would not turn our bed into a place where my hands hurt him to wake him.

Not unless I had no other choice.

So I did the only wild thing that ever made sense with him: I moved closer.

My fingers wrapped his wrists–not to fight, to tell the story of my skin.

I pressed forward into the pressure that denied me breath.

I found his mouth in the dark and kissed him.

It wasn’t graceful.

It wasn’t a kiss for poetry.

It was the kiss you give a man on a battlefield when you need the world to remember that his soul still owns his body.

My lips on his, my breath fighting for passage, my thoughts a chant: ‘Please, Francesco. Please. Come back to me. Come back.”‘

I poured the plea into the bond.

Not words–feeling.

The warmth of bread at dawn.

The scratch of charcoal on paper.

The low sound he makes when he is safe enough to sleep on his stomach, one hand open on the sheet like he’s surrendered to peace.

The garden’s first lavender spike. Rosemary crushed between thumb and forefinger. The way he laughs without sound when I get ink on my cheek and look surprised, every time.

‘Please, love, Please!

13:07 Sun, Oct 19

Chapter 235

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His grip tightened once–stars burst behind my eyes–and then loosened.

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The air that entered tasted like metal and rain and mercy. He gasped as if surfacing, head jerking, mouth breaking from mine to whisper my name like a curse he wanted turned into prayer.

“Ellaine?”

My lungs dragged a ragged breath. “Here.”

“What-” He stopped, swallowed, and the little sound of that swallow ruined me. “What… No… What did I do? Gods–Ellaine. Oh, God. My Ellaine.”

He tried to pull his hands away from my neck, but I held them there a second longer on purpose. Not because I needed pain to make a point, not because I wanted him to suffer–because I wanted him to feel his own hands gentle.

I wanted his skin to remember the warmth under his palms and the lowering of pressure.

I wanted his nerve endings to relearn trust and the body–memory to lead the mind home.

“It’s… all right,” I breathed, my voice shredded to a thread. “I’m… here…”

Through the bond came the flood he could no longer hide: guilt, sharp and self–hating; fear, old and new; love, desperate; love, terrified of itself.

He looked like a man who had seen his house catch fire with everything he cared about inside and now stood in the ashes alone.

‘Look what you’ve done, Lycaon,’ a voice hissed–not from him, not from me. ‘You see? You see?‘

Severine…

Her cold pressed along the wall like fog with knives in it.

She was there at the edge of the room where the light refused to stay, the gray of her shape more idea than body. It would have been nothing to a stranger’s eye–a trick of dawn–but the bond recognized the bruise her presence left on air.

“No,” I said aloud because sometimes you have to say it into the world as if truth were a wedge that can split stone. I turned my face toward that gray and shook my head. “No… It’s not his fault.”

“Ellaine,” Francesco whispered, as if my name were the only thing he could safely say without hurting

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