Shattered Bonds A Second Chance Mate (by Yui) novel Chapter 236

Chapter 236

Francesco’s hand rose, shaking, to the line of my jaw.

He turned my face into the first gray light as if it could testify.

His thumb brushed my throat with the care a surgeon uses on a blade.

I felt the heat there–blood waking under skin where his grip had frightened it.

He touched the marks with reverence so raw it made my eyes sting.

“Not. Your. Fault,” I whispered, and hated the way it sounded like a mercy he wouldn’t take.

He didn’t answer me.

His gaze had gone distant–the mind–link opening as cleanly as a wound.

‘Alfonso. Monica. Marlow. Audrey. Come. Now!!!‘

I winced at the force of it.

He didn’t shout with his body, but the bond carried the call like thunder looking for hills.

A single heartbeat.

Knock. Knock.

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“We’re here, my king,” Alfonso said from the hall–and then the door opened and they froze the way people do when their bones decide to remember a past they’ve never lived.

I must have looked worse than I felt.

I always forget what I’m wearing on the face until someone I love looks at it.

Audrey’s hand went to the knife at her back without thought, then to her mouth.

Monica–the only one allowed to put awe and anger in the same breath–whispered a curse at the sight of my

neck.

Marlow’s expression shuttered into that problem–solving stillness that means his brain is already throwing what–ifs against walls to see what sticks.

Alfonso’s jaw flexed twice, a tic he hides in rooms with enemies and never hides in rooms with family.

“I’m okay… It’s nothing,” I said, and watched the word strike each of them differently: insult, relief, denial,

prayer.

Francesco’s shoulders rounded as if he’d taken a blow meant for me and survived, only to discover survival hurts more than dying when you deserve the blade.

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Chapter 236

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He didn’t let me go. If anything, his hold became gentler–arms around me like vows.

He looked at the floor because kingship teaches men that to show grief is to give a knife a map.

“Report,” Audrey said to the room, voice low and even. Her eyes were not on me. They were on him. ‘Are you here? Are you you? Do I need to keep you away from what you love for your sake or hers?‘

“I dreamed,” he said, and the simplicity bludgeoned me. “And I was not here. I am here now.”

Marlow–who has learned to speak to wolves with sentences, not orders–nodded once. “Understood.”

Monica moved forward only when my hand lifted a fraction—a tiny permission she insisted on the first day she agreed to guard my life with both herbs and steel: ‘Let me touch you only when your body says yes!

She crouched, fingers hovering before settling feather–light on my throat.

He tensed at that too; I felt it in the bond like a spring going tight.

“Easy,” I whispered to both of them, and smiled at Monica to make her breathe.

She did. Her hands were cool and sure, the way water is sure downhill. “Bruising,” she murmured, her anger tucked carefully away where it couldn’t set fire to a forest we had to live in. “No crush. Voice rough tomorrow. Lira’s salve. Warm compress. Rest.” She glanced up at me, then at him. “No shouting,” she added, and had the grace not to smile when she said it.

Audrey’s gaze cut the room to threads and wove it back together. “Perimeter doubled,” she said, more to Marlow than anyone. “Dawn drills stay. Rotate pairs. No one to the Luna’s door without my scent or the King’s.”

“Done,” Marlow said. Already halfway to the hallway, he paused at Francesco’s shoulder and let his knuckles brush the frame–his version of a hand on a back. “We hold,” he said softly. “We hold.”

Alfonso lingered, ledger forgotten, eyes on me the way a brother watches the sister who taught him how to swear properly. He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. Settled for a nod that meant ‘Say the word and I drag the sea into this room to drown whatever needs drowning‘

The room rearranged itself around us–without leaving, without smothering. Audrey took the window like a hinge. Marlow disappeared and returned with a blanket without anyone hearing him leave. Monica went to the hearth and resuscitated the coals like a woman stealing breath back from a sulking god. Alfonso cracked the door, spoke to someone quietly, and the house woke in a different way–the kind that happens when a pack decides to protect what is tender with what is terrifying.

“Enough,” I said at last, because the thing Francesco needed most was the one he would not ask for: privacy to break where love could hold him and not witness him. “I’m all right. Truly, Go, Guard the halls. Guard our people. The only enemy in this room has already left.”

Audrey looked at me, then at him, and read what I didn’t say: ‘He needs to fall and know the floor loves him.‘ She nodded once. “Call,” she said, meaning ‘breathe loud and I’ll hear it.‘ Then she took them all with her- Monica with her medicines, Alfonso with his fury leashed, Marlow with his blade that likes him better than it likes anyone else.

The door shut.

13:08 Sun, Oct 19

Chapter 236

The room felt bigger and smaller at once.

Francesco did not speak.

He didn’t know where to begin.

So I began for us. “Look at me.”

He did, slowly, as if he feared his gaze could bruise.

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I took his hands and placed them back where they had been–around my neck–and felt him almost pull away before the trust I was offering anchored him.

“Feel that?” I asked. “Your hands. Gentle.”

He closed his eyes.

A tear escaped without his permission.

Both of us pretended not to see it until he didn’t want to pretend anymore.

Then he let another come.

He bowed his head until his forehead touched my shoulder. “I hurt you,” he whispered into my skin. “Oh, my God… I hurt you.”

I quickly shook my head. “You didn’t choose to hurt me,” I said, and my voice went thick because truth hurts too. “The curse reached for you. You reached back for me. We both got tangled. That’s all.”

“That’s all…” he echoed like a man at a grave, hating the phrase and clinging to it.

The bond thrummed–a low, steady note that felt like two hands on a drum, finding each other’s rhythm again.

I tilted his face up.

He looked wrecked and beautiful and young in a way that destroyed me.

I kissed him–not to heal, because kisses aren’t spells; to belong, because belonging is stronger than whatever Severine believes in.

“Listen,” I said into his mouth, against his mouth, the way wind talks to windows. “Listen to me, Francesco Lycaon. I know you. I know what your hands do and won’t. I know how your jaw clenches when you lie to make me less afraid and how your eyes go soft when you fail to. I know your laugh that you hide like a treasure and your anger that you hate like a stain. I know you’re not a ribbon around my throat. You are the man who takes my hand in a market because it’s noisy and the man who gives up sleep so that strangers can keep theirs. You are not your ancestor’s hunger. You are my home. My mate. My love. My king. My Alpha. My everything…”

He broke then–the clean break a bone makes when it’s finally set right.

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Chapter 236

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He folded into me like a storm remembering it used to be rain. His shoulders shook. His breath hitched. He tried to speak and failed and tried again and failed better, and I held his head in my hands the way you hold a bird you mean to let go after it remembers how to be wing.

“I don’t deserve-” he started.

“Stop,” I said, and smiled because we will have this argument until we are old or ash. “Deserve is a word for ledgers. Love is not math. Love is bread. We have enough. Eat.”

He laughed once–wet, reluctant–and the sound turned the room warmer by a degree.

I reached for the cloth Monica had left and pressed it gently against my throat, the heat making the ache turn honest.

He flinched; I kissed his cheek to distract the part of him that wanted to take the blame back up like a familiar burden.

“Tell me,” I said when his breathing steadied, because secrets rot the floorboards under you. “What does she say in the dark?”

He hesitated….

But I know the bond nudged.

And now I could feel he let it. “Leave her,” he whispered. “Love makes you weak. You will kill her. Save her by… by not loving her.”

I made a face that would have made Audrey proud. “Convenient,” I said tartly. “For a curse built by someone who lost love and wants the whole world to call that wisdom.”

His mouth twitched by the words.

The tiniest light in his eyes. “You make blasphemy sound like scripture.”

“That’s because truth is sacrilege in shrines to fear,” I said, and cupped his face. “Hear me. If love can’t survive the night, it isn’t love. Ours does. It stumbles and curses and cries and still it wakes. Every dawn, it wakes.”

He leaned into my palm like a man learning that softness isn’t a trap.

The mark at my throat pulsed once, answering the mark below his collarbone with a steady here.

He pressed his lips to the bruise he’d made, reverent as a pilgrim, and something in me unclenched that had been braced for judgment.

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