Shattered Bonds A Second Chance Mate (by Yui) novel Chapter 238

Chapter 238

Chapter 238

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We sat like that, a small animal of quiet curled between us, until the first noises of the house rose: spoons against bowls, leather creaking, the low murmur of men trying whispering and failing because their shoulders.

tell on them.

He stood then, unwilling but obedient to duty.

He dressed in his careful way–belt settled where it belongs, collar closed where he forgets when he is tired- and paused at the door.

“Breakfast?” he asked, almost boyish in the word.

It meant ‘Can I leave you? Will you be safe without me? Will I be safe without you?‘

“In a little.” I said. “Go. Show them the king who listens.”

He hesitated long enough to come back and press his mouth to my brow.

It felt like the first warm sip after a hard winter morning. He left.

The room felt very large without him and very small at once.

I rose slowly, the edges of the scarf whispering over my skin, and crossed to the basin. The water had cooled. A skin had formed on its surface, light as a lie. I broke it with two fingers and wet the cloth again, just to feel the small satisfaction of heat replaced by clean.

The light changed.

Not much.

Just enough to make the window blink and the shadow on the wardrobe forget what it was supposed to

mimic.

The hair at the back of my neck lifted as if it had learned something before I did. I stilled.

The bond held steady.

The house did not.

Wood remembers more than men admit.

I looked up….

The mirror above the dressing table–old glass, silver tired at the edges, a ribbon of foxing running down one side like an old scar–should have shown a woman with a scarf and a bruise and the stubborn set to her mouth that says try me. It did.

But the reflection blinked half a second after I did.

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Chapter 238

And then it smiled with my lips before I had decided whether to.

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The air went cooler. Not cold. The kind of cool you get when you open a cellar door and remember wine exists and could be comfort if you let it.

“Little Luna,” Severine said.

Her voice was not in the room.

It was under the skin of the mirror, the way a song hides under a river if you kneel right.

The glass fogged lightly from the inside with each syllable, as if breath were a courtesy she had decided to

imitate.

“I told him no,” I said, because telling ghosts the truth is a house rule now. “And I will tell you again.”

The reflection tilted its head.

Mine did not.

Her hair was mine and not mine; the gray had a sheen like the inside of a shell.

Her eyes were not kind and not cruel.

Curious is more dangerous.

“You keep fighting,” she murmured. “Two weeks now. Two weeks louder. How pretty your stubbornness is. How expensive.”

“Love is always expensive,” I said, drying my hands on a cloth that had suddenly found its own silence. “You paid the wrong thing for it and then blamed the bill.”

A small, sharp sound. Almost laughter. “You think you are different. That is every woman’s prayer before the fall.”

“I think I am loved,” I answered, and watched the smallest wince stain her perfect stillness. “That is every woman’s weapon before the world learns it should be careful.”

She moved closer to the silver.

The fog thickened just where her mouth would be if mouths belonged in glass. “He choked you.”

“He woke,” I said, and the steadiness surprised even me. “He came back. He put his hands where they belonged and they remembered.”

She paused.

The pause was where the pain lives. “Every love rots the same way. Sweetness first. Then bruise. Then rot that smells like roses until it doesn’t.”

“Then you never had the right kind,” I said–softly, because pity snuck into the room and had to be

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Chapter 238

acknowledged. “Or you weren’t allowed to keep it.”

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The reflection’s eyes narrowed–injured pride and something under it, something that could almost have been relief that I had seen a seam in her story. “Do not speak as if you know me.”

“Mother Severine,” I corrected gently, because names are leashes and bridges and sometimes both. “I don’t know you. But I know grief that makes a woman remake the world into something that looks safe because it doesn’t look like love anymore.”

The mirror hummed.

That is the only word for it.

A chord like a throat wanting to sing and refusing because song requires vulnerability.

“You talk like the river,” she said after. “The river is stupid. It goes the same way even after men put their dead in it.”

“And still it cleans them,” I whispered.

She went very quiet then, the way storms do when they change their minds about whether to break this roof or the one after it.

For a breath, for two, her gaze slid not to me but to the space just over my shoulder, where the curtains breathed.

The bond gave me nothing–no heat, no pull, no alarm–only a sense that something had shifted in someone else that I could not touch.

“You are not me,” she said at last.

I nodded my head, “No,” I agreed. “And he is not him.”

The mirror’s chill pressed closer to my skin. “Prove it.”

The word landed like a stone in a well.

The rings it made reached farther than the room.

I set my palms on the wooden edge of the table. “What proof does a ghost accept from the living?”

Severine did not smile.

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