Shattered Bonds A Second Chance Mate (by Yui) novel Chapter 239

Chapter 239

Chapter 239

(87)

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She smile.” Then through him,” she murmured, and the glass chilled hard enough that my breath turned visible. “He would not refuse a woman at the door.”

Is she serious?! That’s not my Francesco!.

“You don’t know him,” I said confidently, and let a little pride into it. “He doesn’t open doors out of pity. He

opens

them because he remembers what it costs to sleep outside.” I explain to her.

She watched me the way a hawk watches a field that no longer belongs to it.

The reflection lifted a hand and pressed it to the wrong side of the glass.

My pulse jumped.

The silver shivered.

“Little Luna,” she said. “You know, in every story I was ever told, love loses. Because it is polite. Because it is slow. Because it chooses to bleed and calls that a doctrine.” The fog on the glass thickened around her fingers. “Make a new story. Or prove mine right.”

The bond warmed–faint, then stronger.

I felt him somewhere two courtyards away, speaking to Alfonso in a voice measured not to break the brittle morning, pausing mid–sentence the way a man does when he knows his name is being looked for by someone he belongs to.

The ribbon between us tugged.

I breathed him in…

Calm. Alive. Here.

“I don’t have to let you in,” I said. “You’re already watching. That is the shape of your cruelty and your loneliness both.”

She did not deny it.

“Then,” I said, and took a step closer to the mirror until my breath fogged our two faces into one brief blur, “watch this.”

I set my hand on the glass.

I did not open.

I did not invite.

I did not share the bond like a plate at a table that can always stretch to one more.

11:07 Thu, Oct 23

Chapter 239

:

87

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I only let the mirror feel the smallest truth I owned: that love had made a room in me and the room had furniture and bread and light that did not go out when storms made the house list, that my faith in him was not a door but a foundation stone, that my fear was honest and did not run the place, that my body remembered his mouth on my bruised skin and had chosen to rewrite the bruise into a vow.

The glass burned cold.

The burn went through my palm and up my arm and down my ribs, a winter river looking for the sea.

I held it… So she could see clearly what I want to show her.

The reason why I have so much faith on Francesco and I.

Severine sucked in a breath–not mine, not air, but the reflex of a woman who had expected heat and met warmth instead, the difference between fire and hearth.

Her eyes widened….

She saw it.

And it makes me smile wider.

What she saw–it is not an illusion, not a trick, not a spell with a price tag hidden under it.

What she saw it’s a life.

A true love…

A house that had learned to keep all its doors and windows and still not be a fortress.

A second. Two.

Then the cold lunged.

It wasn’t a hand. It was intention concentrated. It slid into the seam between skin and story and pushed.

The room tilted.

The light turned thin and then left.

The bond flared–Francesco jolted somewhere, my name tearing through him—and I dug in like roots.

“No,” I said, and the word tasted like iron. “Not like that.”

Severine’s mouth trembled. Not rage. Not scorn.

It was fear.

The silver under my palm cracked, a hairline line running wild as lightning across the glass.

The sound it made was small and terrible.

11:08 Thu, Oct 23

Chapter 239

:

87

55 vouchers

I breathed once more and pushed back–not her, not her grief, not the history that made her–the trespass.

It was like asking a tide to leave a single stone dry.

It is possible if you are stubborn enough and the moon is listening.

The cold receded an inch. Two. Then surged. My knees buckled. The scarf at my throat went hot and then

numb. The room swam.

“Ellaine.”

His voice…

Not in the room.

In the marrow.

The bond was a hand on my back saying Stand.

The mirror tried to be a cliff.

I refused to be a woman falling just because everyone before me had been given a script with that ending.

“Watch,” I whispered through my teeth, not sure to whom. “Learn.”

I held until the world narrowed to the width of my palm and the sound my heart makes when it knows a body will forgive it one more beat.

The glass flickered.

Severine’s face went out of focus and came back older.

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