Chapter 181

Alaric didn’t pull away from her finger. He couldn’t. The emerald glow from her touch was seeping into his skin, a numbing cold that fought the residual fire in his veins.

He looked into those white, sightless-looking eyes and saw a woman who had spent centuries fortifying her heart against the very thing he was offering.

"I didn’t lie about the bond," he whispered, voice trembling but firm. "I felt the pull before I even knew you were a witch."

Clara didn’t move. Her narrow gaze scanned his face, looking for the tell-tale twitch of a liar’s eye or the spike in heart rate that would give him away.

But Alaric’s heart was steady while he narrates. "I felt it when I was still a thousand miles away in the heat of the South. If I’m running, Clara, I’m running to you, not just away from them"

"A romantic sentiment," Clara said, finally pulling her hand back, but she didn’t move away. "But sentiments don’t survive the North. Lucian is already questioning your utility. If you are nothing but a fugitive kid with a biology problem, you won’t survive the week."

"Then I would be useful," Alaric countered, sitting up straighter. Clara mocking smile didn’t return, but her suspicion didn’t vanish either.

She straightened her back, her robes falling into perfect lines once more. The room was restored, the wreckage gone, but the atmosphere remained charged with an electricity that no spell could dampen.

"I will be the judge of your ’utility’," she said, walking toward the door. She paused with her hand on the handle, her back to him.

"And Alaric? Do not mistake my silence for acceptance." She didn’t wait for his reply. The door clicked shut, the magical wards humming into place with a green flare.

Alone in the room, Alaric let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. He looked at the bed, then at the bookshelf she had so meticulously repaired.

She was a wall of ice, ancient and unyielding. But as he laid his head back against the pillow, he could still feel the sensation of her finger under his chin.

It had been cold, yes. But for a split second, before she pulled away, he had felt her hand shake. "Mine," he murmured to the ceiling, a ghost of a smile touching his bruised lips.

Outside the door, Clara stood in the hallway, her hand pressed against the wall. Her breathing was steady. "Focus, Clara," she whispered to herself.

The adrenaline that had fueled her magic was beginning to ebb, leaving behind a gnawing ache in her stomach. She hadn’t eaten.

She remembered the three plates sitting in the kitchen—a breakfast she had prepared with precision before the world in the East Wing had dissolved into musk and violence.

She had meant to serve Isabella first, but a strange, nagging tug in her intuition had pulled her toward Alaric’s door instead.

That "tug" had been the first warning sign of the rut, and in her haste to contain the boy, her own needs had been relegated to the back of her mind.

Now, her body was demanding payment. Her head throbbed with the familiar rhythm of a magical overextension.

She began the long walk toward the kitchen. The mansion was unnervingly quiet. Marcus was no where in sight same with lucain and Isabella.

As she neared the kitchen entrance, the scent of her porridge hit her. Clara slowed her pace, her white eyes narrowing.

She didn’t need her sight to know who was standing inside. The air around the kitchen was pressurized, weighted by the sheer, unyielding gravity of Lucian’s presence.

She paused at the threshold. Lucian’s back was to the door. He was standing by the island, his large hands braced against the edge of the table.

He was shirtless, the little scars on his back catching the morning light. He didn’t turn around, but the tension in his shoulders shifted—a silent acknowledgment that he had felt her the moment she stepped into the hallway.

"The boy is sedated," Clara said, her voice echoing slightly against the pots hanging from the ceiling.

She didn’t wait for him to ask. She knew the Sovereign didn’t care about the boy’s comfort, only his containment.

Lucian didn’t answer immediately. He picked up a piece of fruit from a bowl and added it into a plate. "The wards are holding," she added, stepping further into the room. 𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮

Her eyes drifted to the corner of the counter where the two plates were now emptied and a pot was steaming up the porridge again.

Clara eyes widened, flickering back to lucain who was focused in plating a fruit salad.

"Isabella’s awake" Clara asked as she watched as he pick up some grapes.

Lucain eyes darkened as he rasped. "She knows." Clara dropped the spoon she had picked to stir the porridge back onto its place.

The hunger in her stomach was instantly replaced by a cold dread. "She knows what?"

"Everything," Lucian rasped. "The scars. The night at the void. The Lycan blood." Clara let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.

She sank onto a wooden stool, her robes spilling around her. "You told her. After weeks of silence, you chose *this* morning to tell her?"

"She insisted,Clara. Your mate rut almost triggered something out from her and she couldn’t ignore the signs anymore," Lucian finished, his voice like grinding stones.

He finally turned around, his face alandscape of exhaustion and simmering fury. He set the plate of fruit down to the marble island.

"The musk from that brat’s rut... it acted like a chemical key. It clawed at her instincts, forcing the Lycan blood to answer. She saw the scars on my chest, the truth reflected in my eyes and the bond, and there was no lie big enough to hide behind anymore."

Clara stared at him, her fingers curling into the fabric of her robes. She wanted to defend kid—to say that a rut is a force of nature, not a choice—but the words died in her throat.

Seeing the raw, bleeding tension in Lucian’s posture, she knew better. She looked down at the steaming porridge, the appetite she’d been nursing completely gone.

"I won’t pretend his timing was ideal, Lucian. But blaming a wolf for his rut is like blaming the tide for coming in. He’s a victim of his own biology."

"He’s a liability," Lucian countered, his grey eyes flashing dangerously to red. "One I should have eliminated at the staircase."

Clara took a slow, measured breath, trying to inject some of her characteristic ice back into the room. "But you didn’t. And now we are here. So, what do we do? How did she... how did she truly take it?"

Lucian’s expression shifted, the anger momentarily eclipsed by a flicker of profound pain. He looked away, staring toward the doorway as if he expected Isabella to appear.

"She told me to give her space," The words came out in a gravelly whisper. Clara blinked, stunned. "Isabella? She told you to leave?"

"She looked me in the eyes and asked for distance," Lucian said, a bitter, self-deprecating smirk touching his lips.

Clara watched him, her white eyes tracking the way his large fingers meticulously arranged a sliced pear on the porcelain.

There was something jarring about seeing the most feared man—a man who had torn throats out with his bare hands—fret over the presentation of a fruit salad.

It wasn’t pity she felt for him; it was recognition of the mess he had made. She had told him. From the moment Isabella woke up from the incident, shivering and fragile, Clara had warned him that secrets didn’t stay buried, they froze, preserved until the spring thaw turned them into a flood.

"You were adamant, Lucian," Clara said, her voice cutting through the heavy silence of the kitchen. "You insisted she wasn’t ready. You claimed that knowing would break her mind before her body could adapt. And now? Now the truth has come out in the worst time ever."

Lucian’s jaw tightened, a muscle leaping in his cheek. He didn’t argue. He couldn’t. He picked up a silver spoon and began to dish the steaming porridge into a separate bowl.

The aroma of it filled the air. Clara raised an eyebrow, her gaze shifting from his face to the tray he was carefully preparing.

"And who is that meal for?" Her tone was dry and mocking. "You don’t eat human food, Lucian."

Lucian didn’t look up. He filled the plate, his movements steady despite the storm clearly raging behind his grey eyes.

"It’s for Isabella," he rasped. "She hasn’t eaten since yesterday. She needs the energy."

Clara let out a short breath—half-sigh, half-scoff. She leaned back against the kitchen stool, crossing her arms over her torn robes.

"But she told you she needed space, didn’t she? She told the Sovereign to get out. Most men would take that as a cue to go to the woods and hit something. Or, in your case, to go and execute the boy in the guest wing."

"I am not ’most men,’" Lucian snapped, finally lifting his head. His eyes weren’t grey anymore; they were a dull, bruised crimson. " I care about what she said but it was in a moment of shock. I know what she needs."

"She needs to process that her mate is a liar and that she is a biological anomaly," Clara countered. "I don’t think porridge is the cure for that, Lucian."

"That doesn’t mean she should starve," Lucian growled, picking up a glass of water and placed it on the tray next to the fruit and the porridge.

"She can hate me. She can banish me from the room. She can even try to claw those scars back into my chest if it makes her feel better. But I will not let her waste away because she’s too overwhelmed to remember how to take care of herself."

Clara watched him with a calculating look. This was the side of Lucian that the world never saw—the side that was almost pathologically devoted to a girl who had no idea how to handle him.

"You’re going to try and move past this as if it’s just a minor marital spat, aren’t you?" Clara asked. "You think if you provide enough fruit and space, she’ll forget that you’ve been gaslighting her for weeks."

"I am going to survive this with her," Lucian corrected,"There is no ’moving past it.’ There is only moving through it. She is my mate, Clara. Her blood is mine, and mine is hers. If she is a monster, then we are monsters together. But she will be a fed monster."

He picked up the tray. The silver handles glinted in the morning light. For a moment, he looked down at the food, a flicker of doubt finally crossing his face—the only sign of weakness he had shown since the sun rose.