Chapter 183

The room felt larger than it had ten minutes ago, the silence stretching into the corners now that Lucian had retreated.

He had taken the tray with him, the clink of the spoon against the porcelain bowl echoing in her mind. She had eaten every bite of the porridge and every slice of the citrus fruit.

Her body had demanded it with a ferocity that was almost frightening, a primal hunger that had bypassed her pride and gone straight for survival.

Now, she was alone with her thoughts, and they were a tangled mess. She reached for the chair where a fresh shirt of Lucian’s had been left.

It was dark as a bruise, and far too large for her. She slid her arms into the sleeves, the cool fabric sliding over her skin—the skin that shouldn’t be whole, but was.

As she buttoned the front, her fingers fumbled. She kept looking down at her palm, expecting to see the ghost of the red line she had carved there, but there was nothing.

Just smooth, pale flesh that felt humingly alive. "I am a Lycan." The thought didn’t sit in her brain;m. She thought back to her years in the South, to the whispers of being "broken" and "useless."

She had spent eighteen years mourning a wolf that never came, only to find out she was something the world had tried to breed out of existence.

And Lucian had known. She pulled the oversized shirt over her shoulders, the hem falling nearly to her knees.

It smelled of him. She wanted to be angry. She was angry. But the anger was being smothered by a complicated, exhausting layer of understanding that she didn’t want to possess.

He took the fault, she thought, leaning her forehead against the cool bedpost. ’He didn’t make excuses. He didn’t tell me I was too weak to handle it, even if that’s what he clearly believed.’

She closed her eyes, picturing the scars on his chest. Those brutal marks she had left even when she still couldn’t remember. He had stood there and let her—the beast inside her—tear into him.

He was a man who could end a life with a thought, yet he had allowed her to mark him, to hurt him, and he hadn’t said a word. He had carried those wounds in silence, buttoning his shirts over the evidence of her "awakening" as if it were nothing more than a minor inconvenience.

Who does that? Who takes a claw from a beast and still refuses to tell the person that they are the ones who swung the blade?

The logic was there, buried under the betrayal. Lucian lived in a world of monsters. He had been born into a bloodline that was as much a curse as it was a crown.

To him, the truth was a weapon, and he had spent his life keeping weapons away from her. He had seen her fragility in the South—the way she had been crushed by the expectations of a pack that didn’t want her—and he had decided to create a sanctuary where she didn’t have to be anything other than Isabella.

But in doing so, he had robbed her of the only thing that could have uplifted her: the truth of her own power.

She walked toward the large mirror in the corner of the room. She looked like a ghost in the dark silk. Her hair was a wild tangle, and her eyes... she leaned in closer, her breath fogging the glass.

The gold was still there, but the red ring around the pupils was more pronounced now, a subtle pulse of amber and crimson. It wasn’t the eye of a human. It wasn’t even the eye of a standard werewolf either.

’I would have appreciated honesty,’ she thought bitterly, her fingers gripping the edge of the mirror’s frame. ’I would have taken the fear. I would have taken the confusion. I would have rather been terrified together than safe and alone in a lie.’

Every time he had watched her eat, every time he had tucked the furs around her and checked her for a fever, he had been looking at the clock, waiting for the monster to burst out of her.

She felt a surge of the old grudge—the need to push him away, to make him feel the coldness of the distance she had demanded. He deserved to be shut out. He deserved to wonder if she would ever look at him with trust again.

But then she remembered the way his voice had dropped when he told her he had no excuse. Lucian was a man of absolute control, and watching him lose it—watching him admit his failure—felt like a different kind of truth

The soft thud of the door closing was the only warning she had. Isabella didn’t startle; her lycan’s senses, sharp and huming beneath her skin, had tracked Lucian’s scent the moment he turned the corner of the corridor.

She stayed exactly where she was, watching him in the reflection of the mirror. Lucian moved with a strange, hesitant grace, his massive frame cutting through the shadows of the room. He didn’t speak.

He didn’t offer a platitude or another apology. He simply walked until he was standing directly behind her.

In the mirror, their eyes met. The contrast was jarring. Isabella looked like a fragile bird caught in a storm, drowned in the dark fabric of his shirt, her pale skin appearing almost translucent against the deep violet silk.

But her eyes—those gold-and-crimson beacons—told a different story. They were the eyes of something ancient.

Lucian’s eyes remained stormy grey, filled with a hunger and a remorse so deep it felt like a weight in the room.

For a long, agonizing minute, the only sound was their soft breathing. Isabella watched his reflection, noting the way his gaze swept over her.

She saw the flash of something possessive in his eyes as he looked at her wearing his clothes—the way the collar stood up against her neck, the way the sleeves swallowed her hands.

It was a primal, territorial satisfaction that he couldn’t quite mask. He loved seeing his mark on her, even if that mark was just a piece of fabric.

But beneath that, she saw the pain. Lucian’s hands slowly rose. For a heartbeat, they hovered in the air with an uncertainty she had never seen from him.

Then, he let them drop. His palms landed heavily on her shoulders, his thumbs brushing the base of her neck. Isabella took a deep, shuddering breath. His touch was scorching, a brand of heat that seemed to anchor her soul back into her body.

She didn’t lean back into him, but she didn’t pull away either. She just stared at his hands in the mirror—vast, scarred, and capable of such violence, yet resting on her as if she were the most precious thing in the world.

He moved one hand from her shoulder, his fingers trailing down the silk of her sleeve. He felt the weight of the fabric, the way it hung off her frame, and a ghost of a smile—sad and fleeting—touched his lips.

"You look..." he started, then stopped, clearing his throat. "I have kept you here in my clothes, in my rooms, under my shadow. I told myself it was for your protection."

"And now?"Isabella watched him, her heart skipping a beat. Lucian finally looked down, breaking the mirror contact to look at the back of her head.

"And now I realize that by denying you your own things, I was trying to keep you as a pet rather than a partner," he said.

His voice regained a bit of that sovereign steel, though it was softened by a layer of raw vulnerability. "You would need clothes of your own, Isabella. Real clothes. Wool and leather and furs that fit your frame, not mine."

Isabella felt a strange pang in her chest. Part of her wanted to snap at him, to say that clothes were the least of her concerns when her DNA was unraveling.

But she also heard the silent admission in his words. By offering her her own clothes, he was offering her a shred of the autonomy he had spent weeks slowly stripping away.

He was acknowledging that she was an individual, not just an extension of his will. "You don’t like me wearing your shirts?" she asked, a spark of her old defiance returning.

Lucian’s eyes snapped back to the mirror, burning with a fierce intensity. He stepped closer, his chest now pressing against her back.

The heat was overwhelming. Isabella felt her skin prickle, the Lycan blood inside her reacting to his proximity.

"You should have things that belong to you," Lucian whispered into her ear, his lips grazing the shell of it.

"Tomorrow, I could have Clara bring you cloths to choose from or would you prefer to go choose them yourself?"

Isabella leaned her head back, just an inch, until it rested against his collarbone. She looked at them in the mirror—the dark king and the golden monster.

"I would have preferred the truth over silk, Lucian," she said, her voice steadying. "I would have preferred you looking me in the eye weeks ago and saying, ’Isabella, you are going to change, and it’s going to be terrifying, but I am here.’" 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

"I know," Lucian rasped, burying his face in the shell of her neck, breathing her in.