Chapter 175

The bathroom was cold and silence as Isabella was perched on the edge of the closed toilet seat, her fingers knotted so tightly into Lucian’s discarded dress shirt that her knuckles were white.

Around her feet, a pile of his cloths lay in a makeshift nest. She inhaled sharply, burying her face back into the dark fabric of the shirt.

It smelled of him but even that was barely enough to drown out the other thing. The air in the vents was poisoned. It carried a thick, copper-heavy musk that made her restlessly in confusion and nausea.

’Why did he lock me in here?’ The question looped in her mind like a broken record. Lucian’s face had been a mask of such terrifying rage that she hadn’t dared to protest, but the confusion was starting to turn into a low-grade panic.

’Did the Council come unannounced?’ her mind raced, jumping to the worst-case scenarios. ’Did they find out about Alaric or me? Or is it something else? Is the house under attack?’

She shifted, the silk of her nightgown rustling against the wool of his coats. She felt like a child being hidden away during a storm, but she wasn’t a child.

She was his mate. She was the one who was supposed to stand beside him, yet here she was, huddled on a toilet seat in the dark, clutching his laundry as if it were a life raft.

Suddenly, the floor beneath her feet shuddered.

It wasn’t a large movement, just a dull vibration that rattled the glass jars on the vanity and sent a ripple through the water in the sink.

But in the silence of the master suite, it felt like an explosion. Isabella jumped, a small, strangled gasp escaping her throat. Her heart hammered against her ribs.

That hadn’t been the wind. That had been the sound of stone meeting force. "Lucian?" she whispered, though she knew he couldn’t hear her through the heavy door.

The bond in the back of her mind, which had been a steady hum of afterglow just an hour ago, was now flickering. She could feel his anger but she also felt a strange, secondary wave of distress that didn’t belong to him.

It was a hot, suffocating hunger that made her skin itch and her mark pulse with a sympathetic ache.

She looked at the crimson mark on her neck through the mirror, it was visible through the thin strap of her nightgown.

"What is happening out there?" She stood up, the clothes sliding from her lap to the floor. She moved toward the door, her hand trembling as she reached for the handle.

She knew he had told her to stay. She knew he had told her to breathe only him. But the silence and the shaking were more than she could bear.

She pressed her ear against the wood, straining to hear anything—shouting, footsteps, the clash of steel.

But there was nothing but the distant, muffled sound of the Northern wind howling against the walls.

The isolation was suffocating. She felt the gap between her and the world widening, a sense of helplessness that tasted like ash.

She sank back down to the floor, not on the seat this time, but directly into the pile of his clothes, pulling a dress shirt over her head to create a dark, private sanctuary.

The air in the vents spiked one last time before it began to dissipate, replaced by an unnatural chill that Isabella was starting to recognize as Clara’s magic. She pulled the shirt tighter, the scent of Lucian finally winning the battle for her senses.

Back in the East Wing, the impact of Alaric’s body hitting Clara was enough to drive the air from her lungs. He didn’t attack with teeth or claws.

Alaric slammed into her, his arms wrapping around her waist with the strength, burying his face in the crook of her neck, right where the pulse point thrashed against her skin, and let out a sound that was half-sob, half-growl.

Clara stumbled back against the remains of the wardrobe, her breath hitching. The heat radiating off him was astronomical.

For a moment, her hands hovered in the air, trembling, the emerald light of her magic flickering at her fingertips.

She was a High Witch, she should have been chanting a binding spell, should have been driving a silver-tipped needle into his pressure points to force the shift back.

But as his ragged, burning breath hit her skin, the book she had dropped on the floor seemed to mock her.

Lucian didn’t leave. He stood in the wreckage of the doorway, watching them with an unreadable expression—his gray eyes tracking every shudder of Alaric’s shoulders and the way Clara’s fingers slowly, almost imperceptibly, began to curl toward the boy’s hair.

He didn’t trust the wolf. Even a bonded wolf was an animal during a rut, and Lucian was not a man who gambled with the security of his fortress.

"Fix it, Clara," Lucian’s voice cut through the humid air, cold and devoid of sympathy. Clara forced her hands down, pressing them flat against Alaric’s burning shoulder blades. She didn’t look at Lucian as she whispered a spell and a wave of emerald light rolled off her palms, sinking into Alaric’s skin.

It wasn’t a cage this time, but a sedative—a magical frost meant to douse the fire in his blood. As the spell took hold, the thick, suffocating musk in the room began to settle.

Alaric’s grip didn’t loosen, but the tension in his muscles began to melt, his breathing evening out into long, shaky exhales.

The boy let out one final, quiet whine against her skin—mine—before his head slumped heavily against her shoulder.

The mid-shift fur on his back began to recede, the talons digging into her silk robes softening back into human nails.

Clara looked up then, her white eyes meeting Lucian’s gray ones. Her face was a mask of exhausted defiance, her robes disheveled and her hair spilling out.

She looked compromised, and she knew he could see it. Lucian held her gaze for a long second. He saw the way she was holding the boy and without a word, he turned on his heel, leaving the witch and her wolf in the silence of the ruins.