Chapter 179

Lucian was gone.

Isabella didn’t move for a long time. She remained standing by the window, her forehead resting against the cool glass, watching the morning sky.

The sun was beginning to bleed over the peaks of the Northern range in shades of bruised violet and pale gold.

She could still smell him—that stubborn, lingering scent of sandalwood but the bond had gone quiet. It hadn’t vanished; it had simply retreated, coiling back into the depths of her mind like a wounded animal seeking a dark corner.

He was giving her the space she had demanded, but the distance felt less like freedom and more like a different kind of silence.

She turned away from the glass and looked at the room. This was her sanctuary, or at least, she had let herself believe it was.

Now, the velvet curtains and the ornate silver carvings felt like the gilded bars of a cage she had walked into willingly.

"Six and a half feet," she whispered to the empty air. Her voice sounded small, thin, and entirely human, walking toward the newly installed full-length mirror near the wardrobe.

Stopped right in front of the glass and let the silk robe slip from her shoulders. It pooled at her feet in a silent heap of fabric, leaving her standing bare in the artificial glow of the electric bulbs.

She looked at herself. Truly looked while tracing the line of her collarbone with a shaking finger, noting the fragility of the bone beneath the skin. She moved her hand to the softness of her waist, then down to the smallness of her hands. She was delicate.

In the mirror, she saw a girl who looked like she would bruise if the wind caught her too hard. She was the "wolfless" girl from that godforsaken pack.

The one who had spent eighteen years being told she was a mistake of nature, an empty vessel where a wolf should have been.

’He’s joking,’ she thought, her mind clutching at the idea like a drowning person at a straw. ’He has to be. He’s a king, he’s used to grand gestures and epic stories. He’s just trying to make sense of why he was matched with someone as insignificant as me.’

’Is he?’ her subconscious whispered back. She leaned closer to the glass, her breathing becoming shallow and uneven.

She began to obsess over the inconsistencies. She remembered the kitchen incident, how she had been injured and burnt from that fire and lucain. Yet it didn’t take days or hours to heal. She’d been so into the moment then that she hadn’t question anything.

She remembered the way her muscles never seemed to ache anymore or how she never felt tired quickly, even her first time had gone smoothly. She had credited it to the Northern air.

But then, she looked at her eyes. In the harsh light, the gold of her irises seemed to be fighting a losing battle against a creeping ring of red.

It flickered around her pupils, pulsing with a heat that matched the thrumming of the mark on her neck.

She reached out, her fingers trembling as she touched the cold surface of the mirror, tracing the reflection of her own eyes.

"Is that you?" she breathed. Her reflection didn’t blink. She tried to reach into the back of her mind, past the walls Lucian had built and the fog her own brain had created.

She searched for the "monster." She tried to conjure a memory of the bone-snapping agony he had described—the sensation of her spine lengthening, her ribs cracking and re-knitting to accommodate massive lungs, the feeling of her soul being swallowed by a predator that saw the world in shades of red and prey.

Nothing. It was the nothingness that terrified her most. The void where a memory should be felt like a physical weight in her chest.

What if he wasn’t joking? The thought finally took root, replacing the denial with a creeping dread. What if I am a nightmare? What if I am the reason people looks at me with strange mix of hunger and fear?

She walked to the vanity, her heart beginning to pick up speed until it was drumming against her ribs. Her hands were ice-cold. She needed proof.

She needed to feel something other than this suffocating uncertainty. If she was human—if she was just Isabella—then she was safe. But if she was that...

Her eyes fell on a small letter opener and She picked it up, the weight of the opener grounding her for a fleeting second.

She held the blade over the palm of her left hand. Her hand shook so violently the object caught the light in flashes.

"I need to know," she whispered, hesitating, the tip of the blade hovering just millimeters above her skin.

She told herself she was being dramatic. She told herself she was just stressed. But the red in her eyes reflected back at her from the vanity mirror, demanding an answer.

She justified it. A small cut. Just a small one. If it takes a few days to heal, I’m human. I’m just Isabella.

Slowly, intentionally, she pressed the tip of the blade into the meat of her palm, watching, fascinated and horrified, as the skin resisted for a heartbeat before it slid’s in.

A tiny, perfect bead of crimson blood welled up, bright and startling against her pale skin. She didn’t pull away. She didn’t reach for a cloth.

She simply watched as the blood pooled, overflowing the shallow trench of the cut and sliding down the side of her hand.

"See?" she said to the empty room, a hysterical, jagged laugh bubbling in her throat. "I bleed. I hurt. I’m just...."

She stopped. A strange sensation began to crawl under her skin. It wasn’t the itchy, dull throb of a normal injury. She stared at the wound, waiting for the blood to continue its journey down her wrist.

But it didn’t.

The blood seemed to hesitate. Isabella’s breath hitched. Her heart stopped. Before her eyes, the skin just fused. The two sides of the cut pulled together as if they were being drawn by a magnet.

There was no scab, no scarring, no lingering redness. In less than ten seconds, the wound was gone.

The only evidence that she had even touched the blade was the single, stray drop of blood that had fallen onto the marble vanity.

Her palm was as smooth as silk. The shock didn’t hit her immediately. It was a delayed, crushing wave that started at her toes and surged upward.

The letter opener clattered out of her hand, ringing against the floor. "No," she breathed, her voice a mere ghost of a sound. "No, no, no."

She backed away from the vanity, her knees hitting the edge of the bed. She collapsed onto the mattress, her eyes wide and fixed on her unblemished palm.

Am I dangerous? The question finally surfaced, She thought of Lucain, what he had said regarding those three marks.

She pulled the heavy furs from the bed around her, but the warmth didn’t reach her. The cold was radiating from her own marrow. 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢

She looked at her hands and, for the first time, she didn’t see tools for writing or taking notes. She saw weapons.

She lay there for a long time, or perhaps a lifetime, watching the shadows of the room shift as the sun rose higher.

Her unblemished palm still held up in front of her eyes as if waiting for the wound to return out of spite. Her mind tried again to reject it. Tried to rebuild the old version of herself.

The version she had come to accept and live with. But the silence in her body no longer agreed.

She swallowed hard, her throat tight. "If I’m not human..." she paused.

"Why now?’