Chapter 144: They looked alive.
Isabella stood paralyzed at the threshold of the master suite. The silver shards of the shattered mirrors bit into the tender soles of her bare feet but she barely felt the physical sting.
Someone was having a shower. The thought was absurd; it was utterly insane. The bedroom looked like a hurricane made of knives had passed through it, leaving nothing but ruin in its wake.
"Lucian?" she whispered as she took a tentative step forward. Her hand remained clamped over her wounded elbow, the makeshift bandage soaked through.
She reached the ensuite door, and with a hand that shook so violently she could barely find purchase on the handle, she pushed.
He was trembling so badly that the sound of his shivering was audible over the hiss of the pipes. He wasn’t fully clothed; his soaked trousers clung to his powerful frame, but his exposed back was turned to her—a landscape of rigid, corded muscle and pale skin.
The water hitting the marble floor wasn’t clear. As it swirled toward the drain, it carried a sickly, reddish hue that made Isabella’s stomach turn.
"Lucian," Isabella’s voice finally cracked. Lucian flinched at the sound of his name. Every muscle in his back formed a rigid line of concentrated agony that seemed to be vibrating with a frequency only he could feel.
Isabella stared at his back, watching the way his skin rippled with every shuddering breath. "Lucian, you’re shaking," she whispered, her own voice trembling in sympathy as she stepped further into the flooded room.
That dark, heavy musk and ozone that usually made her feel safe, like a sanctuary within a storm. But beneath it all, there was the sharp, unmistakable, and metallic tang of fresh blood.
Isabella didn’t move. Her feet stayed rooted to the flooded marble, the cold water swirling around her ankles in a pink tide, thick with the remnants of the violence that had just occurred in the bedroom.
He was fighting the urge to turn, fighting the very core of his being to keep from looking at her.
He had tracked her heartbeat as it moved across the glass-strewn floor. Every instinct in his body had screamed at him to lunge, to finish what he had started in the smoke-filled kitchen, and to take every last drop of the life that was currently making her so vibrant, so intoxicatingly alive.
It wanted more. It was demanding the very source. And the guilt—the crushing, suffocating weight of seeing her yelp in pain, of seeing her eyes go wide with the raw fear of a prey animal—was the only thing keeping him pinned under the cold spray of the water.
She ignored the sharp sting in her feet as she stepped over a shard of the shattered vanity mirror.
The water continued its relentless drumming against the tile, a chaotic white noise that filled the void between them.
"Lucian?" she prompted again, her heart hammering against her ribs. "Talk to me. What happened in the kitchen? Why did you... why did you run like that? I was choking, the stove was on fire, and you just left me there like I was a disease you couldn’t stand to touch."
"No," she countered, taking another step into the flooded bathroom, the cold water splashing high against her ankles.
"I am not going anywhere. Why won’t you even look at me? Is the sight of what you did so repulsive that you can’t even face me after you’ve fed?"
Lucian finally turned, and Isabella’s breath hitched in a way that nearly made her knees buckle. Her world tilted on its axis, the reality she had known for days shattering alongside the mirrors.
But that wasn’t what made her paralyze on the spot. It wasn’t the fighting madness in his gaze or the way his lips were pulled back in a silent, agonizing snarl that revealed the length of his fangs.
Isabella’s heart stopped. These weren’t mere scratches or the scars of an old battle. They were deep, angry trenches of ruined, glowing flesh that looked as though they had been branded into him by the hand of a vengeful god.
They weren’t healing. Despite his Sovereign blood, despite the power he wielded, they remained open and weeping.