Chapter 522 A SECOND CHANCE (BONUS – 1)

EVELYN’S POV

Witchcraft, despite what mundanes believed, wasn’t chaos.

Magic obeyed rules. Power flowed through established pathways. Circles and sigils held because they were constructed correctly.

For most of my life, my world functioned with the comforting certainty of precision.

Then I met Tobias.

Tobias hadn’t shattered my world so much as opened a window in a room I hadn’t realized was suffocating me.

He asked inconvenient questions. Pointed out inconsistencies I had trained myself not to notice.

Forced me to look directly at truths I had spent years carefully stepping around, because acknowledging them would have required admitting that the woman who raised me was not who I believed her to be.

Slowly, painfully, the blindfold began to slip.

I saw Catherine for the monster she really was, and once I did, I couldn’t unsee it.

I became an active participant in the effort to stop her. A conspirator hidden beneath her own roof.

A traitor by every definition that mattered to the woman who literally lifted me out of flames and raised me.

My world tilted. My loyalties fractured.

Everything I thought I understood about myself became uncertain.

But even then, despite everything, my world did not completely fall off its axis—until Lucian Reed.

Until that damning word echoed in my head, in the deepest depths of my soul.

Mate.

Lucian Reed was a werewolf with an alarming tendency toward self-sacrifice, an unhealthy relationship with guilt, and an active desire to die if he thought he was sparing someone else an inconvenience.

And somehow, somewhere between stopping him from killing himself in a dying forest, watching him beg for death on the ruined island, and holding him together while Catherine’s madness tried to tear him apart from the inside, he had become the point around which my entire, off-kilter world had begun to turn.

The first few days after the battle had been chaotic.

Nightfang healers moved through the medical wing like a tide that never receded, carrying medication, bandages, and exhaustion beneath their eyes.

Half the alliance had returned injured. Some would recover quickly. Others would carry scars for the rest of their lives.

Lucian belonged to neither category.

Strangely, annoyingly, his body had no problem healing.

The wounds closed. The bruises faded. The damage that final struggle had inflicted on his nervous system gradually stabilized beneath layers of treatment, medication, and good old werewolf genes.

And yet he did not wake.

He simply remained still beneath white sheets, breathing quietly and evenly as if he were sleeping and not trapped somewhere too distant to hear us calling.

Every night, I dreamt of the roaring fire that took my parents—the only memory I had of them. Every time I blinked, I saw the implosion that destroyed the only mother I would remember.

But watching Lucian like that, so close and yet so impossibly far, was still the worst sight of my life.

Yet, I couldn’t leave.

The medical wing eventually stopped asking why I was there every morning before sunrise and stayed well into the night, long after visiting hours ended.

One nurse had even started leaving cups of coffee beside his bed without asking.

“Any changes?” Sera asked softly one afternoon as she stepped into the room.

I looked up from the chair beside Lucian’s bed and offered her a tired smile.

“None that I can see. You?”

Seraphina, Luna of Nightfang, with all her responsibilities and personal woes, had fulfilled her promise to me.

She’d come every day with the same determination and stubborn refusal to give up on Lucian that she’d shown on the island.

Over the past week, I watched her sit beside his bed and reach for him in ways no healer, physician, or witch ever could.

Psychic energy would unfurl around her in shimmering silver threads as she searched for him somewhere beyond the reach of medicine and magic alike.

His mind, she explained, had retreated inward.

Not gone, thankfully, but healing. Recovering from the brutality of Catherine’s influence, like a wounded animal crawling into darkness until it was strong enough to emerge again.

It made sense, but understanding a problem and being able to solve it were not remotely the same thing.

For the first time in my life, every tool I possessed was useless.

My witchcraft could stabilize a failing heart. Repair damaged neural pathways. Untangle curses intricate enough to destroy entire bloodlines.

But this?

I knew no spell to guide someone home from the ruins of their own mind. No ritual to bridge a distance that wasn’t tangible.

Helplessness. I fucking hated it.

Sera stepped closer to Lucian and rested two fingers lightly against his temple.

Just like every time she had done this, I held my breath. Waiting. Hoping.

After several moments, she withdrew.

“Still quiet,” she murmured.

My chest tightened, and I drew my knees up to my chest, resting my chin on them.

“Probably for the best,” I murmured. “If he wakes, he’ll start begging anyone within a one-mile radius to kill him.”

Soft, hesitant laughter spilled from Sera’s lips, and the sound drew my eyes to her.

She really was beautiful, with her cerulean eyes, long blonde hair, and soft smile. But I could never look at her too long.

Because she looked too much like Zara.

Zara, who was Lucian’s first mate.

Zara, who he sacrificed his humanity for.

Zara, who in turn, sacrificed her life for him.

“Can I ask you a question?” The words were out before I realized my lips had formed them.

Sera gently perched on the arm of the chair opposite me and gave me a gentle, expectant smile.

“Ask anything you want, Evelyn.”

I took in a long, deep breath, trying to sort my thoughts.

There was so much I wanted to know—about werewolves and mates and their ridiculous, inane tradition of worshipping the damn moon.

Above all…

“Can you tell me about Zara?”

Sera’s smile slipped a little, but she didn’t flinch from the question. Instead, she asked, “Which?”

I frowned. “What—”

Then I remembered that the Zara who had died on the island had been nothing more than a glorified science experiment.

“The…original, I guess,” I said.

Sera seemed to think for a bit, like she was gathering her thoughts. Then she nodded.

“Would you like me to show you the memory of when he spoke about her?” she asked softly.

I blinked. “What?”

She shrugged. “I can project the memory of when Lucian told me about Zara. Then it would be like he told you himself.” She hesitated. “Is that too weird?”

Yes. Very, very weird.

But I found myself shaking my head. “No, I…I think I want that.”

She nodded. “Close your eyes.”

I obeyed.

At first, there was only darkness. Then silver.

Psychic energy brushed against my consciousness, gentle and careful in a way that reminded me of someone knocking before entering a room.

And suddenly—

The first thing I became aware of was Lucian’s voice.

Quiet. Measured. Tired in a way that had nothing to do with exhaustion.

I couldn’t see him clearly at first. Only fragments through Sera’s memory: sunlight slanting through the high windows, dust motes turning slowly through the air.

Then there he was—staring at a portrait of Zara as though looking at someone he had never truly lost and never truly stopped missing.

And then he spoke about her.

With longing so old and intense that it had stopped being a wound and become something closer to a second heartbeat.

As the memory unfolded around me, I listened to him speak about dreams built together and promises that survived the people who made them.

He spoke as if she had been woven so completely into the fabric of his existence that separating her from himself was impossible.

He spoke of a future they had believed they would share.

He spoke about how he held that future in his arms as it died.

And beneath every word, beneath every carefully controlled sentence and every deliberate pause, there was profound, undeniable grief.

It had settled into the foundations of him and become part of the architecture holding him upright.

When the memory finally released me, I opened my eyes slowly.

I had to blink several times to clear my blurry vision. My arms tightened around my knees.

I found that I couldn’t look at Sera—she looked too damn much like Zara.

I couldn’t look at Lucian either—not without seeing the love and longing and sorrow that had been in his eyes.

“He loved her very much,” I said softly.

Sera was silent for a moment before answering quietly, “Yes.”

“He couldn’t possibly…”

I couldn’t bring myself to complete the sentence: He couldn’t possibly love someone else as much as he’d loved Zara.

Second-chance mates, that was what we were.

Second best.

A relationship, if there could be one, would constantly be in the shadow of the great love that came before.

Did I even want a relationship?

“I—” My legs uncurled, and I stood, a little shaky. “I need some air.”

The brightly lit, well-ventilated room was suddenly suffocating.

Sera rose, too, her face pinched with worry. “Zara, let’s talk. I understand how you—”

I shook my head.

No. She who had found her own great love in the arms of her gorgeous mate couldn’t possibly understand.

“I just need…”

Space. Distance. The ability to go back to a time when Lucian Reed didn’t exist.

I turned on my heels and walked—no, ran—out of the room.

And with every step that took me further away from Lucian, my heart hurt a little more.