Chapter 83

Chapter 83
Sera POV

I didn’t realise I had slept at all. My eyes felt heavy, my body heavier, as if the dream had wrapped itself around my ribs and stayed there, clinging to me even after I woke.

Jade was already awake.

He wasn’t touching me, but he sat beside me on the bed, elbows resting on his knees, head bowed slightly. His hair fell forward, catching the morning light. His back rose and fell with a quiet, steady breath.

He looked calm, but I could feel the storm inside him.

The bond made it impossible not to.

I pushed myself up slowly, wincing as the lingering ache of everything – fear, confusion, longing – pulled through my chest. Jade turned his head, and his silver eyes softened the moment they met mine.

“You’re awake,” he said quietly.

I nodded because my voice didn’t want to work yet.

He reached forward and brushed a strand of hair behind my ear, his fingers lingering just a moment too long, like he worried I might disappear if he didn’t hold onto something. I didn’t pull back. I didn’t lean in either. I stayed suspended somewhere between.

We said nothing else; we didn’t get to.

A heavy knock slammed into the door, three jolts, sharp and echoing through the room. Jade stiffened instantly, his entire body shifting from warmth to cold authority in the span of a heartbeat.

He stood; his voice when he spoke was no longer soft.

“What is it?” he called.

A guard’s voice answered from the hallway, urgent and strained.

“Alpha Lucien sent a message through one of his warriors. He… he demands the girl.”

My entire body went cold.

Lucien.

I didn’t know him, but the name felt like thunder that came before destruction. And if the guards spoke his name with fear, then he was not a man who asked. He was a man who took.

Jade didn’t move at first.

He just stood there. Then he laughed.

“Demands?” he repeated, as if the word itself offended him.

“He dares to send demands to me?”

His voice was no longer human around the edges. It was too deep.

“Yes, he said he wants her,” the guard confirmed quietly.

Jade turned his head slightly, but the air in the room changed, thickening like smoke.

“He will not touch her,” Jade said. It wasn’t so loud, but it was with the certainty of a blade pressed to someone’s throat.

The guard swallowed.

“Who exactly delivered the message?” he asked.

“His messenger camped at the western border, Alpha.”

Jade nodded once. A single, cold decision.

“Send Merek,” he said. “Tell him to ride to the border and deliver my answer.”

The guard hesitated. “And what shall the answer be, Alpha?”

Jade didn’t blink. “Tell Lucien,” he said, “that if he comes for what is mine, I will tear out his throat and hang his head on my gates.”

The guard left instantly, and complete silence filled the room.

The kind that makes your heart feel too loud in your own chest.

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to ask whether this was about protection… or possession. Whether the mark on my neck bound me because he loved me… or because he refused to lose anything that he believed belonged to him.

Jade came back to the bed.

His hands didn’t touch me at first.

He just looked at me.

And then, gently… like his anger wasn’t burning holes into the air… he lifted my chin and pressed his forehead to mine.

“Something inside me tightened.

I had this inexplicable fear of Jade.

Of how easily violence lived inside him.

How quickly it woke and how naturally it fit him.

The guard left with a short bow, and Jade finally turned to look at me again.

His eyes were no longer soft.

They were burning.

Filled with a possessive fury so fierce it made my heart thud painfully against my ribs.

“He will not take you,” he said.

A vow that sounded like the beginning of a war.

I wanted to speak. To say something. To ask why Lucien wanted me. To ask what connection I had to a man I’d never met. To ask why fate seemed to be tying threads together behind my back, weaving something I could not yet understand.

But the words tangled in my throat and died there.

. He didn’t wait for words after that; his mouth found mine as if the space between us had been empty for too long and he had to fill it with himself in case the world tried to take me away.

The kiss came hard and sudden, not violent but urgent, every inch of it claiming and gathering like a storm gathering wind; his hands threaded into my hair, tilting my head back just enough, his body close and solid behind mine so that I could feel every breath he took as if it were a tide pulling at my ribs.

It was possessive in the way it pressed at the edge of me, in the way his fingers tightened where they held my waist, in the low sound that ripped from him and settled into my bones, and in the mark at my throat.

I wanted to pull away at first, to tell him to stop, to tell him that threats and promises and blood did not make me safer, that war in his name would not heal the hollow that lived inside me.

But his mouth was everywhere, claiming the shape of me with an insistence that left me dizzy, and the bond flared hot beneath my skin like a second pulse, answering him before I could.

When he finally broke the kiss, it was only a breath, close enough that his lips brushed my temple, and still his hands did not let me go.

His voice was low and ragged and full of something I could not name… need, fear, a kind of desperate tenderness that made my heart twist. “No one will take you,” he said again, not as a promise but as a vow into the space between us, and for one trembling moment I wanted to believe him without question.

Instead my fingers curled into his shirt, and I let the truth press out of me gently, halting and half-formed, “I don’t want you to burn everything for me.”

The words felt small and useless against his heat and the echo of his threat out beyond our walls, but they were real, and he heard them.