Semua Bab BLOODBOUND: THE LAST MATE : Bab 81 - Bab 90

"I didn't choose this," Rafael said. He was at the window — his back to her, which was unusual, which told her more than his words did. "The night I was turned, I was twenty-nine. I was a soldier and I was going to die in a war I hadn't started, and someone offered me an alternative. I took it. Not because I understood what I was agreeing to. Because I was twenty-nine and afraid to die." He turned. "That is not a noble origin story.""Most aren't," she said."Most people claim better ones." He came away from the window and sat across from her. "The first hundred years were — difficult. In ways I've never talked about. I was stronger and faster and effectively deathless, and I was also completely alone in a way that had nothing to do with physical presence and everything to do with — continuity. The people I had loved were gone within thirty years. Everything that had given my existence its shape had dissolved. I had a kingdom to run, which gave me structure, but structure isn't the sa

"She must not survive until the Red Moon." The voice was Dorian's. She was certain of it.Lena stood in the corridor outside the north reception hall, a corridor she had taken as a shortcut from the library because the eastern passage had been occupied by some minor ceremony she'd had no interest in observing. She had heard Dorian's voice through the gap in the door — not all of the conversation, just the end of it, just those words, landing in the quiet corridor like a stone dropped into still water.She stood very still. She heard the sound of a chair, of movement, and she stepped back around the corner and pressed herself against the wall and waited until the footsteps passed in the other direction. Then she stood in the corridor for a moment and let the words organize themselves in her mind.She must not survive until the Red Moon.She went to find Rafael immediately. He was in a meeting — she could hear voices from behind his war room door — and she waited outside in the corridor

"She has your jaw," Rafael said from behind her.Lena did not turn immediately. She stood in front of the portrait — end of a long gallery, candlelit, dusty with the specific dust of rooms that are not often entered — and she looked at the woman in the painting and she tried to decide what she was feeling.The woman in the portrait was not her. She was sure of that. The face was different in its specific construction: broader forehead, slightly different set to the eyes. But the jaw was the same. The way she held her hands — one slightly forward, one slightly back, a posture that Lena recognized because she had seen it in her own reflection for twenty-four years — was the same. And on the inside of her right wrist, visible in the portrait despite the formal dress she wore, was a mark that Lena had grown up being told was a birthmark, a wolf-mark, a claim of the moon — the same mark, in the same place, in the same exact shape."Who is she?" Lena asked."Her name was Astara," Rafael sai

"Let him handle the guards," Seraphine said. "My concern isn't Rafael."She was standing at the branch corridor's entry, alone — no attendants, no ceremony, no carefully arranged advantage. Just herself, in the late-evening dress she'd worn at dinner, and an expression that had moved entirely past the performance of contempt into something that Lena recognized, because she had grown up reading the faces of people who had decided she was a problem that needed resolving. It was the expression of conclusion. Of someone who had done the math and arrived at a number they could live with."Seraphine," Rafael said, from behind Lena. She could hear him managing the two attendants, the sounds of restraint."I said my concern isn't you," Seraphine said again, still looking at Lena. "You're not the threat. You're never the threat, Rafael. You've always been a reasonable man and reasonable men can be worked around." She tilted her head at Lena. "Her, though. What she is, or what she's about to be

"The corridor is not the right place for this conversation," she said."No," he agreed. "It isn't."He gave two terse instructions to his senior guard — Seraphine to the holding chambers, the corridor cleared — and then he led Lena through the south gallery and into the east study, and she went because it was the right move and because her legs were working on automatic while the rest of her processed what he had just said in front of the entire court.He closed the door behind them. He went to the fireplace and lit the grate with the kind of automatic motion that suggests the hands have always known how to do something, and the fire caught immediately, and the amber light filled the room, and Lena stood in the center of it and turned to face him."Three hundred years," she said. "You have known for three hundred years that your mate would come from the Shunned Star line.""Yes.""And you attended auctions for three hundred years, waiting.""Six auctions," he said. "At irregular inter