Lucas let out a slow breath, shaky but clearer. "You don’t think I’m cursed? Haunted?"
Trevor tilted his head down, kissing his temple once. "If you are, then I’ll be cursed right alongside you."
Another breath. This one steadier. But what followed was anything but.
"Christian was one of the worst," Lucas said, voice barely above a whisper. "Nobody came to save me. Not Caelan, not Serathine, no one."
Trevor’s entire body went still.
Lucas didn’t stop. Couldn’t stop now that the door was open.
"At twenty-one, I met him. Christian. And for a while... I thought maybe I could be happy." His voice cracked—not a sob, but something rawer. Like his ribs were splintering from the inside.
"He was kind. Gentle. He said all the right things. Touched me like I mattered. Like I was wanted. And I was so desperate to believe it. After everything Misty did—after being told I was just a body to sell—I clung to that fantasy."
Trevor’s grip on him tightened just enough to be felt. Just to say I’m here. I hear you.
Lucas went on, slower now, the words dragging themselves out like they hurt to form. "He was obsessed with having a child. I didn’t understand it at first—why he was so determined to leave me pregnant. He kept saying it would fix everything. That I owed it to him."
Trevor said nothing, but his chest had gone taut beneath Lucas’s cheek. The ache he’d been holding in check coiled tighter, sharp and metallic.
Lucas’s voice dropped. "Now... now I think he would’ve rather killed me than hand me off to Agatha. But I’m not sure. If the second part of your findings is true—if I really can change dormant alphas—then I think..."
He hesitated. Not because he doubted. But because saying it would make it real.
"I think it already happened," he whispered.
The silence that followed was deep. Weighty.
"There were so many," Lucas continued, his voice barely audible. "I don’t know their names. I don’t even know if they were... if they were buyers, or clients, or just tests. He stopped pretending after a while. Just kept saying that someone would pay enough to make it all worth it. That I was lucky he was giving me a chance to be useful and that it wasn’t his fault for me not getting pregnant."
Trevor’s jaw locked. He couldn’t stop the faint tremor that went through him, couldn’t stop the absolute, feral protectiveness rising like a storm inside his bones.
He closed his eyes, inhaled, and forced himself to stay still. To stay gentle.
Because Lucas was trembling now. Not violently, not visibly—but deep under the skin, like the memories had started to bleed through every nerve. Like speaking them aloud had summoned ghosts.
"I didn’t even know what I was," Lucas said, laughing once—flat and bitter. "I thought I was just broken. I didn’t know there was a reason they kept forcing me into heat and waiting. Watching."
Trevor finally spoke. His voice was low, guttural. "They used you like an experiment."
Lucas gave a tiny nod. "They made me believe I was the failure."
"You weren’t," Trevor said, firm. "You never were."
Lucas let out a breath, rough and uneven. "And if I can really... awaken alphas, like you said... if that’s what they were trying to harness—then what am I, Trevor? What the hell am I?"
Trevor pulled back just enough to meet his gaze. His hands stayed on Lucas’s waist, grounding him. His stare didn’t waver.
"You’re not a weapon," Trevor said. "You’re not a product, or a breeding tool, or a cure for someone else’s failure to feel. You’re Lucas. You’re the man who walked into a room full of nobles and made them regret opening their mouths. You’re the one who stood up to Misty and didn’t look back. And you’re the one I chose. Freely. Every time."
But his eyes—those storm-glass eyes that had seen too much and been believed too little—finally closed, and the tears slipped free in silence.
No sobs. No gasping. Just the quiet surrender of a dam finally cracking.
Trevor didn’t try to stop them.
He didn’t wipe them away or shush the grief like it was something to be ashamed of. He let Lucas cry. Let him grieve—not just the past, but the years stolen, the trust fractured, and the versions of himself he had to become just to survive.
And gods, he’d survived. That alone was a miracle.
Trevor drew him in closer, arms wrapped tight around his back, chest rising and falling with slow, deliberate calm. He pressed a kiss into Lucas’s hair and whispered into the hush, voice steady as a vow:
But he clung tighter.
And that was answer enough.
Lucas had fallen asleep without realizing it.
One minute he was trembling in Trevor’s arms, breath uneven and heart pounding against his ribs like it was trying to escape. The next—still. Limbs loose. Breathing slowly. His forehead rested against Trevor’s chest, lips parted just enough to draw soft, steady breaths. The kind of sleep that didn’t come easily to people like him.
Not because he was trapped, but because everything in him was suddenly dedicated to the act of being still. As if the wrong shift would wake Lucas. As if the weight of what had just been said needed silence to settle.
He looked down at the man in his arms. At the peaceful expression carved over exhaustion and battle scars no one else could see. At the dried tears on his cheeks. At the way his fingers were still curled slightly into Trevor’s shirt, even in sleep.
It hit him harder than it should have.
Trevor exhaled slowly and leaned his head back against the headboard, his gaze distant now, sharp where it needed to be. His hand moved reflexively across Lucas’s back in soft, circular motions—reassuring for Lucas, grounding for him.
His mind, however, was anything but still.
Brick by unforgiving brick.
He went back—months now, maybe more. It was the first time Lucas had seen Christian. That moment at Serathine’s estate when the light had drained from him so fast it left everyone around him scrambling. The silence. The stillness. The absolute terror Lucas hadn’t been able to name.
It hadn’t made sense then.
That wasn’t fear of a stranger.
Trevor’s hand stilled.
No one reacted like that to someone they’d never met or spoken to. Even Christian’s presence, commanding as it was, wouldn’t have shattered Lucas like that unless something inside him had already lived that trauma once before. Trevor had written it off as stress, as an echo of a life shaped by abuse. But now?
Now he believed him. free\NovelHub.c o(m)
Lucas hadn’t been speaking metaphorically when he said he died. He hadn’t been spiraling. He hadn’t been imagining. He remembered. And Trevor, for all his training, for all his skepticism, had seen enough strange things in this world not to dismiss the impossible outright.
He’d read the temple reports—buried in archives, redacted for public review. Rare cases where youths had woken before their coming-of-age ceremony with knowledge they should not have had. Details from other lifetimes. Names. Faces. Even history long forgotten, languages no one had spoken for generations. Most were written off as anomalies. A quirk of ether. A divine misfire.
But Lucas? Lucas had lived it.