My Sister Stole My Mate And I Let Her (Seraphina) novel Chapter 488

Chapter 488: Chapter 488 TOO LATE

SERAPHINA’S POV

The woman beside Lucian did not answer immediately.

She simply looked at me with those unnervingly familiar eyes, and something deep inside my instincts recoiled in confusion because nothing about her felt right.

She didn’t carry the hollow absence of Catherine’s puppets, nor the fractured corruption clinging to rogues altered beyond recognition.

Her presence felt...layered. Like standing in front of a mirror submerged beneath dark water, where the reflection moved a fraction too slowly.

If she were indeed a puppet, Catherine must have taken her sweet, sweet time with her.

And then placed her beside Lucian like a chain made of flesh and memory.

I looked from her to him, and my voice came out lower than I intended.

“This is why?”

Lucian’s expression did not change, but pain shimmered in his eyes, raw and liquid. For a heartbeat, he looked so much like the man who had once stood beside me in the ashes of my life and offered his hand.

The wind shifted across the ridge, carrying the distant sounds of battle from the shoreline below.

Somewhere behind us, power exploded hard enough to shake leaves from the trees, and I knew Kieran and Damian were still tearing through each other with enough ferocity to split the island apart.

But here, silence pressed in, louder than a scream.

Maxwell moved slightly closer to me, his weapon lowering by only an inch.

“I don’t like this,” he muttered.

Lucian laughed once under his breath, though no amusement touched the sound. It quickly vanished beneath cold restraint as the pressure around him tightened.

I felt it now that I knew to look for it. Catherine’s control wrapped around him in invisible threads, subtle enough that another psychic might not have noticed, but to me, the distortion was impossible to ignore.

Lucian was fighting something every second he stood here. And he was losing.

“You’re too late,” he said quietly.

Maxwell stiffened. “For what?”

Lucian’s eyes lifted toward the sky.

Instinctively, mine followed.

The sun still shone above the island, but shadows had begun creeping slowly across its surface. At first glance, it looked like nothing more than shifting cloud cover.

Then my stomach dropped.

An eclipse. Like the one Catherine had caused when we first confronted her.

A cold pulse went through the island beneath my feet.

Lucian saw the realization hit me.

“Catherine is almost finished,” he said.

The air seemed to constrict around us.

“What does that mean?” I demanded.

For a moment, he simply looked at me, and the grief in his eyes made my chest ache, because it was the same expression he had worn the day he confessed Zara’s death to me back at OTS.

Only now there was something even worse beneath it.

Helplessness.

“When the eclipse reaches totality,” he said softly, “the barrier will close completely.”

“And then?” Maxwell asked sharply.

Lucian’s gaze shifted toward him.

“Everyone inside Catherine’s domain becomes hers.”

Horror crashed over us.

“No,” I whispered.

Lucian’s expression hardened with bitter certainty.

“She’s using the island itself as a psychic amplifier. The barrier, the blood rituals, the puppets, the altered rogues...all of it has been feeding the final stage.” His voice roughened. “Once the eclipse is complete, Catherine won’t need collars or conditioning anymore. She’ll overwrite every mind trapped within the barrier.”

My pulse stumbled.

The warriors behind us shifted uneasily.

Maxwell swore viciously under his breath.

“She can’t control all of us,” one Frostbane operative said, though uncertainty cracked through his voice.

Lucian looked at him with exhausted pity.

“You don’t understand what she’s become.”

Zara finally moved.

Only a step.

But psychic pressure rolled outward from her so suddenly that several warriors behind me staggered.

My eyes widened.

Gods, even damaged, even restrained, she was powerful.

The air distorted faintly around her as an invisible force swept through the entrance hall behind them. Lights flickered. The stone beneath our feet groaned softly.

Lucian closed his eyes.

“Zara,” he said quietly, and something fragile moved through the single word.

Her power steadied instantly.

My throat tightened.

She listened to him.

Not like a puppet obeying commands. Like someone holding onto the last familiar voice left in the dark.

“She doesn’t want to hurt you,” Lucian said without looking at me.

“Then move,” Maxwell snapped.

Lucian’s gaze lifted again. “I can’t.”

The invisible pressure around him constricted harder, and this time, the pain flickered openly across his face.

Catherine was listening.

Not actively, but enough to punish resistance.

“Lucian,” I said carefully, “if there’s any part of you that feels guilty, that wants to make amends, then help us stop her.”

Something terrible crossed his expression then.

Not refusal.

Fear.

But something told me it wasn’t for himself.

The words from his letter replayed in my mind.

‘The revived Zara is a leash he has hung around my neck to ensure I stay obedient; I can’t refuse him anything for fear of her getting hurt.’

Gods knew what horrors Catherine and Marcus had in store for Zara if Lucian disobeyed.

Another, stronger pulse moved through the island.

The shadows across the sun deepened.

My instincts screamed.

Time was running out.

“My mother’s below us, isn’t she?” I asked suddenly.

Lucian’s eyes snapped toward me.

I felt Sylvia faintly beneath the earth now that I stood this close, weak but unmistakable.

Lucian saw the answer settle across my face, and resignation settled on his.

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