My Sister Stole My Mate And I Let Her (Seraphina) novel Chapter 525

Chapter 525: Chapter 525 A SECOND CHANCE (BONUS Chapter 3)

LUCIAN’S POV

Consciousness was a journey.

For a long time, there was only darkness—though even that wasn’t entirely accurate.

Darkness implied awareness of its own existence, and whatever place I had drifted into after the island felt emptier than that.

There had been no pain there, no memory, no thought substantial enough to hold onto.

Then, gradually, something began to intrude upon the silence.

At first, it was only a voice.

Not even words—a rhythm. A cadence I couldn’t quite grasp but somehow recognized anyway.

It came and went like distant waves reaching a shoreline I couldn’t see, retreating before I could reach it and returning before I could convince myself it had never existed at all.

Eventually, there were other things too.

A presence.

Warmth pressing insistently against the cold emptiness surrounding me.

The faint scent of cinnamon and old books and rain caught in stone corridors.

Something familiar.

Something safe.

Something that tugged at an instinct buried deeper than thought and made me want, with an urgency I could not explain, to move toward it.

The closer I drew to that distant warmth, the heavier everything around me seemed to become, as though the void objected to my departure and had every intention of dragging me back beneath its surface.

But the voice came again.

And again.

And again.

And the idea of losing it was unbearable.

So I followed.

Toward warmth.

Toward light.

Toward the certainty that if I stopped, if I let go, something important would disappear before I ever managed to reach it.

The ascent was slow and difficult and exhausting, but eventually the darkness loosened its grip, the warmth became sunlight against closed eyelids, and I surfaced into the world of the living with all the grace of a man being violently evicted from the afterlife.

Waking up was a bitch.

The discomfort was so profound and all-encompassing that it overshadowed the miracle of continued existence.

Every muscle in my body ached.

My mouth felt like sandpaper and tasted like ash.

My limbs possessed all the responsiveness of decorative furniture.

Opening my eyes felt like lifting cinderblocks with a feather.

I managed to squint against the sunlight spilling across white sheets and pale walls, filling the room with the soft gold of late afternoon.

For several seconds, I simply stared upward, allowing my mind to catch up with the fact that I was alive.

The island returned in fragments.

Blood.

Battle.

Catherine’s voice.

My own voice begging someone—begging everyone—to kill me before I became something I couldn’t come back from.

My body reacted before my brain did.

I sat upright too quickly and immediately discovered that several days of unconsciousness had left my muscles with strong opinions about sudden movement.

Pain lanced through my ribs and shoulders as the room spun around me.

A hand caught my arm before gravity could reclaim me.

"Lucian!"

I looked up to find Sera standing beside the bed, relief washing visibly across her features.

"Easy," she said, sounding close to tears. "You don’t get to wake up and immediately attempt to injure yourself. We’ve had enough of that foolish behavior to last a lifetime."

My throat felt raw when I tried to speak.

"How long?"

"Almost two weeks."

Sera handed me a glass of water, and I drank it with all the dignity of a man who had spent a lifetime trekking through the desert.

My fingers trembled as I returned the glass, and my head hurt as I shook it when she asked if I wanted more.

My gaze drifted toward the window, and a strange sense of wrongness settled over me.

Something was missing.

My eyes moved instinctively toward the chair beside the bed.

Empty.

“Where’s Evelyn?”

The question escaped before I could even make sense of it.

But somehow, I knew she had occupied that seat. It was her voice, her scent, her presence that had pulled me out of that bottomless void and into the light.

Mate.

Sera’s face softened as she arranged pillows behind me and gently helped me sit up.

"She isn’t here right now."

I looked back at the empty chair.

The blanket folded neatly over the backrest looked used.

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