Chapter 84: The Weight of Centuries

Chapter 84: Chapter 84: The Weight of Centuries

"Three thousand years?"

Iris stared at Alexander, the stillness in the apartment stretching until the silence felt heavy enough to bruise. A small, incredulous laugh escaped her chest—a quick, breathy sound she tried immediately to suppress. She pressed her lips together, her shoulders lifting in a futile effort to keep the absurdity down.

Three thousand years. The number didn’t just sound ridiculous; it sounded like an insult to basic arithmetic, a claim so grand it belonged in a gilded leather bound tome, not coming from a man sitting on a faded linen sofa in a university town.

She shook her head, a faint, disbelieving smile tugging at the corner of her mouth as her eyes searched his face for the punchline. "Are you going to tell me that you’re three thousand years old with a straight face?"

Alexander didn’t answer.

He didn’t shift his posture, nor did he offer the slight, wry curling of his mouth that usually signaled he was humoring her.

The quiet amusement faded from Iris’s lips, line by line. She looked at him again, closer this time, taking in the uncanny, motionless gravity of his frame.

There was no flicker of playfulness in his blue eyes, no subtle widening of his pupils to indicate he was waiting for her to get the joke. He simply watched her, resting one forearm across his knee, his posture possessing the effortless, ancient stillness of carved granite.

Iris’s brows slowly drew together, the warmth draining from her skin. "You’re kidding, right?"

The clock on the wall ticked once. Twice. He remained motionless.

Her breath hitched in her throat, her eyes widening as the room seemed to shrink around them.

"Oh my God."

Zoey’s voice wasn’t much more than a rasping exhale from the corner of the room. Iris turned her head toward the sound. Zoey was sitting rigid against the worn upholstery of the couch, her fingers dug so deeply into the fabric that her knuckles had turned stark white. Her gaze was locked entirely on Alexander.

"Iris," Zoey whispered, her voice trembling with a sudden, sharp clarity. "The photograph."

Iris frowned, her throat feeling dry. "What about it?"

"The photograph from 1891." Zoey’s hand lifted slowly, her index finger trembling as she pointed across the low glass coffee table. "It’s him. Iris... it’s actually him."

Iris’s stomach dropped, a cold, heavy plummet that made her knees feel hollow. She turned back toward Alexander, her mind reeling back to the image Zoey had pulled up on her laptop only hours ago. The memory flashed with terrifying clarity—the faded, sepia-toned glass plate, the imposing, ivy-draped stone facade of the Blackthorne Estate in the background, and the three men standing in tailored, Victorian wool coats in the foreground.

The man on the left. The exact same high, carved cheekbones. The same uncompromising line of the jaw. The same piercing, unnervingly still eyes that seemed to burn straight through the aged, crackled paper.

Even the posture was identical—the shoulders set with an absolute, unyielding authority that belonged to someone who had never once asked for permission to occupy space.

She had dismissed the resemblance when Zoey first showed her. She had called it a coincidence, an ancestor, a uncanny family trait passed down through generations of immaculate genetics. Because the alternative was impossible.

Except the alternative was now sitting three feet away from her.

Iris slowly rose from the couch, her movements measured, as if a sudden action might break whatever fragile reality was holding the room together. "Are you really the one in that picture?"

Alexander stayed silent, though his gaze followed her as she stood, tracking her with quiet, unblinking intensity.

"The one standing with the two other men in front of the Blackthorne Estate?" she repeated, her voice rising slightly, searching for a crack in his composure.

Still, he offered nothing.

Iris took a step toward him, her hand reaching out to grip the back of a wooden dining chair just to anchor herself. "I’m sure with your hearing—with whatever supernatural hearing you have—you heard every word Zoey was telling me earlier. You heard her tell me about the man from the photograph who looked exactly like you. I saw it on her screen, Alexander. I laughed it off because it made no sense."

She studied his face, looking for a twitch of the jaw, a blink, anything human. "And just now, you told me your bloodline existed thousands of years ago." She swallowed, her voice dropping into a quiet, fragile register. "So tell me. Was that actually you?"

Alexander’s chest expanded as he took a slow, deep breath, the movement deliberate. He stood up smoothly, the fluid grace of his motion far too seamless for a man of his size.

He slipped his left hand casually into his trouser pocket, his eyes dipping to the worn wooden floorboards for a fraction of a second before lifting back to meet hers.

"We need to leave," he said quietly.

Iris blinked, taken aback by the sudden shift. "What?"

"We need to leave right now." He straightened his spine, his shoulders squaring as his entire demeanor snapped back into the cold, controlled authority she had grown accustomed to over the past week.

"I will explain the rest to you once we are safely inside the gates of the Blackthorne Estate."

Iris stared at him, her hand tightening on the wooden chair until her fingers pained her. "Wait. You think I’m just going to walk out that door with you?"

She stepped fully away from the chair, disbelief quickly cauterizing the cold fear that had taken root a moment before. "I’m not going anywhere."

Alexander’s expression hardened, the subtle softness in his features instantly vanishing. "I told you that you are in danger here, Iris."

"You’ve told me a lot of things tonight," she retorted, crossing her arms tightly over her chest. "Most of which belong in a historic asylum."

"I am telling you what you need to understand to stay alive."

"And apparently every single explanation requires me to pack up my life and follow you to an estate I’ve only ever seen in historical archives online!"

Alexander’s eyes narrowed, a dark, dangerous ember flickering in the blue depth. "Iris—"

"No." She shook her head fiercely, taking a half-step back. "No, Alexander. You don’t get to do this. You can’t just barge into my apartment, tell me you’re three thousand years old, tell me you’re some kind of ancient Lycan, tell me I’m your... your mate," she spat the word as if it burned her tongue, "tell me ancient enemies are hunting me, and then expect me to meekly gather my things and follow you into the dark."

Alexander didn’t move, but the atmosphere in the room shifted, growing thick and heavy, as if the air itself was condensing around him. He stared down at her, listening to the frantic, rapid flutter of her pulse pounding against her ribs. She squared her jaw, refusing to let him see the tremor in her hands.

"I have a life here," she insisted, her voice tight with rising frustration. "I have midterms next week. I have classes. I have friends. I have parents who expect me to call them on Sunday. I can’t just vanish into thin air because you showed up and decided my life is suddenly a tragedy novel."

"You are in danger," Alexander repeated, stepping closer. The distance between them shrank to a arm’s length, his presence towering over her. "I am not asking you to abandon your life. I am telling you how to survive it."

His voice remained low, almost a whisper, but the sheer weight behind the words—the unshakeable certainty of a man who had watched empires crumble—made Iris’s arms slowly drop to her sides.

"Because of what occurred at the university campus earlier," he continued, taking another slow step toward her, "your existence—and your bond to me—is no longer a secret."

Iris’s throat felt tight. "What is that supposed to mean? You handled Jason. You made him behave."

His jaw clenched briefly, the muscles along his cheek reflexively tightening. "The moment I was forced to exert my aura to break Jason, Finn, Whitmore, and Shawn, I ignited a beacon. Anyone with heightened senses within a five-mile radius of that campus knows an ultimate Alpha exerted total dominance. And there are only three of us.

And once news of that magnitude begins to circulate through the regional packs and into the wider territorial networks, it will take them mere hours to piece together why Alexander Blackthorne lost his composure over a human student."

Iris swallowed hard, her chest tight. "What kind of word?"

"The kind that alters the balance of power," he said softly. "The word that Alexander Blackthorne has finally, after centuries of isolation, claimed his mate." The quiet gravity in his voice made the word mate sound less like a romantic notion and more like a sentence passed down by a court.

"And that his mate," he added, his eyes dropping briefly to the base of her throat, "is human."

Iris frowned, her mind racing to find solid ground. "Wait... your actual family name is Blackthorne? I thought you were the head of Grant Enterprises? Your business profile says Alexander Grant."

Alexander dismissed the question with a subtle tilt of his head. "Grant is a shell. A legal ghost created sixty years ago so I could sign land deeds and pay taxes without raising the suspicion of mortal authorities. That is irrelevant now, Iris."

His eyes dipped briefly, staring at the side of her neck where the faint, warm pulse of the mark he had left burned beneath her skin.

Iris following his gaze, instinctively brought two fingers up to touch her neck, covering the faint, heat-flushed mark beneath her collarbone.

"You carry the mark that signifies the continuity of my lineage," he said softly, his tone laced with a grim severity. "To the factions that monitor my family, you are not simply a woman I have taken an interest in. You are the sole tether to the last surviving purebred Lycan lineage on this continent." His jaw tightened until a muscle jumped near his ear.

"And the enemies that hunted my family to near-extinction during the Purge will not allow that mark to walk the streets unprotected."