Page 25 of Honor Bound

“This?” Coleridge murmured, stepping toward her with a sneer on his lips. His father’s leer swept over her, slow and assessing.

The sneer on his lips remained, but there was something else flickering behind his pale, predatory eyes. Not just recognition. Interest.

“You are the Ancient that is supposed to bring the downfall to the Legion?” Coleridge scoffed, his voice laced with something else—something calculating.

He stepped forward, circling her like a wolf sizing up a rival predator. “I expected something… different.”

Julia remained perfectly still, her expression steady, face unreadable. Roan saw the subtle way her shoulders shifted, the controlled way she inhaled.

And for the first time, he saw something unusual in his father’s expression.

Uncertainty.

Julia barely spared his father a glance. Her focus was on Calstar. She slowly advanced, her head held high. She stopped next to his grandfather and knelt on one knee, ignoring everyone and everything else but Calstar. With a gentle touch, she reached out and caress his forehead. Roan could sense her grief even if he couldn’t see her face. Sorrow and regret pierced him when she moved her hand gently over his grandfather’s eyes to close them.

“Thank you for your guidance and support, my friend. I will never forget you. Hope will come. I swear it,” she murmured.

“Touching.”

Blind fury rose in Roan when his father scoffed at Julia’s quiet promise. He could feel the pressure of the guards’ hands intensify as they sensed his muscles bunching beneath their grasps. He ground his teeth, a low growl rumbling in his chest when Julia stood and faced his father. Everything inside him wanted to protect her from the cruelty of the man who had raised him.

His fury faded to pride and deep respect when Julia stared back at his father with the same regal calm with which she had first faced him—and he saw a flash of uncertainty cross his father’s face again.

A heavy, charged moment stretched between them, thick with unspoken words and simmering tension. A muscle twitched in his father’s jaw before his expression hardened, and with a sharp movement, he lifted his hand.

“Escort her to my ship.”

Soldiers’ hands shot out to seize Julia, but stopped short, their expressions shifting from aggression to hesitation as she leveled a cold, piercing glare at them. With a regal lift of her chin, she stepped forward.

Roan had expected Julia to resist.

Instead, she lifted her chin and walked forward on her own, her movements graceful, measured. She gave the soldiers no reason to touch her.

Coleridge’s lips parted slightly—a flicker of something unreadable in his expression.

Roan had seen his fathercrush men with a glance. He had seen him break wills without a word.

But Julia? She walked past him as if he was nothing.

And his father hesitated. Just for a second.

Roan didn’t flinch as his father turned back to him, his lips curling into a familiar, twisted mocking expression.

“You can watch as I destroy your mother’s home world just as I destroyed Jeslean. When I’m finished, your grandmother will have joined her husband and daughter,” his father taunted.

Something inside Roan broke. No, not broke—exploded.

The ice in his veins turned to molten steel. The quiet, controlled soldier inside him died in that moment—burned away in the same fire that had just consumed his grandfather’s life.

The guards holding him felt it—the sudden coil of sheer, murderous intent. Their grips tightened, muscles tensed, anticipation crackling in the air.

But Roan didn’t move. Not yet.

Because his father wasn’t going to die today.

No. Not today.

But very, very soon.

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