Chapter 15 #2
Elise Montgomery (b. 1885). Exceptional potential. First natural awakening since reconnection. Fire unlike any previous generation. Begin watching at debut. Claim when fully ripened.
My hands shake as I turn the page. There's more—a separate journal, leather-bound and worn, documenting my entire life from the outside. Twenty years of observation, analysis, planning.
Year One of Watching: The girl shows remarkable fire for one so young. Tantrums that could power small cities. Her emptiness grows with each year, making her perfect for eventual claiming.
Year Three: Father's debts mount beautifully. The shipping ventures I've guided toward failure are bankrupting him slowly. Soon I'll have legal justification for collection.
Year Five: She threw crystal at a servant today for bringing the wrong tea. The rage burns hotter even as her omega nature ripens beneath the surface. She'll be magnificent when broken properly.
Year Eight: Almost ready. The hollow ache in her is visible now, driving her to increasingly desperate attempts to feel something real. Perfect.
Year Twelve: First signs of magical sensitivity. She's unconsciously responding to alpha pheromones in crowded rooms, though she doesn't understand what's happening to her.
Year Fifteen: The transformation window is opening. Her scent carries omega potential now, faint but unmistakable to those who know how to detect it.
Year Twenty: Collection time. She's reached peak ripeness—old enough to survive transformation, young enough to mold completely. The emptiness in her soul will make bonding easier. She's been starving for what only an alpha can provide.
Page after page of my private moments, documented and analyzed like a scientist studying a specimen.
My tantrums, my emptiness, my desperate search for something to fill the void inside me.
The way I threw objects when frustrated, the way I withdrew when nothing brought satisfaction, the way I raged against a world that never gave me what I needed.
All of it recorded by the man who planned to become that something.
Every rebellion cataloged as proof of my need for control. Every moment of loneliness noted as evidence of my readiness for bonding. Every desperate attempt to feel alive turned into justification for what he would do to me.
I run to the nearest waste basket and vomit until my stomach is empty, my transformed body rejecting the horror of understanding with violent revulsion.
When Aratus finds me there twenty minutes later, shaking and sick, he doesn't offer comfort. Just watches me with those cold eyes while I wipe bile from my lips with trembling fingers.
"You've been hunting my family for centuries," I whisper.
"Yes."
"Breeding us like livestock."
"Carefully selecting for desired traits, yes." No apology in his voice. No shame or regret. Just calm acknowledgment of facts. "The omega gift is rare. It requires cultivation."
"I was never a person to you. Just a project."
"You were both." He moves closer, and I hate how my body relaxes slightly at his proximity. "Your bloodline carries old magic, Elise. Fae magic that's been sleeping, waiting for the right alpha to wake it up."
"And if I'd died during transformation? Like the others?"
"Then I would have waited for the next generation." His matter-of-fact tone makes it worse somehow. "Or started again with a different bloodline. There are several promising families under observation."
The casual brutality of it steals my breath. Other families. Other women like me, being watched and prepared for claiming. An entire system of predation disguised as fate and biology.
"How many others?"
"From your line? Five attempts over the past fifty years. You're the first to survive transformation intact."
"Lucky me."
"Yes," he agrees seriously. "Lucky you. Your strength allowed you to become everything I hoped for."
Everything he hoped for. A perfect omega slave who can resist but chooses not to because the consequences hurt worse than surrender. A broken woman who will spend the rest of her extended life serving his needs while telling herself it's what she wants.
Day thirty-eight, I test the most dangerous boundary of all.
I spend the afternoon in the library, trying to lose myself in one of the romance novels he's provided.
But even reading becomes another form of bondage.
I find myself wondering what he'd think of the heroine's choices, whether he'd approve of the alpha's methods, how our story compares to the one on the page.
When the fictional omega surrenders to her alpha's demands, I think of my own surrender. When she finds happiness in submission, I wonder if that's what I'm supposed to feel. Every page reminds me of him, every love scene makes me remember our claiming with uncomfortable clarity.
I close the book in frustration, but even that feels wrong. He chose it for me. Rejecting it feels like rejecting his care.
The cruel truth becomes clear: I can resist, but resistance brings emptiness while compliance brings a peace that feels dangerously like happiness. The bond doesn't force me—it just makes the choice between suffering and contentment obvious.
Day thirty-nine, I confront the truth I've been avoiding.
I can't leave—the bond makes escape agonizing.
Can't destroy his property—my hands won't obey such commands.
Can choose to disobey him, but the emptiness that follows makes compliance feel like mercy.
Can hurt myself, but regret follows immediately.
Can walk away, but find myself returning to ease the loneliness.
The claiming was more thorough than I understood. It didn't just transform my body or bind us together. It rewrote my fundamental desires, made happiness and suffering depend entirely on him.
But I can still think. Can still question. Can still recognize the difference between genuine feeling and magical manipulation. Can still hold onto the knowledge that the woman who begged for his cocks wasn't really me, but some creature his magic and my biology created together.
I make my first real choice since the claiming.
It's not much. But I choose to hold onto the anger, the questions, the small flame of self that still burns beneath all the conditioning and magic and biological imperative.
Maybe I can't leave. Can't fight effectively. Can't refuse him without suffering. But I can remember that this isn't love—it's ownership dressed up as biology. I can recognize that my contentment comes from magical compulsion, not genuine happiness.
I can hold onto the knowledge that somewhere beneath the grateful omega who purrs at his touch, the real Elise Montgomery still exists.
It's not much resistance. Barely a rebellion at all.
But it's mine.
And I'm going to hold onto it with everything I have left, even if it's the only thing in this world that still belongs to me.
Because if I let go of that last piece of myself, there won't be anything left worth saving.