Prologue #9
“No, you won’t.” I keep my voice gentle, almost tender, even as I close the final door on her freedom.
“Because your village’s safety is conditional on your survival.
If you die—by your own hand or anyone else’s—the blood debt transfers to Ironhold itself.
Three girls, just like the original tribute demanded. Plus interest.”
The fight goes out of her like water from a broken vessel.
I watch it happen—watch her shoulders slump, watch her warrior’s pride crumble, watch her understand exactly how thoroughly I’ve trapped her. She came here thinking she was making a sacrifice. Thinking she had agency, choice, some measure of control over her own fate.
Now she knows the truth. She never had any of those things.
She was always going to end up exactly here, in exactly this moment, belonging to me.
“I hate you.” The words come out flat, empty, stripped of everything except exhaustion.
“I know.” I release her face and step back, gesturing to the guards who’ve approached at my signal. “That will change.”
“It won’t.”
“It will.” I lean down, bringing my face close to hers one last time. “Your body already wants me—I can smell how wet you are, even now, even hating me. The omega transformation will do the rest. By the time I claim you properly, you’ll be begging for everything I want to give you.”
Her jaw clenches, but she can’t hide the way her breath catches at my words. Can’t hide the flush that spreads across her cheeks, or the way her pupils dilate despite her fury.
She feels the pull. She’s just not ready to surrender to it yet.
That’s fine. I’ve waited seven centuries for a woman worth claiming.
I can wait a little longer.
“Take her to my chambers,” I tell the guards. “She’s to be treated as an honored guest—comfortable quarters, good food, anything she requires.”
“I require my freedom,” Hannah snarls.
“Anything except that.” I step back, letting the guards flank her. “Rest well, little warrior. Tomorrow, your real education begins.”
They lead her away, and I watch her go—the rigid set of her spine, the way she refuses to let her shoulders slump even now, the defiance she’s clinging to like a drowning woman clinging to driftwood.
She’s everything I hoped for. Fierce and proud and absolutely determined to resist, even when resistance is pointless.
I’m going to enjoy breaking that determination. Going to savor every moment of her surrender, every crack in her armor, every step of her transformation from warrior to omega.
I touch the wound on my side—already closing, my magic knitting the flesh back together. A small price to pay for what I’ve gained. The first blood I’ve shed in four hundred years, and it bought me something priceless.
Hannah Mitchell is mine now.
And soon, she’ll understand exactly what that means. Chapter 5: Hannah
The door closes behind me with a sound like a tomb sealing shut.
For a long moment, I just stand there. The guards have deposited me in what they called “the Guardian’s personal chambers”—a suite of rooms carved into the living mountain, all polished stone and silk hangings and furniture scaled for someone twice my size.
Massive bed draped in furs. Hearth crackling with a fire that must have been lit in anticipation of my arrival.
Windows overlooking the fortress’s training grounds, where Stone Court warriors spar in the fading light like this is just another ordinary evening.
A gilded cage. Prepared and waiting, because he knew I was coming.
Because he’s known for months.
The rage hits me like a physical blow.
I grab the nearest object—a ceramic vase filled with mountain flowers, white blooms that smell like snow and honey—and hurl it against the wall. It shatters with a crash that echoes off the stone, shards scattering across the polished floor in a spray of water and broken petals.
It’s not enough.
I follow it with a crystal decanter that explodes into a thousand glittering pieces. A wooden jewelry box that splits down the center when it hits. A small bronze sculpture of a warrior that I throw so hard my shoulder aches, watching it dent the wall before clattering to the ground.
“Bastard.” The word tears out of me as I grab a silver hand mirror and send it spinning into the hearth. “Manipulative, scheming bastard.”
He planned this. All of it. Not just the blood debt trap—I knew about that, walked into it with my eyes open, thought I understood the cost. But the rest of it.
The tribute demands designed to be impossible.
The quotas calculated to leave me exactly one option.
The months of watching through scrying crystals, studying me, learning my patterns, predicting my choices before I made them.
I thought I was making a sacrifice. I thought I was choosing to trade my freedom for my village’s safety, and that choice—that agency—was the one thing I had left. The one thing that made the sacrifice mean something.
But I wasn’t choosing anything. I was following a script he wrote, hitting marks he laid out, walking down a path he built step by step until I arrived exactly where he wanted me.
Even the wound. Even that.
I sink to the floor amid the wreckage, glass crunching under my knees, and the sound that comes out of me isn’t quite a sob but isn’t far from one either.
He let me cut him. Seven hundred years undefeated, and I thought—for one glorious, idiotic moment—that I’d actually done something impossible. That my skill, my training, my desperate determination had accomplished what no one else could.
But it was a lie. Another piece of his performance. He opened his guard and let my blade through because the blood debt required first blood and first blood required me to actually wound him.
My victory was just another cage he built.
I press my palms against the cold stone floor and force myself to breathe.
In through the nose, out through the mouth, the way I taught myself during those first terrible months after my parents died.
When the grief threatened to swallow me whole and I had to find a way to keep functioning because no one else was going to protect the village.
I won’t cry. I won’t. He doesn’t get to have my tears on top of everything else he’s taken.
But God, it’s hard. Eight years of being the strong one. Eight years of sacrifice and struggle and shouldering burdens that should have broken me. Eight years of telling myself that it meant something, that my choices mattered, that being the one who always stepped forward made a difference.
And now I’m on my knees in a monster’s bedroom, surrounded by broken glass, and the worst part isn’t that I’m trapped.
The worst part is that I never wasn’t.
I don’t know how long I sit there before the despair starts to calcify into something harder.
Despair is useless. I learned that lesson standing over my parents’ bodies with a sword I barely knew how to hold. Despair doesn’t find escape routes or identify weaknesses or figure out how to survive another day. Despair just sits there and lets the monsters win.
I’m not dead yet. I’m not broken yet. And as long as that’s true, there’s still a chance.
I push myself to my feet, ignoring the sting of glass fragments embedded in my palms, and begin a systematic exploration of my prison.
The chambers are larger than I initially realized—three connected rooms plus the bathing area, all carved directly into the mountain’s heart.
The stone walls are polished smooth but not uniform; veins of silver and gold run through the granite like frozen rivers, catching the firelight and throwing it back in patterns that shift when I move.
It’s beautiful in a cold, inhuman way. The beauty of something that’s been here for centuries and will be here for centuries more, long after I’m dust.
The main room holds the massive bed—a frame of dark wood that must have taken a team of craftsmen months to carve, draped in furs and silks that probably cost more than everything in Ironhold combined.
The sitting area has chairs sized for a giant, a low table covered in books and papers, a writing desk with quills and ink that gleam with faint magical light.
A secondary chamber holds what appears to be a private training room.
Practice weapons rack the walls—swords and staffs and things I don’t recognize, all of them slightly blunted, designed for sparring rather than killing.
Padded mats cover the floor. A full-length mirror dominates one wall, and I catch my own reflection in it: a small, bruised woman in worn fighting leathers, standing in a room built for a god.
The third room is a study. Shelves of books in languages I don’t recognize, their spines cracked with age and use.
A desk carved from a single piece of granite, its surface covered in correspondence and maps and what looks like official documents bearing seals I can’t read.
This is where he works, I realize. Where he’s spent seven centuries running his court, making decisions, shaping the world to his liking.
I check the windows first. They’re real—not illusions, though with Fae magic you can never be sure—but the drop to the training grounds below is at least fifty feet.
Even if I survived the fall, I’d land in the middle of Stone Court’s warrior barracks, surrounded by enemies who would have me back in this room within minutes.
The main door is locked with something that pulses against my palm when I touch it. Mountain magic, warm and unyielding, keyed to open only for people who aren’t me. The servant’s entrance in the bathing chamber has the same resistance.
I’m trapped. But I already knew that.
What I didn’t know—what I’m only beginning to understand—is what seven centuries of existence looks like when it’s laid out in front of you.