So you did.
“Tell me about your first kill.”
We’re seated across from each other at the table, firelight flickering between us. She’s stopped refusing the food—a pointless rebellion, and she’s smart enough to know she needs her strength. But she still watches me like I might poison her at any moment.
“Why?” She doesn’t look up from her plate.
“Because I want to know you. The scrying crystals showed me what you did, but not what you felt.”
I expect her to refuse. To tell me to go to hell, or simply ignore the question.
Instead, she answers.
“I was sixteen.” The words come out flat, controlled. “A chaos-beast broke through the northern wall three months after my parents died. Everyone was running. No one was fighting back.”
“So you did.”
“Someone had to.” She stabs at a piece of meat, her jaw tight. “I didn’t think about it. Just saw the beast heading for a group of children and got between them.”
“You killed it?”
“Eventually.” She finally looks up, meeting my eyes. The firelight catches the silver threads in her gray irises—a sign of the transformation beginning, though she probably hasn’t noticed yet. “It took me twenty minutes and most of the skin on my arms. But yeah. I killed it.”
“You were brave.”
“I was terrified.”
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.” I set down my fork, giving her my full attention. “Courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s acting despite fear.”
Something shifts in her expression—suspicion warring with something that looks almost like hunger. The hunger of someone who’s been starving for recognition and doesn’t know how to accept it when it’s finally offered.
“Why do you care?” she asks. “What does it matter to you what I felt when I was sixteen?”
“Because you’re mine now.” I hold her gaze, letting her see that I mean it. “And I take care of what belongs to me.”
“I’m not a thing.”
“No. You’re a woman who spent eight years carrying a burden no one should carry alone.” I lean back, watching emotions war across her face. “When’s the last time someone asked if you were okay, Hannah? When’s the last time anyone in that village offered to help?”
She doesn’t answer.
She doesn’t have to.
The dreams are getting worse.
I can smell them on her every morning—that sweet, desperate musk saturating her skin, clinging to the sheets, filling the air of our chambers with evidence of what she won’t admit. She wakes flushed and trembling, her thighs pressed together, her body aching for relief she refuses to give herself.
She’s too proud to touch herself while thinking of me.
But she wants to. I see it in the way she moves through the mornings—restless, agitated, her skin too sensitive and her focus scattered.
I see it in the way her eyes drop to my bare chest during training before she forces them back up.
I see it in the way her hips shift against mine when I pin her, movements she pretends are escape attempts but feel like something else entirely.
Two weeks in, I decide to push.
“You dreamed about me again.”
We’re in the training room, circling each other after a bout that left her flat on her back three times. She freezes at my words, her face going red.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Your scent.” I move closer, and she retreats a step before catching herself. “It changes when you’ve spent the night thinking about me. Sweeter. More desperate.” Another step. She holds her ground this time, jaw clenched, but I can see what it costs her. “You woke up wet this morning, didn’t you?”
“Shut up.”
“Aching.” I stop in front of her, close enough to touch. “Wanting something you won’t let yourself have.”
“I said shut up.”
“Did you touch yourself?” I let my voice drop low, intimate. “Did you slide your hand between your thighs and imagine it was mine?”
Her hand cracks across my face before I see it coming.
The slap rocks my head to the side—not hard enough to hurt, not really, but hard enough to surprise me. I turn back to face her, and she’s standing there with her chest heaving, looking as shocked by what she did as I am.
“Don’t.” Her voice shakes. “Don’t talk to me like that.”
“Or what?” I catch her wrist before she can pull it back, holding her gently but immovably. “You’ll hit me again?”
“Maybe I will.”
“Go ahead.” I bring her captured hand to my chest, pressing her palm flat over my heart. “But it won’t change what we both know is happening.”
“Nothing is happening—”
“Your pulse is racing.” I hold her gaze. “Your pupils are dilated. You’re breathing like you just ran a mile, and I can smell how wet you are from here.” I press her hand harder against my chest, letting her feel my own heart beating steady and slow. “Tell me you don’t want me.”
She stares at me, gray eyes bright with fury and something else—something that looks a lot like despair.
“I hate you,” she whispers.
“I know.” I release her hand, letting her stumble back. “But you still want me. And that’s not going to change.”
She turns and flees.
I let her go.
The transformation is progressing faster than I expected.
Her senses are sharpening—she hears me coming before I enter a room now, tracks my movements with an awareness that goes beyond ordinary perception.
Silver threads are appearing in her irises, faint but visible if you know to look.
Her body responds to my scent with increasing intensity, arousal spiking every time I get close.
And when I touch her—when I pin her wrists or cup her face or let my fingers brush across her cheek—she shudders with want she can’t hide anymore.
Soon the heat will come.
It builds slowly in omegas who fight it—their bodies trying to force the issue, their minds pushing back, the war between biology and will generating pressure that eventually has to break.
She’ll hold out longer than most. She’s stubborn and strong and has spent eight years refusing to yield to anything.
But the heat doesn’t care about stubbornness. When it finally crests, it will burn through every defense she has, leave her desperate and aching and willing to do anything for the relief only I can provide.
She’ll come to me then. She’ll beg me to fill her, claim her, make her mine in every way that matters.
And I’ll finally take what I’ve been waiting for.
Until then, I can be patient.
Patient as the mountain itself. Chapter 9: Hannah
Something is changing inside me.
I feel it in the way my body responds to him now—not just the unwanted arousal, but something deeper. Something that softens when he’s near, that leans toward his warmth before I can stop it, that craves his presence even as my mind screams at me to fight.
Two weeks since the arena. Two weeks of training sessions that leave me pinned beneath him, breathless and aching.
Two weeks of shared meals where he asks questions no one else has ever thought to ask.
Two weeks of dreams so vivid I wake up gasping, my hand already moving between my thighs before I realize what I’m doing.
I always stop myself before I finish.
But it’s getting harder.
The slap changed something between us.
I don’t regret it—he pushed too far, asking about my dreams, describing my arousal with that knowing smirk. My palm cracking across his face felt like the only honest thing I’d done since arriving at Stone Court.
But he didn’t punish me. Didn’t even seem angry. Just caught my wrist, pressed my hand to his chest, and told me the truth I already knew: I want him, and that’s not going to change.
Since then, the training sessions have grown more intense. More intimate. Like he’s testing how far he can push before I break.
This morning, I find out.
“Your guard is dropping on the left side.”
His voice cuts through my exhaustion, and I force my arm back into position. We’ve been sparring for two hours, and every muscle in my body screams for rest. But he doesn’t stop, doesn’t slow down, doesn’t give me a moment to catch my breath.
“Better.” The word sends warmth flooding through my chest, and I hate myself for it. “Again.”
He comes at me with a strike that would flatten a normal opponent, and I duck under it, using my smaller size to get inside his guard. For one glorious moment, I have an opening—
His hand closes around my throat.
Not squeezing. Not hurting. Just holding. His massive palm wraps around my neck like a collar, his fingers reaching all the way to my spine. My entire throat disappears inside his grip, and I’m suddenly aware of how easy it would be for him to crush my windpipe. How completely I’m at his mercy.
How wet I am between my thighs.
“Throat control,” he says, his voice dropping to that low register that makes my skin prickle. “Your opponent owns your breath, your blood, your consciousness.”
“I know what throat control is.”
“Do you?” His thumb traces the line of my jaw, and I shudder.
My skin feels electric where he touches me—too sensitive, like every nerve ending has been rewired to respond to him.
“Do you know how it feels to have someone else decide whether you breathe? To understand in your body—not just your mind—that your life belongs to someone else?”
I should fight. Should claw at his wrist, drive my knee toward his groin, do something other than stand here trembling while his hand wraps around my throat like it belongs there.
But there’s something else underneath the fear. Something that feels like relief.
He’s so much bigger than me. So much stronger. If he wanted to hurt me, I couldn’t stop him. If he wanted to take me right here on the training mat, there’s nothing I could do. The realization should be terrifying—and it is—but it’s also something else.
It’s freedom.
For eight years, I’ve been the one protecting everyone. The one who had to be strong, had to fight, had to carry burdens that should have broken me. No one was ever strong enough to protect me.
But he is.