Chapter 6 #2
I thought I was brave. Thought I was making a choice, sacrificing myself for my village, walking into the monster’s den with my eyes wide open.
But my eyes were never open. I was blind—blind to the strings he’d been pulling since I was a child, blind to the cage he’d been building around me for sixteen years.
The tribute demands. The impossible ore quotas. The request for three girls that forced my hand. He designed them. He told me that, didn’t he? Told me he’d crafted the demands specifically to leave me no choice. I thought he meant months of planning. I didn’t realize he meant sixteen years.
Everything. Everything.
My parents’ deaths. My isolation. My exhaustion. The bone-deep weariness that made me so desperate to rest, so desperate to let someone else be strong—he manufactured all of it. Broke me down piece by piece so I’d be grateful when he finally offered to put me back together.
And I was grateful.
God help me, I was grateful.
I let him fuck me. Let him knot me. Let him flood me with his seed while I begged for more.
I called him Alpha. I meant it. Just this morning—this morning—I knelt on the training room floor and took his cock in my mouth and thanked him for defending me.
Thanked the monster who murdered my parents for making a Fae lord bow.
I felt the bond forming between us and I thought—I actually thought I was starting to need him. Starting to crave him for more than just the heat, more than just the omega instincts. I thought the emptiness inside me was finally being filled. I thought I’d found something worth surrendering to.
The sob that wrenches out of me is ugly, violent, tearing at my throat like broken glass.
I’m crying so hard I can’t breathe, can’t see, can’t think.
The crystals cut into my knees and my palms and I don’t care.
I deserve the pain. I deserve worse. How could I have been so stupid?
How could I have let myself feel anything for the creature who destroyed my life?
The bond pulses in my chest, warm and steady, and I want to claw it out of my body. Want to reach inside my own ribs and tear out the connection that ties me to the monster who murdered my parents.
But I can’t.
I’m trapped. Bound. Claimed by a creature who spent sixteen years grooming me for exactly this moment.
The tears keep coming, and I don’t try to stop them.
I kneel in the wreckage of his surveillance room and I sob—ugly, wrenching sobs that hurt my chest and steal my breath.
I cry for my parents, dead on a road because of plans I’m only now beginning to understand.
I cry for the girl I was at eight years old, happy and innocent, not knowing a monster was already watching her from the shadows.
I cry for the woman I became, desperate enough to walk into a monster’s arena and call it choice.
And I cry for the part of me that still needs him.
That still wants him, even now, even knowing what he’s done. That still aches with the emptiness he trained me to feel, still craves his touch, still reaches for him through the bond like an addict reaching for poison.
That’s the cruelest part. The bond doesn’t care about betrayal.
Doesn’t care about manipulation or manufactured destiny.
It just pulses with warmth and belonging, reminding me that somewhere in this fortress, my Alpha is waiting.
My body still craves him. My omega instincts still reach for him through the bond, seeking comfort from the very creature who caused my pain.
I want to vomit.
I want to scream.
I want to find him and drive a blade through his heart and watch the light leave his golden eyes.
But even as I think it, my treacherous body remembers his hands on my skin. His voice calling me good girl. The peace I felt when he held me, when I finally let myself stop fighting, when I surrendered to someone strong enough to carry me.
He built that peace on the graves of everyone I loved.
And some part of me still wants to crawl back to him and beg him to make the pain go away.
I don’t know how long I stay there.
Long enough for my tears to dry. Long enough for the sobs to fade to shuddering breaths, then to silence. Long enough for the rage to crystallize into something cold and hard in my chest, sharp as the crystal shards still cutting into my knees.
I make myself stand. Make myself look at the destruction around me—sixteen years of surveillance, shattered on the floor. The images are fractured but not gone. I can still see glimpses of my life scattered across the stones like broken memories.
The girl at eight, riding her father’s shoulders.
The teenager at sixteen, standing over her parents’ grave.
The woman at twenty-four, walking into an arena to face a monster she thought she understood.
I was never the author of my own story. I was just a character in his.
But not anymore.
I gather the broken pieces of myself and fit them back together in a new configuration.
Not the naive girl who believed in fairness.
Not the grateful omega who thought she’d been chosen out of all the women in the world because she was special.
Not the fool who let herself need her captor and thanked him for the privilege.
Something else. Something harder. Something that will look the monster in his golden eyes and demand answers, even if the truth destroys whatever fragile thing was growing between us.
Was growing. Past tense. Because whatever I thought I felt for him died in this room, surrounded by the evidence of his manipulation.
I stand up. The crystals crunch under my feet as I walk toward the door. My knees are bleeding. My palms are bleeding. I don’t care.
He’s going to tell me everything.
Every plan. Every manipulation. Every tragedy he engineered to turn me into what I am.
And then I’m going to decide what to do about it. Chapter 18: Karax
She’s different today.
I notice it the moment she enters the training room—something shuttered behind her eyes, a tension in her shoulders that wasn’t there yesterday. The bond tells me she’s troubled, but not why. She’s learned to guard her thoughts from me, building walls I could break through but choose not to.
I want her to trust me. Real trust, not forced intimacy.
“You’re distracted,” I observe, circling her on the training mat. “Your guard is dropping.”
“Then hit me.” She adjusts her stance, but her eyes don’t quite meet mine. “That’s what training is for.”
I don’t hit her. Instead, I stop circling and close the distance between us, tilting her chin up with one finger.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” She pulls away from my touch—the first time she’s done that since the heat. “Can we just train?”
The rejection stings more than it should. Three weeks of growing closeness, of her softening toward me, of something building between us that I’ve never felt before—and now this. Whatever’s bothering her, she’s not ready to share it.
I should respect that. Should give her the space she’s clearly asking for.
“Position one,” I say instead, and we begin.
The session is brutal.
She fights like she’s trying to exorcise something, throwing herself at me with an intensity I haven’t seen since her first week. I match her energy, pushing her harder than I have in days, and by the end we’re both breathing hard—me from exertion, her from exhaustion.
“Better,” I tell her as she bends over, hands on her knees. “Your speed is improving.”
“Thanks.” The word is clipped. Dismissive.
I catch her wrist before she can walk away. “Hannah. Whatever’s bothering you—”
“Nothing’s bothering me.” She tugs against my grip, but I don’t release her. “Let go.”
“Not until you tell me what’s wrong.”
“Nothing is—” She stops, her jaw tightening. Through the bond, I feel a flash of something that might be anger or might be fear. “I found your scrying room.”
The words hit like a blade to the chest.
For a moment, I can’t breathe. Can’t think. Seven centuries of careful control, and one sentence from this woman has reduced me to something raw and exposed.
She found it. She knows.
“I see.” I release her wrist slowly, carefully, though every instinct screams at me to hold on tighter. “And what did you find there?”
“Crystals. Hundreds of them. All showing Ironhold.” Her gray eyes are hard as flint—but underneath the hardness, I can see the pain.
The betrayal. The dawning horror that’s been building since she walked into that room.
“You told me you’d been watching for months.
You didn’t mention you’ve been watching since I was a child. ”
I should have expected this. Should have locked that room more securely, or destroyed the crystals, or—
No. I should have told her. Should have trusted her with the truth before she had to discover it herself, broken and scattered across a floor of shattered stone.
“I can explain—”
“Can you?” She steps back, putting distance between us, and the loss of her proximity feels like a physical wound.
“Can you explain why you have crystals showing me at eight years old? At ten? At twelve? Can you explain why you were watching my parents’ forge before I was even old enough to hold a sword? ”
“Hannah—”
“Did you know?” Her voice cracks, and I see tears gathering in her eyes. The sight of them—of her pain, her grief, her fury—tears something loose in my chest. “Did you know they were going to die? Did you watch them die?”
“No.” The word comes out too fast, too defensive. “I didn’t watch them die. I wasn’t watching that day.”
It’s not a lie. I wasn’t watching when the bandits attacked. I was in Stone Court, attending to business that seemed important at the time.
But it’s not the whole truth either.