Chapter 6 #5
When I’m ready, I’ll find him. And then we’re going to have a very different conversation than the one we had in the training room.
One where I have all the information.
One where I decide what happens to us. Chapter 20: Karax
She doesn’t come back that night.
I feel her through the bond—alive, unharmed, somewhere deep in the fortress—but she’s blocked me out as completely as she can. The walls she’s built are thick, reinforced by anger and hurt and something that feels dangerously close to hatred.
I pace my chambers like a caged beast, fighting the urge to go to her. To drag her back. To make her listen.
But that’s what got me here. Seven centuries of taking what I wanted, and now the one thing I want most is slipping through my fingers because I can’t stop being what I am.
She finds me in the library the next evening.
I’m not reading—haven’t been able to focus on anything since she walked away—but I’m sitting with a book open in my lap, maintaining the pretense of function. When she appears in the doorway, something tightens in my chest that I refuse to name.
“We need to talk,” she says.
Her voice is flat. Controlled. The voice of a woman who’s spent the last day and night processing something terrible and has come out the other side with a plan.
“Yes.” I close the book, set it aside. “We do.”
She enters the library but doesn’t sit. Stays standing, arms crossed, watching me with those gray eyes that see too much.
“I found the evidence,” she says. “All of it. The chaos-beast attacks. The mentors who were bought off or driven away. The tribute demands designed to force my hand.” Her jaw tightens. “The council meeting where you discussed when I would be ‘ready.’”
I don’t deny any of it. Can’t.
“You’ve been manipulating my entire life,” she continues. “Isolating me. Breaking me down. Making sure I had nothing and no one, so that when you finally came for me, I’d have nowhere else to turn.”
“There’s context you’re missing.”
“Context.” She laughs, bitter and sharp. “You want to give me context for ruining my life?”
“I want to show you why it started. And why you.” I stand slowly. “Come with me.”
She doesn’t move. “Why should I?”
“Because you came here for answers. I’m offering them.” I walk toward the door, not waiting to see if she follows. “What you do with them after is your choice.”
A moment of silence. Then footsteps behind me.
Good. She’s still a warrior. Still needs to understand the battlefield before she decides her next move.
I take her to the oldest part of Stone Court—a chamber carved so deep in the mountain that even I rarely visit it. The walls here are natural stone, unworked by Fae hands, and the air smells of ages and the slow patience of geological time.
In the center of the chamber stands a single crystal. Not a scrying crystal—something older. Something that pulses with the same silver-and-starlight magic as the High King himself.
“The prophecy,” I say. “The original. Written in the language of creation before the Sundering.”
Hannah approaches the crystal cautiously. I watch the light play across her face as she studies the symbols etched into its surface.
“I can’t read this.”
“No one can anymore. Not fully.” I move to stand beside her, close but not touching. “Eight bonds between Fae alphas and human omegas. Eight children who will reshape the world. The prophecy doesn’t describe the future—it requires specific conditions. Specific people.”
“People like me.”
“Yes. But you need to understand something first.” I turn to face her. “What I did to you—the manipulation, the isolation—it wasn’t unique. It’s how the Fae courts have always operated.”
Her eyes narrow. “Explain.”
“Stone Court controls the mountain passes. The ore deposits. The chaos-beast migrations.” I gesture at the ancient walls.
“We’ve been shaping human territories for centuries.
Applying pressure. Adjusting tribute demands.
Encouraging certain outcomes. Every village under our protection has been manipulated in one way or another.
It’s how the balance between our kinds has been maintained. ”
“So you’re telling me Ironhold wasn’t special.” Her voice is cold. “We were just another village you were squeezing.”
“You were. Until the prophecy showed me something.” I look at the crystal, remembering. “Decades ago, I had a vision. A human woman with gray eyes and a warrior’s spirit, standing in my arena with blood on her blade. My blood. The fourth bond.”
“You saw me before I was born?”
“I saw a possibility. A shape in the mist.” I turn back to her.
“When you were born, I felt it. A stirring in the mountain. So I started watching Ironhold more closely. At first, you were just one of many children I was monitoring—the prophecy pointed to your village, but I didn’t know which bloodline would produce the omega I needed. ”
“But you figured it out.”
“By the time you were twelve, I was certain. You had the spirit the prophecy described. The potential.” I hold her gaze.
“So yes—I shifted focus. The pressure that had been spread across your village became concentrated on you. The mentors removed, the friends driven away, the isolation engineered—that was targeted. That was deliberate.”
“That was evil.”
“That was necessity.” The word tastes like ash, but I say it anyway.
“The prophecy requires sacrifice, Hannah. It requires someone who would walk willingly into certain death for the people they love. Someone whose courage is born from desperation, not hope. I couldn’t court you like a normal suitor.
I needed you to be forged in fire, and I—”
“You were the fire.” Her voice cracks. “You burned away everything I loved so I’d have nothing left to lose.”
“Yes.”
The admission hangs between us.
“And my parents?” She’s shaking now, tears threatening. “The attack that killed them—was that you too?”
“No.” I hold her gaze, willing her to see the truth.
“I didn’t engineer that attack. The bandits were opportunists—I had nothing to do with them.
But the fever that kept you home that day…
” I pause. “That was me. I needed you to survive. I couldn’t risk losing the only candidate the prophecy had identified. ”
“You poisoned me so I’d be orphaned.” Not a question.
“I poisoned you so you’d live. I didn’t know the attack was coming—if I had, I would have stopped it. Your parents’ deaths served no purpose for me. I wanted you isolated, not destroyed.”
“There’s a difference?”
“There was supposed to be.” For the first time, I look away.
“I watched you grieve. Watched you pick up a sword at sixteen and teach yourself to fight because there was no one left to teach you. Watched you become exactly what the prophecy required—a warrior, a protector, a woman with nothing left to sacrifice except herself.”
“And you felt nothing.”
“I felt…” I stop. Consider the question honestly. “I felt that it was working. That you were becoming what I needed. Whatever else I felt, I buried. The prophecy mattered more than your suffering. That’s what I told myself.”
“What you told yourself.” She laughs, hollow and broken. “And now? What do you tell yourself now?”
“That I was wrong.” The words come harder than any I’ve spoken in seven centuries.
“That the prophecy didn’t require me to enjoy your pain.
That I could have found another way, if I’d been willing to look for one.
That somewhere in the last sixteen years, I stopped seeing you as a means to an end and started—”
“Started what?”
I meet her eyes. “Started wanting you for reasons that had nothing to do with prophecy.”
She stares at me, and I see the war happening behind her eyes. The part of her that wants to believe me fighting the part that knows better.
“You’re a monster,” she says finally. “You know that, right? Sixteen years. You spent sixteen years torturing me into becoming your perfect omega, and now you want me to believe you care?”
“I’m not asking you to believe anything. I’m telling you what’s true.”
“And what’s true?”
“That I did monstrous things. That I don’t regret the outcome—you’re here, you’re mine, the prophecy is fulfilled.
But I regret…” I pause, searching for words I’ve never had to find before.
“I regret that I didn’t see another way.
I regret that the woman standing in front of me knows exactly what I am, and I can feel through the bond how much that knowledge is destroying her. ”
“It’s not destroying me.” Her chin lifts—that warrior’s pride, still intact despite everything. “I survived losing my parents. I survived eight years of defending Ironhold alone. I survived the arena and the heat and finding out my entire life was a lie. I’ll survive you too.”
“I know you will.” Something that might be pride flickers in my chest. “That’s what the prophecy saw. That’s why it had to be you.”
“The prophecy.” She shakes her head. “You keep coming back to that. Like it justifies everything.”
“It doesn’t justify anything. It explains why I started. It doesn’t excuse what I became.”
She’s quiet for a long moment, studying me with those gray eyes that have always seen too much.
“I need time,” she says finally. “I need space to think. I can’t be near you right now—I can’t separate what’s real from what the bond is making me feel.”
“I understand.”
“Don’t follow me. Don’t watch me through your crystals.” Her voice hardens. “Give me that much, at least. After everything you’ve taken, give me the space to decide what happens next.”
I want to refuse. Want to drag her back to our chambers and remind her body what it craves, override her objections with pleasure until she forgets why she’s angry. That’s who I am. That’s who I’ve always been.
But I look at her—this fierce, broken, magnificent woman I spent sixteen years creating—and I find I can’t.