Chapter 6 #6
“The east wing,” I say. “There are private chambers there, far from mine. The servants will bring you whatever you need. I won’t come unless you summon me.”
She nods once, sharp and final. Then she turns and walks out of the prophecy chamber.
I stay where I am, surrounded by ancient stone and older magic, feeling her move through the fortress like a blade working its way toward my heart.
Sixteen years of manipulation.
Three weeks of something that felt almost real.
And now I wait to see if the omega I built from scratch will choose to stay with the monster who made her. Chapter 21: Hannah
I take a room on the far side of the fortress.
It’s small—servant’s quarters, really—but it’s as far from Karax’s chambers as I can get without leaving Stone Court entirely. The bond stretches between us like a wire pulled taut, humming with distance and pain, but I can think here. Can breathe without his scent clouding my judgment.
The first night is agony.
I lie awake in the narrow bed, staring at the stone ceiling, and feel the bond punishing me for the separation. It starts as an ache—a hollow wrongness in my chest, like something vital has been carved out. But as the hours pass, it gets worse.
My skin starts to burn.
Not literally—there’s no fever, no visible inflammation—but every nerve ending feels raw, exposed, screaming for contact that isn’t coming. I kick off the blankets because they feel like sandpaper. I tear off my clothes because even soft cotton is unbearable against my flesh.
And still the burning gets worse.
By midnight, I’m curled in a ball on the bare mattress, shaking and sweating and biting my lip bloody to keep from screaming. The bond throbs like an infected wound, demanding I go back, demanding I crawl to him on my hands and knees and beg him to make it stop.
I don’t.
I won’t.
But god, it hurts. It hurts so fucking much.
The second day, the nausea starts.
I can’t keep anything down. Every time I try to eat, my stomach revolts, rejecting food like my body has decided sustenance from any source except him is poison. I drink water and throw it up. I try bread and it comes back bloody.
The servants who bring my meals look at me with pity.
“It’s the bond sickness,” one of them whispers to another, not realizing I can hear. “Happens when omegas separate from their alphas. Most don’t last a week.”
I want to scream at her. Want to demand to know why no one warned me, why no one told me that leaving him would feel like dying by inches. But I don’t have the strength. My voice comes out as a croak, and the servants exchange worried glances as they retreat.
Through the bond, I feel Karax’s anguish. He knows what’s happening to me. He’s fighting the urge to come, to force me to accept his presence, to end my suffering whether I want him to or not.
He stays away.
I hate him for that almost as much as I hate him for everything else.
The third day, I try to train.
It’s a disaster.
My muscles have turned to water. I can barely lift the practice sword, and when I try to run through basic forms, I collapse before finishing the first sequence. I lie on the cold stone floor of the training room, gasping like a landed fish, and I rage.
This isn’t fair.
None of this is fucking fair.
He spent sixteen years breaking me down, manufacturing my isolation, engineering my desperation—and now my own body is punishing me for trying to escape? The biology he exploited is now the chain he doesn’t even have to hold?
I scream.
The sound echoes off the stone walls, raw and primal and full of every ounce of fury I’ve been suppressing since I found those crystals.
I scream until my throat tears. I scream until my voice gives out.
I scream until I’m nothing but a heap of trembling flesh on the floor, too exhausted even to cry.
The bond pulses with Karax’s distress. He felt that too.
Good. Let him feel it. Let him feel a fraction of what he’s done to me.
On the fourth night, the hallucinations start.
I see him everywhere.
In the shadows of my tiny room. In the flicker of candlelight. In the patterns on the stone ceiling. His golden eyes watching me, his massive form looming over my bed, his hands reaching for me with that terrifying gentleness that makes my whole body ache with want.
“You’re not real,” I whisper to the shadows.
They don’t answer. Shadows never do.
But I can smell him. Mountain stone and deep earth and Alpha, so strong it makes me dizzy. My hand moves between my legs before I can stop it, seeking relief I know won’t come. I’m so wet it’s soaking the mattress, my body producing slick like it’s preparing for a heat that isn’t coming.
I touch myself anyway.
It doesn’t help. If anything, it makes the ache worse—highlighting everything that’s missing, everything I need, everything I’m denying myself out of principle and fury.
I come with his name on my lips and tears streaming down my face.
The orgasm provides no relief. Just emptiness. Just the hollow certainty that nothing except him will ever fill this void.
On the fifth night, I dream of my parents.
They’re in the forge, the way they always were when I was young—my father hammering at the anvil, my mother tending the fire, neither of them looking at me. I’m standing in the doorway, eight years old, waiting to be noticed. Waiting to be seen.
They don’t turn around. They never turned around.
“Father,” I say, but my voice comes out small. A child’s voice. “Father, can I help?”
“Not now, Hannah.” He doesn’t look up from his work. He never looked up from his work. “Go practice your letters. The forge isn’t for children.”
“But I want to learn—”
“I said not now.” His voice is sharp, impatient—the voice I remember better than any words of love, because there weren’t any words of love. Just duty. Just expectation. Just the weight of a legacy that mattered more than I did.
The dream shifts. I’m older now—twelve, maybe thirteen—standing at the same doorway with bruises on my knuckles from training I wasn’t supposed to be doing. My mother is alone in the forge, banking the fire for the night.
“Old Marcus says I have talent,” I tell her. “He says I could be a real fighter someday.”
She doesn’t look at me. She’s never looked at me the way she looked at the forge, at my father, at anything that wasn’t the burden of her own disappointment.
“A fighter.” She says it like the word tastes sour.
“And what use is a fighter? The village needs a smith. Your father needs someone to carry on his work.”
“But I don’t want—”
“What you want doesn’t matter.” She straightens, finally turning to face me, and her eyes are flat.
Tired. The eyes of a woman who gave up on happiness so long ago she’s forgotten what it looked like.
“We all do things we don’t want to do, Hannah.
That’s what it means to be part of something larger than yourself. ”
I wake up gasping, the dream still clinging to me like cobwebs.
The bond is screaming—mine and his, tangled together in the dark—but underneath the physical agony, there’s something worse. Something I’ve been burying for eight years, refusing to look at, because looking at it meant admitting a truth I couldn’t bear.
My parents didn’t love me.
They needed me. Needed an heir, a legacy-keeper, a continuation of the Mitchell line that had been working that forge for generations. But love? The warm, unconditional thing I’ve been mourning since I was sixteen?
I’m not sure they were capable of it.
I think about the crystals in Karax’s scrying room.
The images of my childhood, my parents alive and working, me hovering at the edges hoping to be seen.
Did he watch those moments? Did he see what I refused to see—that I was an afterthought in my own family, a tool being shaped for a purpose I never chose?
Is that why he targeted me? Because I was already alone, even before he started taking people away?
The thought makes me want to vomit. Makes me want to scream. Makes me want to crawl back to him and beg him to make me forget, because at least his manipulation was deliberate. At least he chose me, even if the choice was monstrous.
My parents’ indifference was just… indifference. The casual cruelty of people too wrapped up in their own disappointments to notice they were creating the same emptiness in their daughter.
And now they’re dead. Killed by bandits on a road while I lay sick in bed with a fever Karax engineered, and I’ll never get the chance to ask them why I wasn’t enough.
Never get to hear them say they loved me, even if it would have been a lie.
Never get to stop carrying the weight of their forge, their legacy, their expectations—
The forge.
I’ve been defending that fucking forge for eight years.
Protecting it like a sacred trust, like the last piece of my parents I had left.
But what I was really protecting was their indifference.
Their burden. The weight they strapped to my back before I was old enough to understand what it would cost me.
I think about Ironhold. About the village council that sent me to fight and negotiate and sacrifice while they wrung their hands and offered nothing.
About the elders who accepted my protection without ever asking if I could bear it, just like my parents accepted my presence without ever asking if I wanted to be there.
I’ve spent my whole life being useful to people who never saw me as anything more than a tool.
And then Karax came along and did the same thing—used me, shaped me, broke me down into something he could claim.
But at least he wanted me.