Chapter 6 #9
I don’t go to watch her—I promised I wouldn’t, and I won’t break that promise even if keeping it is killing me. I go to face what I’ve done. I go to look at the evidence of my crimes and make myself understand, finally, what I stole from her.
The chamber is dim, hundreds of crystals glowing faintly on their pedestals like captured stars. Sixteen years of surveillance. Sixteen years of watching a girl become a woman, carefully cultivating her suffering, patiently waiting for the moment when she’d be desperate enough to claim.
I pick up one from the early days—Hannah at twelve, practicing sword forms behind her family’s forge.
She’s small, skinny, all elbows and determination.
In the background, her father works at the anvil.
He doesn’t look up. Doesn’t notice her. She practices for an hour in that crystal, running through the same forms again and again, glancing over her shoulder every few minutes to see if he’s watching.
He never turns around. Not once.
I saw this image a hundred times. I never thought about what it meant to her. Never thought about the hope dying in her chest every time she looked back and found his attention elsewhere. Never thought about how many times she must have practiced alone before she stopped hoping altogether.
I set it down and pick up another. Hannah at fourteen, showing her mother a sword technique she’d learned from Old Marcus.
Her face is bright with pride—she’s mastered something difficult, and she wants to share it.
Her mother’s response is barely visible—a distracted nod, a wave of dismissal, a return to whatever task was more important than her daughter’s accomplishment.
In the crystal, I watch Hannah’s face fall. Watch her shoulders slump. Watch her turn away and walk back to the training grounds alone, the pride curdling into something harder, something that will eventually become the armor she wears against the world.
Another crystal. Hannah at fifteen, eating dinner alone at the family table while her parents discuss forge business over her head. They’re not fighting, not ignoring her deliberately—they just… forget she’s there. She’s invisible to them. Present but unseen. A ghost at her own table.
I watched all of this. Catalogued it. Used it.
I knew she was alone. I didn’t understand she’d been alone her whole life. Didn’t understand that I wasn’t creating her isolation—I was exploiting an isolation that started in her cradle, that was built brick by brick by parents who loved their work more than their daughter.
The crystal slips from my fingers and shatters on the floor.
I stare at the shards, at the fractured image of a lonely girl eating dinner by herself, and something cracks inside me too.
Then I start destroying the rest.
One by one, I pick up the crystals and hurl them against the walls.
Hannah at eight, playing alone in the mud while her parents work.
Hannah at ten, crying in her room while her mother sews in the next room and doesn’t come.
Hannah at thirteen, burying a dog she’d loved with her own hands because her father said he didn’t have time to help.
Hannah at sixteen, standing over her parents’ graves with a face like carved stone, already learning to lock her grief away where no one could see it.
Sixteen years of surveillance. Sixteen years of manipulation. Sixteen years of watching a neglected child become a desperate woman and telling myself it was necessary, telling myself the prophecy required it, telling myself the ends justified the means.
I destroy them all.
When I’m done, the chamber is a wasteland of shattered crystal and broken stone. My hands are bleeding—the shards have cut deep into my palms, and silver blood pools on the floor like mercury. The pain is distant, unimportant. What’s another wound? What’s a little blood compared to what I’ve done?
These crystals were the record of my crimes.
Every moment of her suffering I observed and did nothing to prevent.
Every opportunity I took to make her life harder.
Every year she spent carrying burdens that should have broken her, while I watched and waited and planned and told myself I was doing what needed to be done.
Gone now. All of it. Nothing but dust and fragments.
It doesn’t undo what I did. Doesn’t erase the knowledge that I spent sixteen years perfecting the isolation her parents started.
But at least I won’t be tempted to watch those images again.
Won’t be able to tell myself I was studying her potential when I was really just feeding an obsession I refused to name.
On the sixth day, a messenger arrives from Ironhold.
“For the Guardian,” he says, presenting a sealed letter with hands that tremble slightly. He can see the state I’m in—the shadows under my eyes, the silver blood still crusted on my palms, the cracks spreading through the floor beneath my feet. “From the village elder.”
My hands are steady as I break the seal. My heart is not.
Guardian Karax,
Your omega arrived in Ironhold three days ago. I use the word “arrived” loosely—she collapsed from her horse at the village gates and has been unconscious for much of the time since. The bond sickness has progressed further than any I have seen in my eighty-seven years.
She has been reunited with the villagers she spent eight years protecting, and they have welcomed her with joy and relief. They have also seen what the separation has done to her, and many blame you for it. I cannot say they are wrong.
I do not know what passed between you. I do not know why she left your court, or what drove her to flee a bond that should have brought her comfort.
But I know this: she is dying. Whether by bond sickness or by choice, she is letting herself fade.
And she will not accept help from anyone.
She lies in her childhood bed, in the room behind the cold forge, and she waits for death like an old friend.
Come for her, or let her go completely. This halfway state will destroy her. And if she dies—I suspect you will not long survive the loss. That is not a threat, Guardian. It is simply what I have observed about bonded pairs who lose each other too soon.
The choice is yours. But make it quickly. Time is running out.
Elder Miriam
I read the letter three times.
Come for her, or let her go completely.
Let her go. The words echo in my mind, and something in my chest recoils so violently it’s almost physical. Let her go. Release the bond. Sever the connection that ties her to me and set her free to live or die without my shadow hanging over her.
I could do it. The magic exists—old, painful, rarely used.
A severing ritual that would cut the bond at its root, would give her back the autonomy I stole when I claimed her.
She could return to Ironhold, to the village that loves her, to a future that doesn’t include me.
She could find someone else. Someone who didn’t spend sixteen years engineering her desperation. Someone who deserves her.
It would be the right thing to do. The kind thing. The thing a better male would do without hesitation.
I’m not a better male.
I’m the Guardian of Stone Court, and what’s mine stays mine. She can hate me. She can fight me. She can scream and rage and curse my name until the mountains crumble. She can look at me with those gray eyes full of fury and betrayal until the day one of us dies.
But she doesn’t get to die in some village hovel because her own stubbornness won’t let her accept what she is.
She doesn’t get to waste away in her parents’ cold forge, surrounded by memories of people who never saw her, letting the bond sickness take her because she’s too proud to come back to me.
She’s my omega. My claim. My responsibility.
And I’m going to get her back.
I summon my steward and begin issuing orders for the journey to Ironhold. Provisions for a week. A small escort—enough to be safe, not enough to look like an invasion. Medical supplies for bond sickness, in case she’s too weak to travel.
The steward doesn’t ask questions. He knows better.
By nightfall, I’m on the road, riding hard toward the village where the woman I broke is waiting to die.
She can hate me for coming. She probably will.
But she’s going to live. Even if I have to drag her back to Stone Court over my shoulder. Even if she never forgives me. Even if she spends the rest of our lives looking at me the way she looked at me in that training room—like I’m the monster who stole everything she ever had.
She’s mine.
And I don’t let go of what’s mine. Chapter 23: Hannah
Ironhold feels like a dream I can’t quite wake from.
The village is the same as I remember—the forge, the market square, the walls I helped repair a hundred times—but I’m not the same.
I walk through streets I used to patrol and feel like a ghost haunting her own past. Like I died somewhere on that mountain road and this is just the echo, going through motions that don’t mean anything anymore.
Everyone is so happy to see me.
They pour out of their homes when word spreads that I’ve returned, surrounding me with embraces and tears and questions I can’t answer. Where have I been? What happened at Stone Court? Is she staying? Is she well?
I smile. I nod. I say the things they need to hear.
I feel nothing.
No—that’s not true. I feel the hollow ache of the bond, the constant pull toward something that isn’t here.
I feel the wrongness of standing in my childhood village while my body screams that I’m in the wrong place, that I need to go back, that every mile between me and Karax is a wound that won’t stop bleeding.
But for the villagers themselves? For the people I spent eight years protecting, sacrificing for, nearly dying for?
Nothing.