Chapter 6 #10
I watch them cry with relief that I’m alive, and I wonder: where were these tears when I was fighting chaos-beasts alone at seventeen?
Where was this concern when I came back bloody and broken and no one asked if I was okay?
Where was this love when I needed it, instead of now, when I’m too empty to feel it?
The bond is killing me.
I know it now with a certainty that settles into my bones like winter frost. This isn’t metaphor. This isn’t drama. The distance from Karax is a constant agony that doesn’t fade with time—it gets worse. Every hour, every day, my body consuming itself because I dared to separate from my Alpha.
The nausea has faded into something worse: a complete inability to keep food down. I try to eat—bread, broth, water—and my stomach rejects it all. My body has decided that sustenance from any source except him is poison, and it’s slowly starving me to death in protest.
I catch glimpses of myself in windows, in the still water of the village well, and I barely recognize what I see. Gaunt. Hollow-eyed. Skin stretched tight over bones that seem sharper every day. I look like something that’s already dead and just hasn’t had the courtesy to lie down.
I miss him.
I hate that I miss him. Hate that my body aches for his touch, that my dreams are full of his voice, that I wake up reaching for warmth that isn’t there.
Is this love?
The question surfaces unbidden, and I can’t shove it back down.
I’ve been calling it need, calling it conditioning, calling it withdrawal from a drug I was never meant to take.
But what if it’s more than that? What if somewhere in the wreckage of manipulation and heat and desperate claiming, something real took root?
I don’t know what love is supposed to feel like.
My parents’ version was cold and distracted, more obligation than affection.
The romances I read as a girl—stolen moments with tattered books while my mother wasn’t looking—described something bright and clean and uncomplicated.
This isn’t that. This is dark and tangled and shot through with betrayal.
This is wanting someone who destroyed my life.
This is aching for hands that shaped my suffering.
But it’s also remembering the way he held me after the heat, like I was precious. The way he defended me against Greymun without hesitation. The way he looked at me sometimes—like I was the first real thing he’d seen in centuries.
Maybe love isn’t supposed to be clean. Maybe it’s supposed to be exactly this messy, this complicated, this impossible to untangle from all the other things wrapped around it.
Or maybe I’m just trying to justify wanting my abuser. Maybe the conditioning runs so deep that I’m rewriting the story to make it bearable.
I still don’t know. And I’m starting to think I might die before I figure it out.
I spend the first three days in the room behind the forge.
It’s smaller than I remembered. The bed where I slept as a child, the desk where I practiced letters my mother said were more important than sword forms, the window that looks out on the smithy where my parents spent every waking hour.
The forge is cold now—has been cold since I left, since there was no one to tend it—and the silence feels like an accusation.
I lie in this bed and I stare at the ceiling and I remember.
My father coming home exhausted, eating dinner in silence, going straight to bed without asking about my day.
My mother bent over account books, too busy with numbers to notice I’d learned a new fighting technique.
The two of them talking over my head about ore shipments and commission deadlines while I sat at the table and practiced being invisible.
I thought leaving would feel like coming home. Instead, it feels like finally seeing a house I always knew was empty.
On the fourth night, I dream of Karax.
Not a nightmare—that would be easier. Instead, I dream of the good moments. His hand on my throat, gentle despite its strength. His voice in my ear, telling me I was good, I was perfect, I was his. The way he held me after the heat, like I was something precious instead of something broken.
I wake up gasping, my hand between my legs, my body aching with need that has nowhere to go. The orgasm I chase provides no relief—just emptiness, just the hollow certainty that nothing except him will ever fill this void.
I hate him for that. I hate him for making my body into a traitor, for conditioning me to need him so completely that even my own pleasure is meaningless without him.
But underneath the hate, there’s something else. Something that feels too much like grief. Like I’m mourning something I never really had, or something I had and didn’t recognize until it was gone.
The village elder finds me on the fifth day.
I’m sitting on the hill where I buried my parents, watching the sunset paint the mountains in shades of gold and amber.
The view is beautiful. I can’t feel it. The graves at my feet are well-tended—someone’s been caring for them in my absence—but looking at the headstones doesn’t bring the grief I expected.
Just… emptiness. The same emptiness I felt standing in their house. The same emptiness I’ve carried my whole life without understanding what it was.
“You’re not eating.”
I don’t turn at Miriam’s voice. She was old when I was a child—ancient by human standards—but she moves with a quiet strength that defies her years. She’s one of the few people in this village who ever looked at me like I was a person instead of a tool.
“I’m not hungry.”
“You’re not sleeping either.” She settles onto the grass beside me, her joints creaking in protest. “The whole village can hear you pacing at night. And crying. And calling out for someone who isn’t there.”
Heat floods my face. “I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t come here for an apology.” She follows my gaze to the mountains, to the peaks where Stone Court rises invisible in the distance. “I came to ask you a question.”
“Ask.”
“What are you doing here, Hannah?”
The question hits harder than it should. “I came home.”
“No.” Her voice is gentle but firm. “You came to hide. And maybe to die, from the look of you. There’s a difference.”
I finally turn to look at her. She’s watching me with eyes that have seen too much, that saw me grow from a grieving teenager into a desperate protector. Eyes that might have seen more than I realized.
“He manipulated me,” I say. The words feel hollow, rehearsed. I’ve been saying them to myself for days, trying to make them feel like enough. “For sixteen years. He engineered my isolation, my exhaustion, my desperation. He made sure I had no choice but to walk into his arena.”
“I know.”
I blink. “You know?”
“I’ve suspected for years.” She picks at the grass with gnarled fingers. “The way people kept leaving. The way attacks always came when we were weakest. The way every door seemed to close until you were the only one standing between this village and destruction.” She shrugs. “I’m old, not stupid.”
“Then why didn’t you say anything?”
“What would I have said? ‘Hannah, I think an ancient Fae lord is manipulating your life to ensure you become his perfect omega’?” She laughs, dry and humorless. “You would have thought I’d lost my mind. Besides—” Her expression grows more serious. “Would it have changed anything?”
I open my mouth to say yes, of course, I would have done things differently—
And I realize I don’t know if that’s true.
“He engineered the circumstances,” I say slowly. “But… the choices I made within them were mine. I chose to protect this village. I chose to train, to fight, to sacrifice. He didn’t make me do those things. He just made sure I had no other options.”
“And now?”
“Now?” I look back at the mountains. “Now I have options. I could stay here. I could leave, go somewhere Stone Court can’t reach, try to build a new life.”
“Is that what you want?”
The question lodges in my chest like a splinter.
“I don’t know what I want anymore.” My voice breaks. “I don’t know if anything I feel is real. He spent sixteen years manufacturing me into someone who would need him, and now I do, and I can’t tell if it’s real or just… very effective conditioning.”
Miriam is quiet for a long moment. When she speaks again, her voice is softer.
“Can I tell you something? Something I’ve never said to anyone?”
I nod, not trusting my voice.
“I watched you grow up, Hannah. Watched you hover in doorways waiting for your parents to notice you. Watched you practice sword forms for hours hoping your father would look up from his anvil. Watched you bring your mother little gifts—wildflowers, pretty stones—and watched her set them aside without really seeing them.”
Something cracks in my chest. “You saw that?”
“Everyone saw it, child. We just didn’t talk about it.
” She sighs. “Your parents weren’t bad people.
They loved you, in their way. But they loved the forge more.
Loved their work, their legacy, their place in the village.
You were… an afterthought. Something they’d get around to when they had time. And they never had time.”
I’m crying. I didn’t notice when it started, but tears are streaming down my face and I can’t stop them.
“I spent my whole life trying to earn their attention,” I whisper. “And then they died, and I spent eight more years trying to be worthy of their memory. Protecting their forge. Carrying their legacy. Being the daughter they wanted instead of the one they had.”
“I know.” Miriam reaches out and takes my hand.
Her skin is paper-thin, fragile, but her grip is strong.
“And your Fae lord saw that hunger in you. That desperate need to be seen, to matter, to be enough for someone. He used it. Cultivated it. Made sure no one else could fill that void so you’d have no choice but to turn to him. ”
“He’s a monster.”