Chapter 6 #11
“Yes.” She doesn’t flinch from the word. “But here’s what I’ve learned in eighty-seven years of living: monsters aren’t born from nothing. And the cages they build aren’t always made of bars. Sometimes they’re made of loneliness. Of neglect. Of being invisible in your own home.”
She squeezes my hand.
“He didn’t create your isolation, Hannah. He just perfected it. The foundation was already there—laid by parents who didn’t see you, by a village that used you, by a world that needed you to be strong and never once asked if you could bear it.”
“That doesn’t make what he did okay.”
“No. It doesn’t.” She releases my hand and turns to face me fully.
“But it means you have a choice that’s more complicated than ‘monster or not monster.’ You can hate him for what he did and still acknowledge that he saw you when no one else did.
You can rage at his manipulation and still admit that being claimed by him felt like finally being seen. ”
I want to deny it. Want to say that’s not true, that what I felt was all conditioning, all biology, all the carefully constructed trap he’d been building for sixteen years.
But I can’t. Because she’s right.
He saw me. From the very beginning, he saw me—not as a tool, not as an afterthought, not as a burden to be managed.
He watched me for sixteen years because I mattered to him.
Because I was worth watching. Because something in me caught his attention and held it for longer than my own parents ever managed.
That’s fucked up. That’s so fucked up I can’t even begin to untangle it.
But it’s also true.
“What am I supposed to do with that?” I ask, and my voice sounds like something broken. “How am I supposed to forgive someone who spent sixteen years destroying my life just so he could be the one to save me?”
“I don’t know if you’re supposed to forgive him.
” Miriam pushes herself to her feet with a grunt.
“That’s not really the question, is it? The question is what you’re going to do now.
Are you going to stay here and die—slowly, in a village that loves the idea of you more than it ever loved you?
Or are you going to figure out what you actually want, and then fight for it the way you’ve fought for everything else in your life? ”
“I can’t go back. Not after what he did.”
“Can’t?” She raises an eyebrow. “Or won’t?”
I don’t have an answer.
“He’s coming, you know.” She brushes grass from her skirt and looks down at me, her expression unreadable. “I saw the dust on the mountain road this morning. Someone’s traveling from Stone Court, and I doubt it’s a merchant caravan.”
My heart lurches. The bond flares with sudden, desperate hope that isn’t entirely mine—or maybe it is mine, and I just don’t want to admit it.
“I didn’t ask him to come.”
“No.” Miriam’s mouth curves in something that’s almost a smile. “But I wrote to him. Told him you were dying. Told him to come get you or let you go completely, because this halfway state was killing you.”
“You what?”
“You can hate me for it later, when you’re alive to hold grudges.” She starts walking back toward the village. “He’ll be here by tomorrow. Maybe you should spend the night figuring out what you’re going to say to him.”
She walks away, leaving me alone on the hill with my parents’ graves and the weight of a choice I’m not ready to make.
I look at the headstones. At the names carved in stone—parents who loved their work more than their daughter, who laid the foundation for every cage that came after.
Then I look at the mountains. At the peaks where Stone Court rises invisible in the distance, where an ancient Fae lord is riding toward me because a village elder told him I was dying.
He’s coming.
And I still don’t know if I want to run toward him or away. Chapter 24: Karax
I almost turn back a dozen times on the road to Ironhold.
The bond is screaming at me—not with words, but with a constant, agonizing pull that intensifies with every mile I travel toward her. She’s sick. Dying, maybe. The letter from Elder Miriam made that clear.
And it’s my fault.
Not just the bond sickness. All of it. Every moment of suffering she’s experienced since I first started watching her through the scrying crystals—a girl of eight with her father’s stubborn jaw and her mother’s gray eyes—has been shaped by my hand.
Sixteen years of careful manipulation. Sixteen years of engineering her isolation, her desperation, her need.
I deserve to lose her. Deserve to let the bond sickness take her if that’s what she chooses.
But I can’t.
Not because I’m noble. Not because I’ve suddenly developed a conscience after seven centuries without one. Because she’s mine, and I don’t let go of what’s mine—even when I’m the one who broke it.
The journey from Stone Court takes three days on horseback.
I could have used magic—could have traveled through the mountain pathways that only Guardians can access and arrived in hours. But I need the time. Need to think about what I’m going to say, what I’m going to offer, how I’m going to play this.
Because make no mistake—this is strategy.
Everything I do is strategy. I spent sixteen years maneuvering her into my arena, and now I’m going to spend however long it takes maneuvering her back into my bed.
The difference is that this time, I want her to choose it. Want the victory to mean something.
The dissolution crystal weighs heavy in my saddlebag.
I found it in the deepest archives of Stone Court, buried beneath records so old the language they’re written in has been dead for three thousand years.
It’s the only one of its kind—a failsafe built into the blood debt law by ancient Fae who understood that even the most sacred bonds could become chains.
No one has ever used it. The cost is too high for most.
But I’m betting everything that she won’t use it either. That when I offer her freedom—real freedom, total freedom—she’ll realize she doesn’t want it. That she’ll choose me, not because the bond compels her, but because somewhere in the wreckage of what I did to her, something real took root.
It’s a gamble. The biggest gamble of my seven-century existence.
But I’ve always been good at reading my opponents. And I’ve been reading Hannah Mitchell for sixteen years.
The village looks different than it did through the scrying crystals.
Smaller. More fragile. The walls I watched Hannah repair a dozen times are held together with hope and stubbornness more than actual structural integrity. The fields are sparse, the buildings weathered, the whole place carrying the tired weight of a community that’s been slowly dying for decades.
This is what she sacrificed herself to protect.
I dismount at the village gate and feel hundreds of eyes turn toward me. Fear, mostly—I’m an eight-foot Fae lord in their tiny human settlement, bronze skin and silver-veined with mountain magic. Even without knowing who I am, they can sense the predator in their midst.
Some of them recognize me. I see it in the way their fear sharpens into something closer to hatred. They know. Hannah must have told them, or they figured it out themselves. Either way, they know their Guardian is the monster who destroyed their protector’s life.
Good. Let them hate me. Their hatred is nothing compared to what I’ve done.
Elder Miriam meets me at the edge of the village square.
She’s old—ancient by human standards, though barely middle-aged by mine—with eyes that have seen too much and a spine that refuses to bend. She looks up at me without flinching, and I respect her for it. Most humans can’t meet my gaze for more than a few seconds.
“Guardian.” Her voice is cold enough to frost the air between us. “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”
“Your letter didn’t leave much choice.”
“There’s always a choice.” She spits the words like an accusation. “That’s what you don’t seem to understand. What you’ve never understood.”
I could argue. Could point out the irony of a woman lecturing me about choice when she’s the one who summoned me here, who decided Hannah’s fate needed my intervention. But what would be the point?
“Where is she?”
“The hill.” Miriam’s eyes narrow. “Where her parents are buried. The parents who died because of your manipulations.”
I don’t deny it. Can’t.
“She’s dying,” Miriam continues. “The bond sickness has progressed further than any I’ve seen. She barely eats. Barely sleeps. Her body is consuming itself from the inside out.” Her voice cracks, but her gaze doesn’t waver. “She’s the strongest person I’ve ever known, and you’ve broken her.”
“I know what I did.”
“Do you? Do you really?” She steps closer, fearless despite the fact that I could snap her neck with two fingers.
“Because I watched that girl grow up. Watched her parents ignore her, watched this village use her, watched her turn herself into a weapon because no one else would protect the people she loved. And then you came along and took even that from her. Took the last thing she had—her agency, her choice, her sense of self.”
“I didn’t come here to be lectured.”
“No. You came here to take her back.” Miriam’s laugh is bitter. “That’s what you do, isn’t it? Take and take and take, and call it love.”
The word hits me harder than it should. Love. Is that what this is? This constant ache in my chest, this desperate need to see her, touch her, know she’s alive?
For a moment—just a moment—I let myself consider it.
Seven centuries of existence, and I’ve never felt anything like this.
Never rearranged my entire world around another person.
Never lain awake at night reaching for someone who wasn’t there.
Never felt like I might not survive losing someone I was supposed to own.
If this isn’t love, it’s something close enough that the distinction might not matter.