Chapter 6 #12
But I push the thought away. Alphas don’t love. We claim. We possess. We keep. Whatever this feeling is, giving it a name won’t change what I have to do.
“I came to give her a choice,” I say, pulling the dissolution crystal from my cloak. The magic pulses against my palm, ancient and terrible. “A real one, this time.”
Miriam studies the crystal for a long moment. I watch understanding dawn in her eyes—she’s old enough to recognize what it is, what it means.
“You would do that for her? Give up everything?”
“I would do whatever it takes to keep her.” I tuck the crystal away. “If that means letting her go, then I let her go. If it means burning down everything I’ve built so she can choose freely—then I burn it down.”
“That’s not selflessness. That’s still manipulation.”
“Maybe.” I start toward the hill. “But at least this time, she gets to see the strings.”
I feel Miriam’s eyes on my back as I walk away. Let her think what she wants. Let her call it manipulation, strategy, another move in a game I’ve been playing for sixteen years.
She’s not wrong.
But she’s not entirely right either.
She’s on the hill.
I feel her through the bond before I see her—a pull so strong it takes all my willpower not to run. The connection has been starved by distance, and now that we’re close again, it’s screaming at me to close the gap, to touch her, to claim her all over again.
The alpha instinct roars through me like wildfire. She’s sick. She’s weak. She’s mine, and every primitive part of my brain is demanding that I go to her, pin her beneath me, flood her with my scent and my seed until the bond sickness breaks and she remembers who she belongs to.
I could do it. She’s too weak to fight me. I could have her on her back in seconds, could remind her body what it was made for, could override her resistance with pleasure until she stopped fighting and accepted what she is.
I don’t.
Not because I’m noble. Because I want more than her submission. I want her choice.
She looks like death.
The vibrant woman who walked into my arena, all fire and fury—she’s a ghost of herself now.
Thin. Pale. Her gray eyes are sunken, her cheeks hollow, her hands trembling as they rest on her parents’ grave markers.
The fighting leathers she wore when she left Stone Court hang loose on her frame, and I can see bones that shouldn’t be visible, angles that shouldn’t exist.
I remember the crystals I destroyed. The ones showing her parents working at the forge while she hovered in the doorway, waiting to be noticed.
The ones showing her eating dinner alone while they talked over her head.
The ones showing a lifetime of small neglects that laid the foundation for everything I built.
She’s been waiting her whole life for someone to see her.
And now she’s dying on the hill where she buried the people who never did.
I force myself to walk, not run. Force myself to approach like a supplicant, not a predator. Whatever happens next, I will not take anything from her that she doesn’t willingly give.
She turns when I’m still a hundred feet away. Her gray eyes find mine across the distance, and I see everything in them—anger, grief, longing, confusion. The same tangled mess I’ve been drowning in since she left.
“You weren’t supposed to come.” Her voice is rough, cracked, barely loud enough to carry on the mountain wind.
“Miriam wrote to me. Told me you were dying.” I stop at the base of the hill, looking up at her. She’s silhouetted against the sunset, and even gaunt, even dying, she’s the most magnificent thing I’ve ever seen. “Did you think I’d just let that happen?”
“I didn’t think you’d care.”
“Then you don’t know me as well as you think.”
“I don’t know you at all.” She comes down the hill toward me, each step deliberate, controlled, but I can see the effort behind it.
She’s holding herself together through sheer willpower—the same stubborn strength that drew me to her in the first place.
“Everything I thought I knew was a lie. The months you said you’d been watching—it was sixteen years.
The coincidences that brought me to your arena—they were all engineered.
Every moment of my life since I was eight years old has been shaped by your manipulation. ”
“Yes.”
She stops a few feet away, close enough that I can smell her—underneath the sickness, underneath the exhaustion, there’s still that scent that drives me mad. Still the omega I claimed, the woman I broke, the only thing in seven centuries that’s made me feel anything at all.
“Why are you here, Karax?”
“To give you something.” I reach into my cloak and pull out the dissolution crystal. It pulses with ancient magic, casting strange shadows in the fading light. “Something I should have given you from the beginning.”
She eyes it warily. “What is that?”
“The key to breaking the blood debt.”
She goes very still. So still I’m not sure she’s breathing.
“The bond between us was created by blood magic,” I continue, holding the crystal out to her. My hand is steady—I won’t let her see what this costs me. “Ancient law, older than Stone Court. But every law has an exception. Every cage has a key. This is how we undo it. Completely. Permanently.”
“You’re offering to break the bond?” Her voice is barely a whisper.
“I’m offering you a choice.” I take a breath. “The dissolution requires sacrifice. Blood for blood. If I break the bond, I lose my position as Guardian. My power. My ability to sire children. Everything I’ve built over seven centuries, burned away to ash.”
“And in return?”
“In return, you’re free.” I step closer, close enough to see the tears forming in her eyes.
“Truly free. The bond severed. The blood debt erased. You would be exactly who you were before the trial—no omega biology, no connection to me, no claim on your soul. The bond sickness would end. Your body would heal. You could live a normal human life, find a normal human man, pretend we never met.”
She stares at me, and the tears spill over, tracking down her hollow cheeks.
“You would give up everything,” she says. “For me?”
“I already took everything from you.” I step closer still, close enough to touch but not touching.
Not until she asks. “I stole sixteen years of your life. I isolated you, exhausted you, broke you down until you had nothing left. I watched your parents die—not by my hand, but because I’d ensured you wouldn’t be there to save them.
I saw a girl waiting to be noticed, and instead of noticing her, I used her loneliness as a weapon. ”
“Karax—”
“The least I can do is give you the key.” I press the crystal into her hands, feeling its ancient magic pulse against both our skin. “The least I can do is burn down everything I built on your suffering and let you walk away clean.”
She’s crying openly now, tears streaming down her face, but she doesn’t let go of the crystal. Doesn’t push me away.
“And then what?”
“Then you decide.” I let my hands fall to my sides, resisting every instinct screaming at me to pull her close. “If you want to walk away—from Stone Court, from the prophecy, from me—you can. You’ll be free. I won’t follow. I won’t watch. I won’t do anything except wait, and wonder, and regret.”
“And if I don’t want to walk away?”
The question catches me off guard. For a moment, I can’t speak. Can’t breathe. Can’t do anything except stare at her, searching for the trap, the trick, the angle I’m not seeing.
But there’s nothing in her eyes except exhausted honesty.
“If you choose to stay,” I say slowly, “it has to be because you want to. Not because the bond compels you. Not because you have nowhere else to go. Not because I spent sixteen years conditioning you to need me.” I reach out, brushing a tear from her cheek with my thumb.
She doesn’t flinch away. “It has to be real, Hannah. Or it’s not worth having. ”
She looks down at the crystal in her hands. Looks up at me. Looks at the village below, at the mountain above, at the sunset painting everything in shades of ending and beginning.
“I need time,” she says finally. “To think. To decide.”
“Take as long as you need.”
“You’ll stay? Here, in the village?”
I nod. “If they’ll have me.”
A ghost of a smile crosses her face—the first I’ve seen since she found the scrying room. “An eight-foot Fae lord sleeping in Ironhold’s inn. That should make for interesting gossip.”
“I’ve survived worse than gossip.”
She laughs—a small, broken sound, but a laugh nonetheless. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve heard in weeks.
“Okay.” She tucks the crystal into her pocket. “Give me tonight. I’ll have an answer for you by morning.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
She turns and walks down the hill, toward the village, toward whatever choice she’s about to make.
And I stay on the hill where her parents are buried, watching the sun set on everything I might lose.
I gave her the key to her cage. Showed her the door, told her she could walk through it, promised I wouldn’t stop her.
Now I wait to see if my gamble pays off.
I’m betting she won’t use that crystal. Betting that somewhere underneath the rage and betrayal, she feels the same pull I do—the same impossible, inexplicable rightness of what we are together.
Betting that when she really looks at her options, she’ll realize that freedom without me is just another kind of emptiness.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe she’ll break the bond and walk away and I’ll spend the rest of my existence as a shadow of what I was, stripped of power and purpose and the only thing that ever made me feel alive.
But I don’t think I’m wrong.
I’ve been reading Hannah Mitchell for sixteen years.
And I’ve never been wrong about her yet. Chapter 25: Hannah
I don’t sleep.