Chapter 6 #13
The crystal sits on my bedside table, pulsing with ancient magic, offering me a freedom I thought I’d never have. All I have to do is use it. Speak the words. Let the blood debt dissolve, and walk away from everything Karax did to me.
Everything Karax is to me.
I lie in my childhood bed, staring at the ceiling I used to stare at as a girl, and I try to imagine my life without him.
No bond thrumming in my chest. No scent of mountain stone on my skin. No massive body curved around mine at night, making me feel small and safe and held for the first time in my life. No golden eyes watching me with a hunger that should terrify me but doesn’t.
No one strong enough to carry me when I’m tired of carrying everyone else.
The thought makes me want to weep.
I press my hand to my chest, feeling the bond pulse beneath my palm. Even now, even with all this distance between us, I can feel him. His anguish. His hope. Something desperate and raw that I can’t quite name, but that echoes in my own chest like a wound that won’t stop bleeding.
Is it real? Is any of it real?
I close my eyes and try to separate what I feel from what the bond makes me feel. Try to find the line between Hannah Mitchell of Ironhold and the omega Karax spent sixteen years creating.
I can’t find it.
Maybe there is no line. Maybe the omega and the woman are the same person now, so intertwined that pulling them apart would destroy both.
Maybe that’s what the crystal would do. Not free me, but hollow me out. Leave me with a Hannah-shaped hole where something was beginning to grow.
Around midnight, I get up and walk.
The village is quiet, most people long since asleep.
Moonlight silvers the familiar streets, casting long shadows from buildings I’ve known my entire life.
I pass the forge where my father worked—dark now, cold, the fires unlit since his death.
The new blacksmith uses a different building.
No one wanted to work in the place where Garrett Mitchell used to hammer in silence, too focused on his work to notice the daughter hovering in the doorway.
I press my palm against the door. The wood is rough with age, splintering in places.
I should say something. Should whisper an apology, a goodbye, something to mark this moment. But what is there to say to people who never really heard me when they were alive?
“I spent eight years protecting your legacy,” I say finally.
“Your forge. Your village. Your burden that I inherited because you died and left it to me.” My voice is flat.
Hollow. “I thought I was honoring you. But I was just… continuing the pattern. Being useful. Being needed. Being everything except seen.”
The door doesn’t answer. My parents never answered, not really. Not when it mattered.
I keep walking.
The market square where my mother shopped without ever asking if I wanted to come.
The well where I used to draw water before dawn while everyone else slept.
The walls I spent eight years defending, stone by stone, death by death, while the village council wrung their hands and sent me out alone again and again.
This place was my whole world once. My purpose. My prison, in its own way—I was as trapped by duty and obligation as I was by Karax’s manipulation. Everyone needed me. Everyone depended on me. And I couldn’t leave, couldn’t rest, couldn’t be anything except the protector they required.
I was exhausted before Karax ever touched me. He just… used that exhaustion. Sharpened it. Made sure no one else could shoulder the burden until I was so desperate for relief that I’d walk into a monster’s arms.
And the worst part?
The relief was real. When he held me, when he told me I was good, when he took control and I could finally stop fighting—that was real. Not manufactured. Not conditioned. Just… real.
Maybe that’s what I can’t forgive. Not that he trapped me, but that the trap felt like coming home.
I find myself at the hill again, looking up at the graves.
Two simple stones, weathered by eight years of mountain wind. I couldn’t afford anything finer when I buried them. Could barely afford the stones at all. I was sixteen, alone, trying to figure out how to pay for funerals and food and a life I never asked for.
I sink to my knees in the grass.
For a long time, I just kneel there, staring at the names carved in stone. Garrett Mitchell. Elena Mitchell. Beloved parents. Faithful servants of Ironhold.
Beloved. The word feels like a lie now. Or maybe not a lie—maybe they loved me in their way, the way you love a piece of furniture that’s always been in the room. Present. Functional. Unremarkable.
“I used to dream about making you proud,” I whisper. “Used to practice sword forms for hours hoping you’d notice. Hoping you’d look up from the forge and see me. Hoping you’d say something—anything—that proved I mattered to you.”
The wind stirs the grass around me.
“But you never did. And now you’re dead, and I’ll never know if you even loved me, or if I was just… another obligation. Another burden you carried because that’s what people do.”
I press my forehead to my mother’s gravestone. The rock is cold against my skin.
“Karax saw me,” I say, and the words taste like betrayal. “From the very beginning—before you died, before any of it—he was watching. He saw me practice those sword forms. He saw me wait for you to notice. He saw every moment of loneliness and he catalogued it and used it against me.”
I lift my head, staring at the stone.
“But he saw me. That’s more than you ever did.”
The graves don’t answer. They never do.
I stay there for a long time, kneeling in the grass, feeling the cold seep into my bones. The bond aches in my chest—Karax is awake too, I realize. He can feel my turmoil. He’s probably lying in that tiny inn room, too large for the bed, counting the hours until I come to destroy him or save him.
He’s waiting to see if I’ll use the crystal.
And the terrible truth is: I don’t want to.
I think about the woman I was before him.
Strong. Capable. Alone.
So fucking alone.
I think about the nights I lay in this very bed, staring at this very ceiling, wondering if this was all my life would ever be.
Protecting people who took me for granted.
Fighting battles no one else would fight.
Carrying a village on my shoulders until my spine cracked under the weight—just like I’d carried my parents’ expectations, their legacy, their cold and distant love.
I think about the way I used to dream of someone coming to save me.
A ridiculous fantasy—I didn’t believe in saviors, didn’t believe anyone could be strong enough to carry me the way I carried everyone else.
But late at night, when the exhaustion was too much, I’d imagine what it would feel like to have someone else be strong.
Someone who could hold me up instead of leaning on me.
Someone who could fight beside me instead of hiding behind me.
Someone who could see me—really see me—instead of just seeing what I could do for them.
Karax gave me that.
In the worst possible way, through manipulation and lies and sixteen years of patient destruction, he gave me exactly what I’d been dreaming of my whole life.
Does that make it wrong? Does the method poison the result?
Or can something real grow from corrupted soil?
I think about love.
I don’t know what love is supposed to feel like.
My parents’ version was cold and distracted—obligation dressed up as family.
The romances I read as a girl, stolen from traveling merchants and hidden under my mattress, described something bright and passionate and all-consuming. This isn’t that either.
This is darker. More complicated. Shot through with betrayal and rage and grief.
But there’s something underneath all of that.
Something that stirs when I think about him—not just the bond pulling me back, not just the biological need the claiming created.
Something that started before the heat, maybe.
Something that began the first time he looked at me like I was worth looking at.
I think I might be falling in love with him.
The thought terrifies me. How can I love someone who did what he did? How can I feel the beginnings of something real for a monster who spent sixteen years engineering my destruction?
But I felt the beginnings of it before I knew the truth. In the training room, when he pushed me to be better. In his chambers, when he held me and told me I was good. In the quiet moments between the manipulation, when he looked at me like I was the first real thing he’d seen in centuries.
Was that manufactured too? Or was that the one true thing in all his lies?
I don’t know. I might never know.
But I know what I feel now—this fragile, complicated, impossible thing growing in my chest. Not fully formed. Not certain. Just… beginning.
The question is whether I’m brave enough to let it grow.
I think about the crystal in my pocket.
I could use it. Could sever the bond, wash away these feelings, return to the woman I was before. Clear-headed. Independent. Free.
Alone.
Is that what I want? To be alone again? To go back to carrying everything by myself, to fighting every battle without someone at my side, to lying in this bed night after night wondering if anyone will ever see me?
I survived it before. I could survive it again.
But surviving isn’t the same as living. I learned that a long time ago.
Dawn breaks pink and gold over the mountains.
I’m still on the hill, still kneeling between my parents’ graves, when the sun crests the peaks and pours light across Ironhold. The village stirs below me—smoke rising from chimneys, early risers beginning their day.
The day I have to choose.
I look down at my hands. They’re dirty from the grass, cold from the night air. Warrior’s hands. Protector’s hands.