Chapter 8
DANA
The lake was the one thing that was always mine.
It wasn't that anyone had given it to me—nothing there was handed over.
Still, the lake wasn't his, no matter how often he insisted otherwise.
I chose early on to keep what he couldn't take.
I clung to that in the same quiet, private way I held on to most things that kept me sane—by avoiding attention.
I kept count because I always had, establishing a meticulous internal routine during captivity. I counted my paintings, the women who came and went from the cabin, the days between his visits, the herbs along the eastern bank, and the steps from the cabin to the lake on a quiet morning.
Four hundred and twelve.
I counted because counting meant I was still here. Still thinking. Still, Dana, beneath everything that had been done to me, and that mattered more than I can explain to someone who has never had to fight to remain themselves in a life designed to erase them.
The last painting depicted Senya, though I kept it secret. She was an anonymous figure by the water, her back to me, her stillness etched in my memory for twenty years—the way she stood when thinking and the way her shoulders moved when making decisions.
Senya had always stood as if already decided, merely waiting for the world to catch up.
I included her in the painting to keep her outside my mind. Memory isn't permanent. I watched women lose parts of themselves in that cabin over the years, their minds slowly eroding without external anchors for their truths. I wouldn't lose Senya or what she gave me.
“These will slow the heats,” she had said, her voice low, her hands pressing dried herbs into mine. “These will prevent the pregnancies. Do not let him count the months, Dana. Do not give him that.”
I had not given him that.
Fifteen years of quiet resistance brewed into tea every morning before he returned to the cabin.
Each cup bought me another year, another cycle, another period during which I could avoid becoming the kind of woman who loses herself carrying a child she never chose to have.
I told him many times what happened to the pregnancies.
I learned early on exactly how much grief he expected to see and gave him just enough to be believable. I watched disappointment cross his face every time, not the heartbreak of a man mourning his children, but the irritation of a man whose possession was failing its intended purpose.
He looked at me like something defective, something that wasn't performing as it should, despite everything he had invested in it. But the truth was, Senya and I were the only women who produced pups for him, so he had to hope it would happen again.
That was the only power I had, and I used every inch of it, every day, for fifteen years.
Allowing my body to enter controlled heats, presenting to an Alpha I hated, and performing grief I did not feel for children who did not exist, so that the child who did exist — my baby, my girl, alive somewhere in a world I could not reach — would stay mine.
Would stay safe. Would stay out of his reach.
The other Omegas—I couldn't save them from the cabin, the visits, the men he gifted them to like objects, or the indignity of heat spent with someone chosen by others.
I could be there afterward, learn their names, sit with them in silence, hold the pieces, and wait for them to reassemble. Teach them to paint the lake on impossible mornings.
I had become, over ten years, the keeper of those women.
It was not the life I would have chosen.
It was the life I had been given, and I decided it was worth something.
That kept me from becoming someone I didn't recognize.
Every morning, I reaffirmed that decision.
Some mornings it was easy; others, it was the hardest thing I had ever done.
I persisted because the alternative was letting him win silently, breaking a woman so thoroughly that she could no longer tell whether she was surviving or disappearing.
I was not going to disappear.
Not for him. Not for any of it.
A week ago, Redmon walked through the cabin door, and I knew before he opened his mouth that something had broken open somewhere.
He told me about my daughter.
I always knew she was alive—deeply, beyond belief, as a fact the body holds. Despite photographs and claims that the child didn't survive winter, I filed them away with falsehoods, knowing the truth.
My baby was alive. Senya had gotten both girls to safety. That was the truth I was holding on to.
Hearing Redmon express satisfaction and watching my reaction were unexpected. After twenty years of knowing without understanding, the knowledge suddenly became clear and real outside my mind, causing some to spill out.
He saw it on my face and smiled. The bastard smiled.
After twenty years of surviving that man, I understood his smile and its cost. When my daughter's existence was both confirmed and weaponized, I realized I was more than a survivor—I was capable of things survival doesn't demand, given the right circumstances.
I did not give him what he was looking for. I locked it back down. I had twenty years of practice.
Redmon was a regular visitor to the cabin and was cruel to the girls, taking pleasure in their pain. I was off-limits to all the men who visited because I belonged to the Boss. Nonetheless, Redmon's disrespectful behavior was relentless.
That's how I knew, the night he took me, that something was dreadfully wrong.
He led me into a stone-walled room that reeked of concrete and fear. He explained I was bait, waiting for my daughter, and warned me about what was to come. I stopped paying attention because some truths, if fully absorbed, threaten the very survival you need to hold on to.
The cabin's absence triggered a surprising reaction. Twenty years of the Boss’s scent on every surface and the forced bond—imposed when I was nineteen—had been ingrained in my body.
Now, the distance sparked static, a wrongness, as my body instinctively reached for the need it had been trained to fulfill, but found nothing.
The static was its own punishment, the cruelty of a forced bond that didn't care whether you hated it or were forced into it. Your body still reacted, felt deprivation, whether you wanted to or not. I had managed this for years, knowing its rhythms and peaks and how to reduce it.
I managed it. Until Redmon's fist connected over and over again.
I shifted my focus to keep that moment from dominating my thoughts until the static noise overwhelmed me. My body, exhausted from injuries and withdrawal from the forced bond, ached. I lay on the stone floor, feeling nineteen instead of forty-two as my mind struggled to bear the pain.
I held on to one thing.
She was coming.
My daughter was coming, with green eyes like mine and twenty years of life I had not shared. She was coming, and I was not going to be anything less than fully present when she arrived.
The world came back in pieces.
Cold ground first—the unwarming stone that seeps into your bones before you're aware. Then urgent voices, moving fast, knowing what they're doing and wasting no motion.
The moment I was lifted from the floor into someone’s arms, something in me jolted awake. Care changes the body. To be held carefully was to be reminded I was more than cargo, more than a body being moved from one place to another.
I tried to find myself inside the pain and the static and the urgency of voices around me.
It was difficult.
Then suddenly.
It came through the static like a gentle voice in a storm — soft and composed, quietly standing out. Clear in a way I hadn't experienced in twenty-two years, slicing through the static's grip on my nerves as if it no longer held power over me.
Not a little. Not by degrees.
It moved like ice when a season changed suddenly and violently after long pressure. My body tensed in the arms that held me.
I hadn't fully realized it amidst the haze, the noise, and the effort to stay grounded. But I felt it from the moment the arms lifted me—reacting before I even thought, a release—a memory.
There was a scent.
Cedar. Rain-washed earth. Something warm beneath that had no name because it did not need one — because the only name it had ever needed was his.
It bypassed the cabin, the stone room, the years, and brought me straight back to a spring festival and a man I had never really left.
I had known this smell for twenty-two years as an anchor. I was inside it now.
No. It cannot be. It cannot be him, it has been twenty-two years, it cannot—
The forced bond collapsed. Not slowly. Not by degrees. All at once.
It was not gentle. It was two hundred and seventy-five months of waiting compressed into one unbearable, living second. The sound that came out of me was not a word.
It wasn't something I chose or could stop. It was the sound of held grief meeting what it was up against, with grief losing everything in that loss, releasing all at once.
***
The medical vehicle was warm.
Herbs, a healer's skillful blend. Hands-on, practiced, and confident, the healer examined me as I allowed, because resistance was futile and the hands were safe.
I knew safe hands. Over ten years, I learned to read intent through touch—essential, since I couldn't control what hands might do—and these hands posed no threat.
A voice. Older. Certain. The kind of voice that comforted the soul.
"Child. Stay with me. Just a little longer."
I tried. I am still trying. That is the thing about staying — once you have decided to do it, you keep deciding, moment by moment, because deciding is not a single act.
There were two presences beside me, and I was aware of both in different ways.
On my left — the scent. Close enough now that the tide had settled into something I could breathe in.
I was afraid to look. Part of me, which had survived by not hoping too much, made me wait until I was sure.
If I looked and it wasn't him — if the smell, bond, and the feeling in my chest were just my mind conjuring what I desperately needed — I didn't know how that would affect the part of me I've protected all this time.
So, I looked to my right first.
On my right — something different. Something in my blood. The recognition of something that came from you, that bears your signature in every cell, that you would know in any darkness, in any condition, no matter how much time had passed.
The face emerging from the blur was unfamiliar to me. She was beautiful. She was here.
She was unfamiliar and instantly known—my face, my eyes, my blood, looking back at me.
"My baby," I said.
My voice was wrong — rough, thin, and stripped of everything but the essential truth in the words. But the words were real.
She moved toward me slowly. Carefully. She did not rush or reach, moving with the patient consideration of someone who had learned to approach a wounded thing without inflicting further harm.
Her arms wrapped around me in an embrace that enfolds without tightening, holding without imprisoning me.
I had not been truly held — held by someone who wanted nothing from the holding except that I feel it — for twenty-two years.
I let my tears fall.
I don't know how long we stayed like that, long enough for the rigid hold to release as the herbs, the healer's hands, warmth, and my daughter's arms helped my body realize the emergency was over, allowing it to relax.
The shift came from within — cellular, total, the specific recalibration of a true mate bond that has been in proximity long enough to begin what it was always meant to do.
My head turned. He was there.
He had been there the whole time, right beside me. He was keeping the bond warm as I found my way back. He had waited, letting me find my daughter first without interruption, and sat beside me patiently, a quality I’ve always recognized in him.
Even at twenty, I had felt it in him, the long endurance, the willingness to wait for the right thing rather than settle for the available one, the specific quality of a man who had decided that some things were worth doing slowly or not at all.
He was older, hell, we both were. The years marked him, suggesting he carried heavy burdens honestly — not broken or hardened, but more settled within like a man who has faced many tests and still finds value in what remains.
His eyes were the same. Baby blue. Patient and deep, gazing at my face with the focused attention of someone who has waited so long to look at something properly that, now that they can, they refuse to look anywhere else.
My mouth found his name.
Not his full name. The name I had called him since I was eighteen. The name I had whispered in my head for twenty-two years, like a prayer offered into the silence.
"Ever."
It came out small. Rough. Entirely inadequate for what I meant by it and entirely the only word I had.
His hand found mine.
"Dana, darling," he said.
My name. His namesake for me. In his voice. After all this time. I gripped his hand and did not let go.
Two hundred and seventy-five months since I last saw his face and felt his touch, and the bond is alive in my chest now, like something lit from within after a very long time.
I understood, as someone who has survived long enough to achieve their goal, that the wait was finally over.
I was home.