Chapter 6
Kess
The Beast King is absolutely spoiled.
That's my first coherent thought as I claw my way back to consciousness—not where am I or how am I alive but this: the man who killed forty-seven omegas sleeps on silk sheets soft as water and a mattress that cradles my battered body like I'm something precious instead of something that should be dead.
The bed is soft, large, and expensive. Nothing like the straw-stuffed pallet I slept on in my grandmother's cottage, nothing like the hard ground I've woken up on after my heat blackouts, with blood under my fingernails and no memory of the night before.
This bed belongs to a king, and I am no queen—just a feral omega who woke up in the wrong place with blood in her mouth and violence in her heart.
I lie there for a long moment, eyes closed, taking inventory the way I do after every heat blackout.
Everything hurts.
Not the sharp, immediate pain of fresh wounds—this is a deeper, bone-aching kind of hurt.
The kind of hurt that settles into your marrow and makes a home there, the kind that tells you something fundamental has changed and there's no going back.
My hips throb with each heartbeat, dull and persistent, each pulse a reminder of where his claws sank through skin and muscle to scrape against bone.
Between my legs is tender in ways I don't want to think about. My shoulders ache from being pinned against stone. My wrists burn where the manacles bit in as I thrashed against them.
My throat is raw from screaming... and from drinking his blood, hot and acidic as it chewed its way through me. I swallow experimentally and taste copper—dried blood coating the inside of my mouth like rust, cracked on my lips.
His blood. Mine. Ours. I can't tell the difference anymore, and maybe that's the point. Maybe that's what the mating does anyway. My stomach turns at the thought of what we did.
The memories surface in fragments, sharp-edged and merciless.
The altar at my back, warm with centuries of dark magic.
His body covering mine, blanketing me, skin to skin from shoulder to ankle.
Pain and pleasure so tangled together that I couldn't have separated them with the sharpest blade.
The knot locking us together, sealing us, his seed claiming me in ways I still don't fully understand.
His blood pouring down my throat while mine pooled on ancient stone. The darkness pulling me under while his voice begged me to stay, to breathe, to live, his throat raw and his voice surprisingly vulnerable and panicked.
I survived.
The realization settles in my chest, heavy and unthinkable. Like a stone dropped into still water, down and down until it hits bottom and stays there.
I survived the claiming that killed forty-seven others.
I'm not number forty-eight.
Not yet, anyway.
So I raise my head and look around at everything.
The room swims into focus like something surfacing from murky water.
High stone ceiling with massive wooden beams dark as old blood.
Narrow windows letting in afternoon light—golden and warm, telling me I've been unconscious for hours, maybe longer.
A fireplace against one wall with embers still glowing like sleeping eyes, waiting to be stirred back to life.
Tapestries hanging everywhere I look, depicting dragons in flight, dragons hunting, dragons locked in combat with each other over burning cities.
His room, of course, just like the too-comfortable bed beneath me is his bed.
I sit up to get a better look, and my body screams in protest like I've been hit by a dragon and not fucked by one. Every muscle locks tight. The wounds in my hips pull with the movement, sending white-hot pain radiating through my core.
I bite back a gasp and freeze, hovering halfway between lying down and sitting up, waiting for the agony to recede so I can gather my strength and push through it.
It takes longer than I want to admit.
When I can think again—when the world stops being nothing but pain—I notice what I'm wearing.
Not the ruined white dress, shredded by his claws until it was nothing but ribbons of blood-soaked silk. Not my own skin, sticky with blood and slick and seed.
A nightgown. One made of soft gray linen that falls to my thighs.
It's clean and simple, and warm from my body heat.
Someone put this on me while I was out of it.
What's more, they washed the blood and the evidence of the claiming from my skin.
I was touched while I was vulnerable and unconscious and out of it.
Him. It was him, I have no doubt of that. Not servants—he's an alpha, a dragon king, he wouldn't let anyone touch me, not while his scent was on my skin.
He undressed me, not that peeling the rest of the bloodstained silk off me would've taken much effort. He washed the blood from my skin with the same hands that tore me open. Bandaged my wounds with the same fingers that sank claws into my hips while he knotted me on an altar built for sacrifice.
The knowledge makes my skin crawl and fills me with a sick kind of nausea.
To my horror, something else stirs beneath it—a strange and tender sense of belonging.
A kind of intimacy that comes from being touched softly and gently, a warmth that has no place in my chest, no right to exist after what he did to me.
Violation and tenderness tangled together. Just like the claiming itself.
I throw the bedsheets off and yank the nightgown up with shaking hands, needing to see. Needing to know the full extent of what was done to me.
The wounds on my hips are bandaged. Clean white linen wrapped carefully around my hips and abdomen and tucked at the ends. No blood seeping through. No angry red of infection visible at the edges. Just neat, careful work.
I probe the bandages gently with my fingertips.
The wounds underneath should scream at me. His claws went deep—I felt them scrape against bone, felt muscle tearing in ways that should take weeks to heal, should leave me bedridden and feverish and maybe dead from infection.
But the pain is manageable, dull and distant, as if I started mending overnight.
That's wrong. Bodies don't work like this. Human bodies, anyway. Omega bodies. Even dragon shifter bodies don't heal this quickly from wounds this deep.
I shove the thought away like pushing something dangerous into a closet and slamming the door. One problem at a time. That's how I've survived this long, and I'm not about to try something new now.
Standing takes effort. My legs shake. My hips scream obscenities at me in a language older than words. But I grit my teeth and push through because I've survived worse than this—heats that lasted days, waking up covered in blood with no memory of what I'd done. I can survive walking across a room.
My way out.
The main door is unlocked.
Beyond it, corridors stretch in both directions—empty.
No guards, no servants. Either I'm not a prisoner or he's confident I can't escape.
Probably both. The castle radiates centuries of emptiness, cold seeping from the stones despite fires burning in every hearth.
This place is a tomb pretending to be a home.
I walk barefoot through the halls, cataloging escape routes, finding none. Through high windows I catch glimpses of jagged peaks and valleys so far below they look like wrinkles in green cloth.
We're high up. Very high up. The only way out is through.
I find the memorial hall by following corridors that curve deeper into the mountain.
The space is massive—ceiling soaring forty feet overhead, held up by columns carved to look like dragons. A long table dominates the center, dark wood polished to a mirror shine. But the table isn't what makes my breath catch.
It's what's mounted on the walls.
Markers. Dozens of them arranged in neat rows like soldiers standing at attention. Each one carved from stone so dark it seems to drink the light. Each one inscribed with a name in elegant script that catches the afternoon sun and gleams gold.
Forty-seven markers.
Forty-seven names.
Forty-seven omegas who died where I survived.
I'm standing in front of the first one—SINA, Year 1247, a small lily carved beneath the letters—when his voice comes from behind me.
"She lasted two minutes."
I spin, body shifting into a fighting stance even though everything hurts and I'm wearing nothing but a nightgown and I couldn't fight off a determined housecat right now, let alone a dragon.
He stands in the doorway.
The Beast King.
Simple black leather pants, nothing else.
His chest is bare, displaying every scar I carved into him—bite marks on his throat, his shoulders, his chest. They should be healed by now.
Dragon healing is fast. But these wounds are still visible, still raw-looking. Like he's keeping them open on purpose.
Like he doesn't want them to fade.
"Sina was fourteen," he says, not moving from the doorway.
Keeping his distance. "Blonde hair, blue eyes, terrified from the moment they put her on the altar.
My beast killed her before I could stop it.
" He walks toward me, stopping beside me rather than across from me.
Looking at the wall instead of at me. "I carved every one of them myself.
Forty-seven names I'll carry until something finally ends me. "
"Where are they buried?"
"A memorial grove on the eastern slope. I tend their graves myself." His voice is quiet, stripped bare. "No one else comes anymore."
I stare at the wall of names. At accusations carved in gold.
"Why remember them? You're a king. You could order everyone to forget they existed. Burn the markers. Plow the graves under."
"I could."
"So why don't you?"
He's quiet for a long moment. When he speaks, his voice is barely louder than the crackle of distant fires.
"Because they deserve to be remembered. Because forgetting them would be worse than killing them." He pauses. "Because I'm a monster, but I don't want to be the kind of monster who forgets the people he destroys."
I should hate him for this. For building monuments to his kills, for making their deaths into something almost beautiful.
But I understand.
I've woken up covered in blood enough times to know what it means to carry death with you. To hold onto every detail because forgetting would make you less than human.
"You're alive," he says, and there's wonder in his voice. Disbelief. "You survived. You're standing here looking at me with murder in your eyes and you're alive."
"Sorry to disappoint you."
"You didn't." He takes one step closer. "You couldn't."
"I tried to kill you. Multiple times. During the claiming."
"I know." The corner of his mouth twitches—something dark, something with teeth. "You drew more blood from me than anyone has in centuries."
I touch my throat without thinking. Where I can still taste his blood.
"You bit me like you wanted to consume me," he says, voice dropping lower. "Like you were trying to drink me dry."
"I was trying to kill you."
"I know. It was the most alive I've felt in three hundred years."
We stare at each other. Two monsters assessing, calculating, recognizing something in each other that should be terrifying but isn't. Something that feels more like looking in a mirror than looking at an enemy.
"I still want to kill you," I tell him.
"I know."
"I'm going to try again. When I'm stronger."
"I know."
"And if you give me an opening, I'll take it."
"I know." He's closer now. Close enough that his scent wraps around me like smoke, like a cage. "But not today. Today you need to heal."
"You want me to try," I realize. "You want me to succeed."
He doesn't deny it.
"Three hundred years is a long time to be a monster. A long time to wake up every day knowing what you are."
The admission hangs between us. Raw. Devastating.
I should grab something sharp and end him right now while he's standing here telling me he wants to die.
Instead I say, "You asked for my name. In the grove. Before—during—"
"You told me to call you Kess. A nickname. Is there something longer you go by?"
I could deny him the knowledge. "Kessa. Just Kessa. My family didn't have a surname."
It's more than I've given anyone since my grandmother died.
"Kessa," he says, and the way he tastes my name—rolling it across his tongue like something precious—makes that hook in my chest twist deeper. "Thank you."
"I gave you my name. Seems only fair you give me yours. Your real one. Not 'Beast King.'"
Something flickers across his face. Surprise—like no one's asked him in a very long time.
"Rhystan. Just Rhystan." He looks away. "My family name... there are too many bad memories associated with it. So I don't use it anymore."
Rhystan.
A strange name to put to the monster from my nightmares. Too human. Too ordinary.
"Rhystan," I repeat, testing the shape of it.
He watches me say it with an expression I can't read.
"No one's said my name like that in a very long time," he says quietly. "Like it belongs to a person instead of a monster."
"Don't read too much into it. I just want to know what to call you when I kill you."
Almost a smile.
"Fair enough."
He turns and walks away, disappearing through the doorway. Leaving me alone with forty-seven names carved in gold and one new name I don't know what to do with.
Rhystan.
The name sits in my chest like a stone.
I look at the markers one more time—at Sina who lasted two minutes, at all of them who died in this castle at the hands of a beast who remembers their names and tends their graves and counts their deaths in scars on his own ribs.
A beast named Rhystan.
Then I go find the food he left me.
Because I'm too stubborn to die.
And I still have work to do.