Chapter 7
Rhystan
She asked me for my name as if she intends to say it out loud.
The thought circles through my head as I walk away from the memorial hall, leaving her alone despite the fact that I want nothing more than to stand near her and speak the shape of her name into the curtain of her dark hair.
Kessa. Just Kessa. No surname, no family lineage, nothing to trace her back to whatever people produced something so fierce and impossible as to survive my beast and ask for my name.
No one has spoken my name in decades. They call me Beast King, or Your Majesty, or simply him in whispered tones when they think I can't hear their voices.
Rhystan is the name my mother gave me, spoken on her lips as she died violently, and its shape has been worn away by three centuries of blood and failure—but Kessa asked for it like she intends to use it, and I gave it to her like it meant nothing though it means everything.
Rhystan. The way she said it—testing the shape, tasting the syllables—set my heart on fire. I can still feel it echoing in my chest, like my name belongs to a person instead of a monster.
I don't deserve that. Don't deserve her in all her fierceness and strength, or the way my beast has gone quiet for the first time in three hundred years, curled up in some deep part of me and content in ways I didn't know it could be.
I find Corvith, the Head Butler, waiting for me at the base of the east tower. His back is curved with age and his eyes filmy with cataracts. He's old enough to have served my father, and loyal enough to have stayed when he had every right to leave with the old king.
He takes one look at my face and straightens his aged shoulders.
"The omega is awake," I tell him. "She'll need attending."
"Shall I assign a maid to—"
"No one enters unless she permits it. Food left outside her door.
Hot water for the bath brought up and left in the antechamber.
Give her fresh clothes. Simple things, practical outfits like those the farm girls wear.
Shirts, trousers, boots that fit her. Nothing that looks like it belongs to a bride or a mother. "
Corvith's expression doesn't shift, but I've known him long enough to read the question in his silence.
"She's not a prisoner," I say, because that has to be clear. "She has full run of the castle. No locked doors, no guards trailing her. If she wants to leave—" The words stick in my throat. "If she wants to leave, she can try."
We both know what I mean when I say try and how futile it truly would be. The mountains would kill her before she made it halfway down, but the choice matters—the illusion of freedom, at least, even if true freedom is impossible.
"And if she asks for weapons, my lord?"
The question hangs between us.
"She won't ask." I'm already walking away. "She'll just take them."
-
I spend the day watching her from a distance.
The bond we formed during the claiming gives me her emotions—flickers of feeling that bleed through the connection whether I want them or not.
Irritation. Curiosity. The sharp focus of a survivor assessing her surroundings.
But emotions don't tell me what she's doing, where she's going, what she's planning.
So I follow her through the shadows of my own castle like a ghost, keeping to corridors she's already passed through, watching from doorways and balconies and the dark corners that three centuries have shown me. My beast wants to be closer, wants to step into the light and be seen, but I deny it.
She needs to believe she's alone. Needs to map this territory on her own terms, find the exits that don't exist, discover for herself that there's no escape from this mountain or from me.
She goes to the kitchens first. I watch from the servant's passage as she takes food without asking—bread, cheese, dried meat—while the kitchen staff freeze in place like rabbits who've spotted a wolf.
She ignores their stares, eating as she walks, practical and efficient. No shame in this one, that's for sure.
She explores the eastern wing next, and I shadow her through corridors I know better than my own heartbeat.
I watch her test windows—too high, too narrow, nothing but a killing drop to the rocks below.
Watch her find the eastern gate and stare at the sheer cliff face beyond, her shoulders tightening with frustration I can feel echoing through the bond.
No escape there. No escape anywhere. Not for anyone who can't shift to a dragon and unfurl their wings.
She takes more food from the kitchens on her second pass and disappears into an empty storeroom.
When she emerges, her hands are empty—a cache secured somewhere I'll pretend not to know about.
She has survival instincts, this one. If she can't escape now, she'll be sure she's ready when the moment comes.
Then she finds the training hall where my warriors and guards spar with each other.
I watch from the gallery above as she moves through the space like she belongs there, her fingers trailing across weapon racks with the ease of someone who's held blades since childhood.
Through the bond I feel her sudden comfort, her recognition—this is familiar territory for her, the weight of steel and the promise of violence.
She's more at home among weapons than she was in my bed.
She lingers at the hunting daggers, and my pulse quickens.
Her hand closes around one—six inches, leather-wrapped hilt, the kind that disappears into a boot—and I watch her test its weight, its balance, the sharpness of its edge. Satisfaction bleeds through the bond as she slides the blade into her boot, settling it against her calf like it belongs there.
I could stop her. Call the guards, have them confiscate the blade, remind her that claimed omegas don't carry weapons in civilized places, especially around their powerful and protective mates.
I don't move from my hidden perch.
Let her have it, I think. Let her plan. Let her try.
The truth is simpler and sadder than anything: I've been waiting for someone capable of ending my life for three hundred years, and if she's the one who finally manages it, I won't complain.
Gods know that I've tried myself to end this torment, only to discover that one side affect of the curse is that it won't let me die by my own hands.
But an omega's hands... well, that would be a fitting way to end it all.
The sun tracks across the sky while I follow her through my fortress, learning her patterns as she learns its shape.
She's thorough, methodical, not easily deterred from her goals or prone to despair.
Even in a simple nightgown and her mud-splattered boots she manages to move like a huntress, a warrior born and bred.
By late afternoon she's covered most of the castle, and I've memorized the way she moves—quick and quiet, always aware of her surroundings, always ready to fight or flee.
When evening falls, she returns to my chambers and settles into the shadows near the wardrobe. Waiting.
I feel her emotions through the bond—anticipation, resolve, a cold determination that sits like iron in my chest.
She's going to try to kill me tonight.
-
Night falls, and I can't avoid her forever.
The bond drags at me with every breath as I climb the stairs toward my chambers, my beast pacing and snarling beneath my skin.
Ours. Go. Now. She's in there—near the wardrobe, pressed into the shadows where I won't see her until she wants to be seen.
Waiting with steel in her hand and murder in her heart.
She's going to try to kill me.
I've known it since I felt her take that blade, known it the way I know the sun will rise and the curse will never break. The difference is that I want her to succeed—want it with a desperation that tastes like hope, which is the cruelest thing of all.
The door swings open onto darkness. Embers dying in the hearth, shadows pooling thick in every corner. But I see her immediately, feel her through the bond like a hook buried deep between my ribs—pressed against the wall where the shadows are deepest, good sight lines, solid wall at her back.
Steel gleams in her hand, precious and beautiful and speaking my death like a lover speaks their true love's name.
"Kess," I breathe, and her name in my mouth sounds like a prayer.
She steps forward out of the shadows. Wild hair tangled around her face, amber eyes burning in the darkness, the blade rising toward my heart with deadly purpose.
She's beautiful in ways that make my chest ache, beautiful like a blade is beautiful, like fire is beautiful—dangerous and bright and capable of destroying everything I am.
"Do it," I tell her.
I relax my hands, let them drop by my side, open and empty, my arms spread wide to show how defenseless I am.
My chest is bare—the dragon in me runs hot, and the cold air soothes my skin.
The moonlight slides across the room from the open window, illuminating the skin above my heart, right where her eyes land, right where she should sink the blade in deep to end my torment.
"I won't stop you."
Her blade wavers, just for a moment—just enough to tell me she's surprised.
No doubt she's been expecting a fight all day, has anticipated it.
That's why she's been looking for an escape route, why she hid food away—she believes that once she's done, she'll need to run.
She has no idea that there isn't a soul around who would avenge me.
"You want to die?" She sounds incredulous, like it never occurred to her.
"I've wanted to die for three hundred years.
" The words pour out of me like blood from an old wound.
"I've tried and failed time and time again.
Threw myself down cliffs. Burned a forest with dragon fire, shifted to my human form, and burned in it.
The curse... it won't let me die by my own hand.
" There's a sharp intake of breath in the silence as my words sink end.
I leave out the countless other ways I've tried, including handing a blade to my head guardsman and ordering him to slice my throat open.
The scar that resulted is flat and minimal now, and that man long dead from old age.
"But you could do it. You survived my claiming when so many others couldn't, and there's something about you, Kess.
You could end this. You could end it all. Do it."
She takes a step forward, raises her weapon and sets it in the killing spot. The blade presses against my sternum, dimpling the skin, and through the bond I feel her heartbeat racing with fear—not of me, but of something else. Fear of herself. Fear of what she's about to do: take a life.
"I hate you," she whispers.
"You should."
"You deserve to die."
"I do."
Steel bites into my skin, blood welling around the point of the dagger.
Her hands slip, move, cutting a thin dark line that catches the light from the dying embers.
The pain is nothing—I've felt worse a thousand times—but her hand is shaking harder now, her eyes wide, and I watch it happen with an ache in my chest that feels like grief.
The moment her resolve crumbles.
The moment her arm goes weak.
The blade falls from her loosened grip and clatters on the stone floor, the end of yet another attempt to stop the curse that thrums in my blood. Inside me, the beast crows with delight, yet again coming out on top.
"I can't." Her voice quavers, her eyes wide and wild, just like they were on that altar. "Why can't I kill you?"
She makes a sound that's half sob, half snarl—something feral caught in a trap of its own making—and then she runs. Past me, through the door, down the corridor with the bond screaming her anguish into my chest.
I don't follow.
Just stand there in the darkness with her blade at my feet and my blood cooling on my chest, trying to understand what just happened. She had me. Steel against my heart, permission to finish it, every reason in the world to push that blade home and end three hundred years of suffering.
And she couldn't do it.
I bend down and pick up the dagger. The hilt is still warm from her grip.
Through the bond, I feel her in the memorial hall—grief and shame bleeding through the connection, sharp enough to cut. She's apologizing to the dead, I realize. Apologizing for failing them.
She thinks she's weak.
I turn the blade over in my hands, watching my blood dry on the steel, and I don't know what to think at all.
She couldn't kill me.
I have no idea what that means.