Chapter 22 Kess #2
"Don't." The word cuts through the air like a blade. "Don't you dare be angry that I kept something from you."
He goes still. Reading the danger in my posture, in my voice, in the way I'm looking at him like I've never seen him before.
"I'm pregnant," I say, and watch his face go carefully blank—not surprised, not confused, just empty in a way that tells me everything I need to know. "And you knew. You've known for weeks. The mystic told me everything."
The silence stretches between us, heavy and sharp-edged, full of all the words neither of us is saying.
"Yes," he says finally. No denial. No excuses. Just that single word, heavy as a stone dropped into still water.
"You've been poisoning my tea to weaken our bond while I carried your child without even knowing it existed."
"Yes."
"That's all you have to say?"
"What would you have me say?" He moves around the desk, not approaching me, just putting himself in open space where I can see all of him—no barriers, no defenses, nothing between us but air and anger and the wreckage of everything I thought we were building.
"That I'm sorry? I am. That I should have told you?
I should have. But I won't pretend I regret trying to keep you alive. "
"By drugging me without my consent—"
"By giving you a chance to survive." His voice hardens, and there's the alpha I've been missing—the one who's ruled a cursed kingdom for three centuries, who's made impossible choices and lived with the consequences carved into his bones.
"Do you know what happens to omegas who bond too strongly with cursed alphas during pregnancy?
I do. I've watched it happen. The bond demands too much, the transformation demands too much, the pregnancy demands too much, and somewhere in the middle of all that demand, something breaks.
Someone dies. And it's always the omega. "
"So you decided to break the bond yourself."
"I decided to weaken it enough that your body might survive." He holds my gaze, unflinching, unapologetic. "You can hate me for that. You probably should. But I'd make the same choice again if it meant you lived."
"That wasn't your choice to make!"
"Then whose was it?" He takes a step closer, and I hold my ground even though every instinct screams at me to retreat—or to close the distance entirely, to let him wrap his arms around me the way he has so many times before.
Even angry, even betrayed, my body remembers his.
Remembers the safety I felt pressed against his chest. "You didn't know you were pregnant.
You didn't know the risks. How could you choose when you didn't have the information? "
"I didn't have the information because you kept it from me!"
"Because telling you would have changed nothing except adding fear to everything else you were already carrying." His jaw tightens. "If I'd told you that you were pregnant and that the pregnancy might kill you, what would you have done? Stopped being pregnant? Stopped being afraid?"
"I would have had a choice!"
"You would have had the illusion of choice." His voice drops, rough with something that might be anger or might be grief. "The same way the forty-seven before you had the illusion of choice when they walked into that grove thinking they could survive if they just tried hard enough."
The words hit like a slap, and for a moment I can't breathe around the pain of them.
"I'm not them," I manage.
"No. You're not." He's close enough now that I can see the tension carved into every line of his body, the way he's holding himself still through sheer force of will.
"You're stronger than any of them. Fiercer.
More likely to survive whatever the curse throws at you.
And I still couldn't take the risk. Because losing you would destroy me in ways that three hundred years of loneliness never could. "
"That's not fair."
"None of this is fair." His voice roughens, cracks at the edges.
"You think I wanted to lie to you? You think I enjoyed watching you drink that tea every night, knowing what it was doing, hating myself more with every cup?
I wanted to tell you. Every single day, I wanted to tell you.
But every time I opened my mouth, all I could see was your name carved into that wall next to forty-seven others, and I couldn't—I couldn't—"
He stops. Swallows hard. And for the first time, I see the cracks in his composure—real cracks, not the careful controlled grief he's been showing me. This is raw. This is bleeding. This is a man who's been tearing himself apart for months and hiding it behind a mask of calm.
The bond—weak as it is, damaged as he's made it—still pulls at me. Still wants me to go to him, to smooth the pain from his face, to tell him I understand even though I don't. Even though I can't.
But it doesn't change what he did.
"You should have told me," I say, and my voice shakes despite my efforts to keep it steady.
"You should have explained your fears and let me decide.
Instead you took that away from me. Drugged me.
Lied to me. Made me think I was going crazy, made me think something was wrong with the bond, when it was you all along. "
"I know."
"That's not good enough."
"No," he agrees quietly. "It's not."
The anger is still there, burning in my chest like dragonfire. But underneath it, something else is breaking—something that loved him, that trusted him, that thought maybe for the first time in her life she'd found someone who would never lie to her.
That was stupid.
Everyone lies.
"I need to go," I finally manage, and my voice sounds like it belongs to a stranger. "I can't be here right now. I can't look at you."
Even as I say it, part of me is screaming to stay. To let him explain more. To fall into his arms and pretend none of this happened, pretend we can go back to yesterday when I still believed he was the one person who would never hurt me.
"Where will you go?"
"Anywhere that isn't here." I back toward the door, keeping my eyes on him—on the man I love, the man who betrayed me, the man whose child is growing inside me right now. "Don't follow me. If you have any respect for me at all—if any part of what you said was real—you'll give me space to think."
His jaw tightens. I can see the war playing out behind his eyes—the alpha instinct to follow, to protect, to refuse to let his pregnant mate walk away from him into danger. But he stays where he is. Forces himself still.
"I'll be here," he says quietly. "When you're ready to talk. Or scream. Or tell me you're leaving forever. I'll be here."
I don't answer.
I just turn and walk out.
And I don't look back.