"What do you mean?"
"I wanted your fire. Your arguments. Your passion." He pauses, looking older than his centuries, as if the weight of what he's done is finally settling on his shoulders. "I thought I could have that and your obedience too. I was wrong. You can't break someone into perfect compliance and expect them to keep the parts that made them worth breaking."
The admission hangs in the air like frost, beautiful and terrible and completely unexpected.
I think of the woman I used to be—the one who threw crystal decanters and argued politics and made him work for everysmall victory. She feels like someone else now, someone I might have known once but can barely remember.
"So you'd let me go?" I ask, barely believing the words even as I speak them. "Really?"
"If you choose it. But know what you're choosing." His voice is steady, but I can feel the undercurrent of pain through our bond. "Know that leaving me means dying a little every day for the rest of your extended life. Know that you'll never feel complete again. Know that every sunrise will remind you of what you've lost."
I look at Father, at the desperate hope written across his familiar features. At Vivienne, whose carefully controlled disgust speaks of someone trying very hard to do the right thing despite her revulsion. At the briefcase full of money that was supposed to buy my freedom but never could.
Then I look at Aratus. Cold, cruel, honest Aratus who broke me down and built me back up and is now offering to let me leave the only home my transformed body will ever truly know.
The choice should be obvious. Freedom over slavery. Choice over compulsion. My father's love over my captor's possession.
But the bond makes nothing obvious anymore.
"I need time to think," I say finally.
"How much time?"
"A day. One day to decide."
He nods slowly, and I catch a flicker of something that might be relief. As if he's as afraid of my choice as I am.
"Very well. You have until sunset tomorrow to choose your cage."
The words are harsh, but his tone is almost gentle. Like he understands the impossibility of what he's asking me to decide.
Father starts to protest, to demand more time or different terms, but Aratus silences him with a look. "One day. That's already more generous than the law requires."
That night, I lie in his bed—our bed—and try to imagine a life without him. The silk sheets that once felt like luxury now seem like a shroud as I picture myself growing old in the human world, always empty, always aching, always reaching for something that isn't there.
The bond carries faint echoes of his presence even when he's not in the room, a constant reminder of connection that would become a wound if severed. How do you live with a hole in your soul? How do you function when part of your very essence has been cut away?
Then I try to imagine staying. Continuing this existence where I'm perfectly cared for and perfectly controlled, where my happiness depends entirely on his approval and my purpose is defined by his needs.
A beautiful cage, certainly. But still a cage.
Both futures stretch before me like different kinds of death. Slow suffocation in the human world, or the gradual erasure of self in this crystalline paradise.
And I have until sunset to choose which one I can live with.
The preservation magic ensures I remember everything with perfect clarity—every moment of pleasure in his arms, every spike of satisfaction when he praised me, every time I felt truly complete. But it also preserves the horror of realizing what I'd become, the shame of begging for things I never would have wanted, the slow erosion of everything that once made me who I was.
By dawn, I still don't have an answer.
Only the growing certainty that whatever I choose, part of me will die with the choosing.
CHAPTER 18
ARATUS
DAY 45
She chooses her father.
