"I could try to contact him," Professor Wells suggests carefully. "Negotiate terms?—"
"He doesn't negotiate." My voice is hollow. "He waits. Patient as winter, knowing exactly how this ends."
And I know he's right. Somewhere in his palace of ice, Aratus is counting down the hours, knowing my body will eventually betray me back into his arms. The thought makes me even wetter, slick flowing freely as my traitorous pussy remembers how perfectly his knots fit inside me.
Day fifty-seven breaks me.
Not the heat—though that's agony. The realization.
I spend eighteen hours fighting biology with pure stubborn will, and I lose. Not because I'm weak, but because I'm exactly what he made me to be. A creature designed to need him, programmed to return to him, incapable of survival without him.
Every cell in my body screams his name. My magic lashes out in desperate patterns, reaching north toward the mountains. My pussy aches with emptiness only his cocks can fill, so swollen and sensitive that even the silk sheets feel like sandpaper against my fevered skin. But worse than the physical need is the emotional void—the knowledge that no one else will ever understand what I am.
What he made me.
I try to touch myself, desperate for any relief from the building pressure. But my fingers feel wrong, too small, toowarm. My body remembers exactly how his dual cocks felt—the length, the girth, the ridged texture that hit every sensitive spot. Nothing else will satisfy the specific need he's created in me.
"I can't do this," I sob to the empty room, my hand moving helplessly between my legs. "I can't want him this much. I can't miss the cage this badly."
But I do. I miss the structure, the purpose, the simple satisfaction of being exactly what someone needs. I miss feeling valuable instead of broken. I miss belonging somewhere instead of existing between worlds.
Most of all, I miss him. Not just his body, but his presence. The way he looked at me like I was precious. The patience in his voice when he taught me magic. Even the punishments, because at least they meant he cared enough to correct me.
The human world feels hollow after experiencing that intensity. Every interaction is surface-level compared to the depth of our connection. Every man is pale and insignificant compared to his ancient power.
And that's the real trap, isn't it? He didn't just make me need him physically. He made sure no one else would ever be enough.
Father brings dinner I can't eat, speaks words I can't process. The fever is consuming everything except the bone-deep certainty that I'm dying in the wrong place. My pussy throbs with each heartbeat, so empty and aching that I whimper involuntarily.
"I have to go back," I whisper when he checks on me that evening.
"Elise, no?—"
"This isn't negotiable." I meet his eyes, letting him see the truth. "I can keep fighting and die here, or I can surrender and live as his. Those are my only options."
"There might be other ways?—"
"There aren't." The words come out flat, final. "He made sure of that. I'm his omega, specifically and exclusively. No one else can give me what I need to survive."
The heat spikes again, and I double over, gasping. My body is preparing itself, producing more slick, my pussy clenching with desperate need. I can almost feel phantom sensations of his knots stretching me open, filling me completely.
Father stares at me through the wreckage of what used to be his daughter. "You hate him."
"Yes."
"You hate what he's done to you."
"Yes."
"But you're going back."
"Yes." I close my eyes against the pain in his face. "Because hating him doesn't change what I am. And what I am can't survive without him."
That night, I face the truth I've been avoiding.
This isn't really choice. It's the illusion of choice between death and surrender. He's engineered the situation so perfectly that returning to him feels like my decision when it's actually just the only option for survival.
But maybe that's enough. Maybe choosing the manner of my surrender is the last freedom I have.
