But that doesn't make what he did right.
I can feel him through the bond even now—weakened by weeks of his poison tea, but still there. Not his grief this time, but something harder. Resolve. The iron will it takes to let me walk away when every alpha instinct must be screaming at him to follow.
He's giving me what I asked for.
I hate that it makes me respect him more.
The main staircase looms before me, and I make it three steps down before my legs buckle. I sink onto cold stone and press my hands against my face, trying to breathe past the tightness in my chest, trying to think past the storm threatening to tear me apart.
Pregnant.
I'm pregnant with his child.
The child of a man who lied to me for weeks. Who drugged me without my consent. Who defended those choices with logic so cold and brutal that I can't entirely dismiss it.
I'd make the same choice again if it meant you lived.
Would I want him to? If some god appeared and offered me that terrible bargain—my survival or his honesty—which would I choose?
I don't know.
And that uncertainty feels like its own betrayal, a crack in my righteous fury I don't know how to repair.
I stand slowly, muscles protesting, and keep walking.
Down the main staircase, through the great hall with its empty hearths, past startled servants who take one look at my face and step aside. My feet know where they're going even if my mind hasn't caught up—back to the storage room where I found the hidden books, back to the hollow behind the cracked armoire where I stashed food in the early days when I trusted nothing and no one.
The supplies are still there. Dried meat, hard cheese, a waterskin I filled weeks ago and forgot about. I shove everything into a rough sack, muscle memory taking over, my body preparing to run even as my heart screams at me to stay.
Old habits. The ones that kept me alive before I came here, before I let myself believe I could have something other than survival.
I sling the sack over my shoulder and head for the gates.
The night air hits me like a slap when I finally reach the courtyard—cold and sharp, carrying the scent of pine and distant snow. I drag it into my lungs and try to clear my head, try to think past the bond still pulsing between us like a second heartbeat.
I need to get away. Need distance. Need to figure out what I'm feeling without his presence overwhelming my senses.
The gates are unguarded this late—or maybe the guards saw me coming and decided not to interfere. Either way, the heavy iron swings open at my touch, and then I'm through, the forest rising before me like a wall of shadow and the path winding away into darkness.
I run.
Not gracefully—my body is still adjusting to the pregnancy I didn't know about, still fighting the transformation the contamination is forcing on me. But I run anyway, feet pounding against packed earth, branches whipping at my face and arms as the trees close in around me. The cold air burns my lungs and the bond stretches behind me like a tether, thinning with distance but never breaking.
I make it maybe half a mile before I feel him.
Not through the bond this time—through something more primal. The displacement of air. The rush of wings. The shadow that passes between me and the stars, blotting out the sky.
He lands in the path ahead of me, the impact shaking the ground beneath my feet.
The dragon form is massive—I forget sometimes, when he's human-shaped and merely tall. But now his neck arches above me like a ship's mast, scales gleaming black opal in the moonlight, eyes burning gold in the darkness. Heat rolls off him in waves, and his scent hits me like a wall—smoke and stone and something rawer underneath, something that makes myhindbrain light up with recognition even as my conscious mind screams at me to run.
Rut.
The shift takes him between one breath and the next—bones cracking, scales flowing into skin, until he's standing before me naked and human-shaped and barely in control. His eyes are still gold, pupils slit like a cat's, and I can see claws trying to push through his fingernails.
"You promised," I manage, backing up a step. "You said you wouldn't follow."
"I tried." His voice comes out wrecked, barely recognizable. "I lasted as long as I could. But your scent—the pregnancy hormones and the fear and the way you ran—" A shudder runs through him. "My rut hit the moment you left the castle. I can't—Kess, I'm trying to control it, but you need to keep running. Get as far from me as you can before I?—"
