I should acknowledge the weight of those words. The forty-seven names carved in stone. The forty-seven scars on his ribs. The forty-seven deaths he carries like chains heavier than the ones that just broke around my wrists.
Instead I just focus on breathing. In. Out. In. Out. The simple rhythm of being alive.
My body is starting to register damage now that the pleasure-high is fading. The wounds in my hips throb in time with my heartbeat—deep, bone-aching pain that promises infection and scarring and weeks of difficult healing.
Blood is still flowing from them. Hot and wet. Running down my sides in slow rivers to pool beneath us on the hungry altar.
His throat is still bleeding too. The artery I tore is trying to close, dragon healing working overtime, but I bit too deep. Blood runs down his chest in steady streams, drips onto me, into me, mixing with mine on the ancient stone.
We're both losing blood. Too much blood.
The edges of my vision darken like curtains closing.
But there's something else. Something worse.
A burning where his claws opened me. Where his blood ran down from my mouth and mixed with mine in the wounds. Not the clean pain of injury—something different. Something thatfeels like heat but wrong, like fever but foreign. Like my body is trying to fight off an invasion and losing.
Like something is spreading through my veins from those four deep punctures in my hips, crawling toward my heart with every beat.
The burn intensifies for a moment—sharp and electric, lightning in my blood where his cursed essence touches my torn flesh. Then it fades to a dull throb that pulses in time with my heartbeat.
Different.
Wrong.
I should care about that. Should worry about what it means, what he's done to me, what I'm becoming.
But the darkness is pulling me under like deep water, and I'm too tired to fight it.
His face blurs above me. His mouth is moving but I can't hear the words through the roaring in my ears, through the thunder of my own failing pulse.
The last thing I feel is his hands touching my face.
Gentle.
Almost tender.
The last thing I think is: I won.
Then the darkness takes me.
6
Kess
The Beast Kingis absolutely spoiled.
That's my first coherent thought as I claw my way back to consciousness—notwhere am Iorhow am I alivebut this: the man who killed forty-seven omegas sleeps on silk sheets soft as water and a mattress that cradles my battered body like I'm something precious instead of something that should be dead.
The bed is soft, large, and expensive. Nothing like the straw-stuffed pallet I slept on in my grandmother's cottage, nothing like the hard ground I've woken up on after my heat blackouts, with blood under my fingernails and no memory of the night before. This bed belongs to a king, and I am no queen—just a feral omega who woke up in the wrong place with blood in her mouth and violence in her heart.
I lie there for a long moment, eyes closed, taking inventory the way I do after every heat blackout.
Everything hurts.
Not the sharp, immediate pain of fresh wounds—this is a deeper, bone-aching kind of hurt. The kind of hurt that settles into your marrow and makes a home there, the kind that tells you something fundamental has changed and there's no goingback. My hips throb with each heartbeat, dull and persistent, each pulse a reminder of where his claws sank through skin and muscle to scrape against bone.
Between my legs is tender in ways I don't want to think about. My shoulders ache from being pinned against stone. My wrists burn where the manacles bit in as I thrashed against them.
