Standing takes effort. My legs shake. My hips scream obscenities at me in a language older than words. But I grit my teeth and push through because I've survived worse than this—heats that lasted days, waking up covered in blood with no memory of what I'd done. I can survive walking across a room.
My way out.
The main door is unlocked.
Beyond it, corridors stretch in both directions—empty. No guards, no servants. Either I'm not a prisoner or he's confident I can't escape. Probably both. The castle radiates centuries of emptiness, cold seeping from the stones despite fires burning in every hearth. This place is a tomb pretending to be a home.
I walk barefoot through the halls, cataloging escape routes, finding none. Through high windows I catch glimpses of jagged peaks and valleys so far below they look like wrinkles in green cloth.
We're high up. Very high up. The only way out is through.
I find the memorial hall by following corridors that curve deeper into the mountain.
The space is massive—ceiling soaring forty feet overhead, held up by columns carved to look like dragons. A long table dominates the center, dark wood polished to a mirror shine. But the table isn't what makes my breath catch.
It's what's mounted on the walls.
Markers. Dozens of them arranged in neat rows like soldiers standing at attention. Each one carved from stone so dark it seems to drink the light. Each one inscribed with a name in elegant script that catches the afternoon sun and gleams gold.
Forty-seven markers.
Forty-seven names.
Forty-seven omegas who died where I survived.
I'm standing in front of the first one—SINA, Year 1247, a small lily carved beneath the letters—when his voice comes from behind me.
"She lasted two minutes."
I spin, body shifting into a fighting stance even though everything hurts and I'm wearing nothing but a nightgown and I couldn't fight off a determined housecat right now, let alone a dragon.
He stands in the doorway.
The Beast King.
Simple black leather pants, nothing else. His chest is bare, displaying every scar I carved into him—bite marks on his throat, his shoulders, his chest. They should be healed by now. Dragon healing is fast. But these wounds are still visible, still raw-looking. Like he's keeping them open on purpose.
Like he doesn't want them to fade.
"Sina was fourteen," he says, not moving from the doorway. Keeping his distance. "Blonde hair, blue eyes, terrified from the moment they put her on the altar. My beast killed her before I could stop it." He walks toward me, stopping beside me rather than across from me. Looking at the wall instead of at me. "I carved every one of them myself. Forty-seven names I'll carry until something finally ends me."
"Where are they buried?"
"A memorial grove on the eastern slope. I tend their graves myself." His voice is quiet, stripped bare. "No one else comes anymore."
I stare at the wall of names. At accusations carved in gold.
"Why remember them? You're a king. You could order everyone to forget they existed. Burn the markers. Plow the graves under."
"I could."
"So why don't you?"
He's quiet for a long moment. When he speaks, his voice is barely louder than the crackle of distant fires.
"Because they deserve to be remembered. Because forgetting them would be worse than killing them." He pauses. "Because I'm a monster, but I don't want to be the kind of monster who forgets the people he destroys."
I should hate him for this. For building monuments to his kills, for making their deaths into something almost beautiful.
