"That wasn't your choice to make."
"I know." He looks away, throat working. "I know. I just—I couldn't bear the thought of you looking at me and seeing what I see. A man too weak to save any of them. A king who let his priests send forty-seven women to their deaths because he was too broken to question why they kept dying."
"You didn't know?—"
"I should have." His voice cracks. "Three hundred years, Kess. Three hundred years of watching them die, and I never once questioned why the priests kept sending the same kind of omega. Never demanded to see the selection records. Never looked for patterns. I was so convinced I was the monster that I never thought to look for the men who made me one."
The rage is still there, banked but burning. But underneath it, something else is stirring—something that aches for this broken man who's spent centuries blaming himself for crimes committed against him.
"What else are you hiding?" I ask. "What else haven't you told me?"
He's quiet for a long moment. Too long. Something moves behind his eyes—a calculation, a decision being made about what to give me and what to keep.
"The contamination is changing you faster than it should," he finally says. "Your heats are coming too frequently, burning too hot. The transformation is accelerating, and I don't fully understand why."
"I know that. I've been living it." I cross my arms over my chest. "What else?"
"That's all I know for certain." He meets my eyes, and I can't tell if he's lying. "The rest is fragments. Speculation. Things I'm still trying to piece together."
But his jaw is tight, and his hands have curled into fists at his sides, and I know—I know—there's more. Somethinghe's decided I don't need to know. Something he thinks he's protecting me from.
Not just the truth about what I am. Something bigger. Something about what I could do, maybe. What I could become. What it might cost me.
He's always trying to protect me from costs. From risks. From anything that might hurt me, even if I'd choose to take that hurt willingly.
It's infuriating. It's also, in a twisted way, the most loving thing anyone's ever done for me.
I want to push harder. Want to crack him open and spill out every secret he's keeping. But I'm tired—bone-deep exhausted from the rage and the revelations and the weight of everything I've learned tonight.
And part of me understands. He's spent three hundred years watching omegas die for him, because of him. Of course he'd rather carry the weight alone than risk putting any of it on me.
Even if I'm strong enough to bear it.
Even if bearing it together is the whole point.
"No more secrets," I say. "About what I am, about the priests, about any of it. If you find something, you tell me. If you suspect something, you tell me. I'm not a fragile thing that needs protecting from hard truths."
Something flickers across his face—guilt, maybe, or fear. "I know you're not."
"Then trust me with the hard things. Even the ones you think might hurt me." I hold his gaze. "I'd rather know and choose than be kept in the dark."
He's quiet for a long moment. Then, softly: "What if knowing puts you in danger? What if the truth comes with a cost I'm not willing to let you pay?"
There it is. The thing underneath all his careful protection.
He's not just hiding information. He's hiding a choice. Something I could do, some risk I could take, some sacrifice I could make—and he's decided for me that I won't.
"That's not your decision," I say. "What I risk, what I sacrifice, what I choose to do with my own life—that's mine. Not yours."
"I know." His voice is rough, cracked. "I know it's not my right. But I can't—" He stops, swallows hard. "I've watched forty-seven women die because of me. Because of what I am, what I carry. I won't add you to that number. I won't let you destroy yourself trying to save me."
The words hang between us, heavy with meaning he didn't quite intend to reveal.
Trying to save him.
There's something in those texts—something he found, something he's hiding—about how warrior omegas can save cursed alphas. About what it might cost. And he's decided I'm not going to pay that price.
I file the information away for later. Another thread to pull, another secret to unravel.
