"Thank you," I hear myself say, and my voice sounds like it belongs to someone else. "For finally telling me the truth."
I leave before she can respond, before the shaking can turn into something worse.
His study door crashes open when I shove it, the heavy oak slamming against stone with a sound like thunder.
He's at his desk, papers spread before him, quill in hand—looking every inch the cursed king dealing with kingdom business. The late afternoon light catches the sharp lines of his jaw, the breadth of his shoulders, and even now—even with rage burning through my veins—some treacherous part of me responds to the sight of him. Wants to go to him. Wants to let him hold me and tell me everything will be alright.
I hate that part of me.
When he glances up at my entrance, he starts to smile, that soft expression he saves just for me, the one that used to make my heart turn over in my chest.
The smile dies when he sees what I'm carrying.
The hidden books. The ones he removed from the library and tucked away where he thought no one would find them. The ones I discovered weeks ago and held close like a secret of my own.
"Kess." He sets down the quill and rises slowly, his eyes tracking from the books to my face and back again. "Where did you find those?"
"Storage room near my old food stash. Where you hid them." I cross to his desk and drop the books with a thud that echoes through the chamber. "I've known about the priests for weeks. About the engineered deaths. About warrior omegas and the conspiracy that kept your curse active for three hundred years. I was waiting for the right time to confront you."
Something flickers across his face—surprise giving way to a flash of anger that hardens his jaw and narrows his golden eyes. "You knew? You've known this whole time and you didn't tell me?"
"Don't." The word cuts through the air like a blade. "Don't you dare be angry that I kept something from you."
He goes still. Reading the danger in my posture, in my voice, in the way I'm looking at him like I've never seen him before.
"I'm pregnant," I say, and watch his face go carefully blank—not surprised, not confused, just empty in a way that tells me everything I need to know. "And you knew. You've known for weeks. The mystic told me everything."
The silence stretches between us, heavy and sharp-edged, full of all the words neither of us is saying.
"Yes," he says finally. No denial. No excuses. Just that single word, heavy as a stone dropped into still water.
"You've been poisoning my tea to weaken our bond while I carried your child without even knowing it existed."
"Yes."
"That's all you have to say?"
"What would you have me say?" He moves around the desk, not approaching me, just putting himself in open space where I can see all of him—no barriers, no defenses, nothing between us but air and anger and the wreckage of everything I thought we were building. "That I'm sorry? I am. That I should have told you? I should have. But I won't pretend I regret trying to keep you alive."
"By drugging me without my consent?—"
"By giving you a chance to survive." His voice hardens, and there's the alpha I've been missing—the one who's ruled a cursed kingdom for three centuries, who's made impossible choices and lived with the consequences carved into his bones. "Do you know what happens to omegas who bond too strongly with cursed alphas during pregnancy? I do. I've watched it happen. The bond demands too much, the transformation demands too much, the pregnancy demands too much, and somewhere in the middle of all that demand, something breaks. Someone dies. And it's always the omega."
"So you decided to break the bond yourself."
"I decided to weaken it enough that your body might survive." He holds my gaze, unflinching, unapologetic. "You can hate me for that. You probably should. But I'd make the same choice again if it meant you lived."
"That wasn't your choice to make!"
"Then whose was it?" He takes a step closer, and I hold my ground even though every instinct screams at me to retreat—or to close the distance entirely, to let him wrap his arms around me the way he has so many times before. Even angry, even betrayed, my body remembers his. Remembers the safety I felt pressed against his chest. "You didn't know you were pregnant. You didn't know the risks. How could you choose when you didn't have the information?"
"I didn't have the information because you kept it from me!"
"Because telling you would have changed nothing except adding fear to everything else you were already carrying." His jaw tightens. "If I'd told you that you were pregnant and that the pregnancy might kill you, what would you have done? Stopped being pregnant? Stopped being afraid?"
"I would have had a choice!"
"You would have had the illusion of choice." His voice drops, rough with something that might be anger or might be grief. "The same way the forty-seven before you had the illusion of choice when they walked into that grove thinking they could survive if they just tried hard enough."
