“It will.” I lean down, bringing my face close to hers one last time. “Your body already wants me—I can smell how wet you are, even now, even hating me. The omega transformation will do the rest. By the time I claim you properly, you’ll be begging for everything I want to give you.”
Her jaw clenches, but she can’t hide the way her breath catches at my words. Can’t hide the flush that spreads across her cheeks, or the way her pupils dilate despite her fury.
She feels the pull. She’s just not ready to surrender to it yet.
That’s fine. I’ve waited seven centuries for a woman worth claiming.
I can wait a little longer.
“Take her to my chambers,” I tell the guards. “She’s to be treated as an honored guest—comfortable quarters, good food, anything she requires.”
“I require my freedom,” Hannah snarls.
“Anything except that.” I step back, letting the guards flank her. “Rest well, little warrior. Tomorrow, your real education begins.”
They lead her away, and I watch her go—the rigid set of her spine, the way she refuses to let her shoulders slump even now, the defiance she’s clinging to like a drowning woman clinging to driftwood.
She’s everything I hoped for. Fierce and proud and absolutely determined to resist, even when resistance is pointless.
I’m going to enjoy breaking that determination. Going to savor every moment of her surrender, every crack in her armor, every step of her transformation from warrior to omega.
I touch the wound on my side—already closing, my magic knitting the flesh back together. A small price to pay for what I’ve gained. The first blood I’ve shed in four hundred years, and it bought me something priceless.
Hannah Mitchell is mine now.
And soon, she’ll understand exactly what that means.Chapter 5: Hannah
The door closes behind me with a sound like a tomb sealing shut.
For a long moment, I just stand there. The guards have deposited me in what they called “the Guardian’s personal chambers”—a suite of rooms carved into the living mountain, all polished stone and silk hangings and furniture scaled for someone twice my size. Massive bed draped in furs. Hearth crackling with a fire that must have been lit in anticipation of my arrival. Windows overlooking the fortress’s training grounds,where Stone Court warriors spar in the fading light like this is just another ordinary evening.
A gilded cage. Prepared and waiting, because he knew I was coming.
Because he’s known for months.
The rage hits me like a physical blow.
I grab the nearest object—a ceramic vase filled with mountain flowers, white blooms that smell like snow and honey—and hurl it against the wall. It shatters with a crash that echoes off the stone, shards scattering across the polished floor in a spray of water and broken petals.
It’s not enough.
I follow it with a crystal decanter that explodes into a thousand glittering pieces. A wooden jewelry box that splits down the center when it hits. A small bronze sculpture of a warrior that I throw so hard my shoulder aches, watching it dent the wall before clattering to the ground.
“Bastard.” The word tears out of me as I grab a silver hand mirror and send it spinning into the hearth. “Manipulative, schemingbastard.”
He planned this. All of it. Not just the blood debt trap—I knew about that, walked into it with my eyes open, thought I understood the cost. But the rest of it. The tribute demands designed to be impossible. The quotas calculated to leave me exactly one option. The months of watching through scrying crystals, studying me, learning my patterns, predicting my choices before I made them.
I thought I was making a sacrifice. I thought I was choosing to trade my freedom for my village’s safety, and that choice—thatagency—was the one thing I had left. The one thing that made the sacrifice mean something.
But I wasn’t choosing anything. I was following a script he wrote, hitting marks he laid out, walking down a path he built step by step until I arrived exactly where he wanted me.
Even the wound. Eventhat.
I sink to the floor amid the wreckage, glass crunching under my knees, and the sound that comes out of me isn’t quite a sob but isn’t far from one either.
He let me cut him. Seven hundred years undefeated, and I thought—for one glorious, idiotic moment—that I’d actually done something impossible. That my skill, my training, my desperate determination had accomplished what no one else could.
But it was a lie. Another piece of his performance. He opened his guard and let my blade through because the blood debt required first blood and first blood required me to actually wound him.
