My victory was just another cage he built.
I press my palms against the cold stone floor and force myself to breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth, the way I taught myself during those first terrible months after my parents died. When the grief threatened to swallow me whole and I had to find a way to keep functioning because no one else was going to protect the village.
I won’t cry. Iwon’t. He doesn’t get to have my tears on top of everything else he’s taken.
But God, it’s hard. Eight years of being the strong one. Eight years of sacrifice and struggle and shouldering burdens thatshould have broken me. Eight years of telling myself that it meant something, that my choices mattered, that being the one who always stepped forward made a difference.
And now I’m on my knees in a monster’s bedroom, surrounded by broken glass, and the worst part isn’t that I’m trapped.
The worst part is that I never wasn’t.
I don’t know how long I sit there before the despair starts to calcify into something harder.
Despair is useless. I learned that lesson standing over my parents’ bodies with a sword I barely knew how to hold. Despair doesn’t find escape routes or identify weaknesses or figure out how to survive another day. Despair just sits there and lets the monsters win.
I’m not dead yet. I’m not broken yet. And as long as that’s true, there’s still a chance.
I push myself to my feet, ignoring the sting of glass fragments embedded in my palms, and begin a systematic exploration of my prison.
The chambers are larger than I initially realized—three connected rooms plus the bathing area, all carved directly into the mountain’s heart. The stone walls are polished smooth but not uniform; veins of silver and gold run through the granite like frozen rivers, catching the firelight and throwing it back in patterns that shift when I move. It’s beautiful in a cold, inhumanway. The beauty of something that’s been here for centuries and will be here for centuries more, long after I’m dust.
The main room holds the massive bed—a frame of dark wood that must have taken a team of craftsmen months to carve, draped in furs and silks that probably cost more than everything in Ironhold combined. The sitting area has chairs sized for a giant, a low table covered in books and papers, a writing desk with quills and ink that gleam with faint magical light.
A secondary chamber holds what appears to be a private training room. Practice weapons rack the walls—swords and staffs and things I don’t recognize, all of them slightly blunted, designed for sparring rather than killing. Padded mats cover the floor. A full-length mirror dominates one wall, and I catch my own reflection in it: a small, bruised woman in worn fighting leathers, standing in a room built for a god.
The third room is a study. Shelves of books in languages I don’t recognize, their spines cracked with age and use. A desk carved from a single piece of granite, its surface covered in correspondence and maps and what looks like official documents bearing seals I can’t read. This is where he works, I realize. Where he’s spent seven centuries running his court, making decisions, shaping the world to his liking.
I check the windows first. They’re real—not illusions, though with Fae magic you can never be sure—but the drop to the training grounds below is at least fifty feet. Even if I survived the fall, I’d land in the middle of Stone Court’s warrior barracks, surrounded by enemies who would have me back in this room within minutes.
The main door is locked with something that pulses against my palm when I touch it. Mountain magic, warm and unyielding, keyed to open only for people who aren’t me.The servant’s entrance in the bathing chamber has the same resistance.
I’m trapped. But I already knew that.
What I didn’t know—what I’m only beginning to understand—is what seven centuries of existence looks like when it’s laid out in front of you.
The books on his shelves aren’t decorative. They’re worn, read and reread, some of them falling apart at the bindings. The training room floor shows patterns of use—faded spots where feet have landed thousands of times, grooves worn into the stone by centuries of practice. The desk in the study is covered in the kind of organized chaos that comes from someone who actually works there, who uses this space for something other than show.
He’s not just a monster. He’s a monster who reads, who trains, who runs a court and makes decisions and has apparently spent the last several months planning how to trap me specifically.
The thought makes me want to break more things. But there’s nothing left within reach that I haven’t already destroyed.
It takes me an hour to explore every inch of the chambers, cataloging everything I find. Clothing in the wardrobe sized for my body—simple dresses and soft sleeping clothes and even fighting leathers that look like they were made from my measurements. He had them prepared. HeknewI was coming, knew my size, knew what I’d need.
The violation of it sits in my chest like a stone.
But what captures my attention most isn’t the furniture or the weapons or the disturbing evidence of his preparation.
It’s the smell.
His scent is everywhere. Embedded in the silk sheets, lingering in the air, saturating the very stone of the walls. Mountain rock and something darker—something primal and ancient that speaks of power held for so long it’s become indistinguishable from the holder. Every breath I take pulls more of it into my lungs, my blood, my brain.
I hate it.
I hate how it makes my body respond without permission. How my pulse quickens when I breathe too deep. How there’s a warmth building low in my belly that has nothing to do with the fire crackling in the hearth and everything to do with the male whose presence saturates every surface of this room.
I hate how part of me wants to cross to that massive bed and bury my face in his pillows.
Stop it.
