Warm hands sliding up my thighs. A low voice murmuring words I can’t quite hear but understand perfectly. The weight of him pressing me into silk sheets while I arch beneath him, desperate and willing, my legs wrapped around his hips as he—
Please, Alpha. I need—
I jerk awake with a gasp.
My heart is pounding so hard I can feel it in my throat, in my temples, between my legs where I’m slick with an arousal so intense it borders on pain. The sheets are tangled around my thighs, damp with sweat and other things I don’t want to acknowledge. His scent fills my lungs with every ragged breath, and my bodyaches—a hollow, desperate ache that pulses in time with my heartbeat.
No. No, no, no.
I throw off the sheets and scramble out of the bed like it’s burning, my bare feet hitting cold stone that does nothing to shock the heat out of my blood. The silk clings to my skin where I sweated through it, and I can still feel the phantom weight of him pressing me down, can still hear the echo of my own voice begging for more.
It wasn’t real. It was just a dream, just my traitorous body manufacturing fantasies I don’t want.
But my thighs are wet, and my nipples are hard against the thin fabric of my sleeping shift, and when I press my hand against my stomach to steady myself, I can feel the way my muscles clench with need.
This is how it starts. The dreams come first. Then the waking fantasies. Then the heat that burns everything else away.
I’m losing myself one night at a time.
The bathing chamber offers cold water, and I use it.
I strip off my sweat-soaked shift and step into the stone basin, gasping as the frigid water hits my overheated skin. The shock cuts through the fog of arousal, dragging me back to something like clarity. I scrub myself raw—arms, legs, between my thighs where the evidence of my dreams still clings—trying to wash away the need along with the physical proof of it.
It doesn’t work. The arousal fades to a manageable hum, a background noise I can almost ignore, but it doesn’t disappear. It sits in my blood like a low-grade fever, waiting for the next trigger to flare back to life.
I stay in the cold water until I’m shivering, until my teeth are chattering and my fingertips have gone numb. Only then do I climb out, dry myself with rough towels that smell faintly of mountain herbs, and face the wardrobe full of clothes he prepared for me.
Fighting leathers that fit like they were made from my measurements. Because they were. He’s been watching me for months, cataloging every detail, planning this moment while I went about my life in blissful ignorance.
I dress with sharp, angry movements, trying not to think about how the leather sits perfectly against my hips, how the boots are exactly the right size, how everything in this room was designed to fit me specifically. Like I was always meant to be here. Like my arrival was inevitable.
Maybe it was. Maybe I never had a chance.
The thought should devastate me. Instead, it just makes me angry—a cold, clean anger that cuts through the lingering haze of arousal. Anger I can use. Anger I can hold onto.
I strap on the provided weapon belt, check the practice blade at my hip, and go to meet my captor.
A servant comes for me at dawn.
She’s Fae—bronze-skinned with the silver veins that mark Stone Court heritage, her face carefully blank in a way that makes her seem more like furniture than a person. She leads me through corridors carved from living stone without speaking, without meeting my eyes, without acknowledging me as anything other than a task to be completed.
Her silence feels heavy. Practiced. The silence of someone who learned long ago that questions only bring trouble.
I wonder if she was human once. Wonder if she walked these halls as a prisoner before she became part of the fortress, her identity worn away by years of service until there was nothing left but this hollow compliance.
Wonder if that’s what I’ll become.
The training room opens before us—a vast circular space with weapons racked along the curved walls and padded mats covering the floor. Morning light streams through windows cut high in the stone, casting long shadows across equipment designed for warriors twice my size. The air smells like metal and leather and exertion, centuries of combat soaked into the very stones.
And underneath all of it, threaded through everything like smoke:him.
He’s already there.
Karax stands in the center of the room, stripped to the waist, his bronze skin gleaming in the early light like he’s been carved from the same stone as the fortress. I knew he was big. I’ve seen him in the arena, felt him pin me in the moment before he announced my captivity. But seeing him like this—half-naked, muscles shifting beneath skin traced with silver veins, completely at ease in his own overwhelming physicality—is something else entirely.
I’m tall for a woman. Five foot ten, strong enough to hold my own against any man in Ironhold, trained by eight years of combat against things that should have killed me. I’m not delicate. I’m not fragile.
But he makes me feel like both.
