Days pass. Then a week. Then two.
The routine settles into place like stones finding their position in a wall.
Every morning, I train her. The sessions grow longer as her stamina builds, more complex as she masters the basics. She’s aquick learner—adapts to Stone Court techniques with the same stubborn efficiency she brought to teaching herself how to fight chaos-beasts. By the end of the second week, she can escape my basic holds three times out of ten.
Not enough to matter in a real fight. But enough to make the training interesting.
Every evening, I share a meal with her in our chambers. She ate in hostile silence the first few nights, refusing to speak, refusing to look at me. But I’m patient. I’ve been patient for seven centuries.
And slowly, grudgingly, she begins to talk.
“Tell me about your first kill.”
We’re seated across from each other at the table, firelight flickering between us. She’s stopped refusing the food—a pointless rebellion, and she’s smart enough to know she needs her strength. But she still watches me like I might poison her at any moment.
“Why?” She doesn’t look up from her plate.
“Because I want to know you. The scrying crystals showed me what you did, but not what you felt.”
I expect her to refuse. To tell me to go to hell, or simply ignore the question.
Instead, she answers.
“I was sixteen.” The words come out flat, controlled. “A chaos-beast broke through the northern wall three months aftermy parents died. Everyone was running. No one was fighting back.”
“So you did.”
“Someone had to.” She stabs at a piece of meat, her jaw tight. “I didn’t think about it. Just saw the beast heading for a group of children and got between them.”
“You killed it?”
“Eventually.” She finally looks up, meeting my eyes. The firelight catches the silver threads in her gray irises—a sign of the transformation beginning, though she probably hasn’t noticed yet. “It took me twenty minutes and most of the skin on my arms. But yeah. I killed it.”
“You were brave.”
“I was terrified.”
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.” I set down my fork, giving her my full attention. “Courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s acting despite fear.”
Something shifts in her expression—suspicion warring with something that looks almost like hunger. The hunger of someone who’s been starving for recognition and doesn’t know how to accept it when it’s finally offered.
“Why do you care?” she asks. “What does it matter to you what I felt when I was sixteen?”
“Because you’re mine now.” I hold her gaze, letting her see that I mean it. “And I take care of what belongs to me.”
“I’m not athing.”
“No.You’re a woman who spent eight years carrying a burden no one should carry alone.” I lean back, watching emotions waracross her face. “When’s the last time someone asked if you were okay, Hannah? When’s the last time anyone in that village offered to help?”
She doesn’t answer.
She doesn’t have to.
The dreams are getting worse.
I can smell them on her every morning—that sweet, desperate musk saturating her skin, clinging to the sheets, filling the air of our chambers with evidence of what she won’t admit. She wakes flushed and trembling, her thighs pressed together, her body aching for relief she refuses to give herself.
She’s too proud to touch herself while thinking of me.
