The thought crystallizes with horrible clarity. The bandits who killed my parents—did he send them? The chaos-beasts that kept attacking our walls—did he direct them to Ironhold? The plague, the raiders, the border skirmishes—all the things that forced me to become the village protector, that ground down my softness and forged me into steel—
Was any of it real? Was any of itchance?
“The fever,” I whisper, my voice cracking. “The fever that kept me home.”
I pick up a crystal shard and stare at it. The image is fragmented, but I can make out pieces: my childhood bed. My mother’s worried face. A cup of something steaming—medicine,I thought at the time. Medicine she gave me the night before they left.
But what if it wasn’t?
What if the fever wasn’t natural? What if it wasengineered, designed to keep me safe while my parents rode to their deaths? What if he needed me alive—needed me orphaned and desperate and alone—because that was the first step in turning me into what I am now?
What if everything that happened to me—every loss, every hardship, every lonely night defending a village that would have collapsed without me—wasorchestrated?
Sixteen years.
Sixteen years of my life, manipulated by a monster who was patient enough to wait for his investment to mature.
I fall to my knees among the broken crystals.
The physical pain of the shards cutting into my skin barely registers. It’s nothing compared to the agony ripping through my chest—the dawning horror that my entire life has been a lie.
He didn’t just watch me grow up.
Hemademe. Shaped me. Destroyed everything I loved and then sat back to observe as I rebuilt myself from the wreckage. Spent sixteen years turning me into the perfect warrior, the perfect omega, the perfectvictimfor his arena.
And I walked right into his trap.
Ithankedhim for it.
I thought I was brave. Thought I was making a choice, sacrificing myself for my village, walking into the monster’s den with my eyes wide open. But my eyes were never open. I was blind—blind to the strings he’d been pulling since I was a child, blind to the cage he’d been building around me for sixteen years.
The tribute demands. The impossible ore quotas. The request for three girls that forced my hand. He designed them. He told me that, didn’t he? Told me he’d crafted the demands specifically to leave me no choice. I thought he meant months of planning. I didn’t realize he meantsixteen years.
Everything.Everything.
My parents’ deaths. My isolation. My exhaustion. The bone-deep weariness that made me so desperate to rest, so desperate to let someone else be strong—he manufactured all of it. Broke me down piece by piece so I’d be grateful when he finally offered to put me back together.
And I was grateful.
God help me, I wasgrateful.
I let him fuck me. Let him knot me. Let him flood me with his seed while I begged for more. I called him Alpha. Imeantit. Just this morning—this morning—I knelt on the training room floor and took his cock in my mouth and thanked him for defending me. Thanked the monster who murdered my parents for making a Fae lord bow.
I felt the bond forming between us and I thought—I actually thought I was starting to need him. Starting to crave him for more than just the heat, more than just the omega instincts. I thought the emptiness inside me was finally being filled. I thought I’d found something worth surrendering to.
The sob that wrenches out of me is ugly, violent, tearing at my throat like broken glass. I’m crying so hard I can’t breathe, can’t see, can’t think. The crystals cut into my knees and my palms and I don’t care. I deserve the pain. I deserve worse. How could I have been so stupid? How could I have let myself feelanythingfor the creature who destroyed my life?
The bond pulses in my chest, warm and steady, and I want to claw it out of my body. Want to reach inside my own ribs and tear out the connection that ties me to the monster who murdered my parents.
But I can’t.
I’m trapped. Bound. Claimed by a creature who spent sixteen years grooming me for exactly this moment.
The tears keep coming, and I don’t try to stop them. I kneel in the wreckage of his surveillance room and I sob—ugly, wrenching sobs that hurt my chest and steal my breath. I cry for my parents, dead on a road because of plans I’m only now beginning to understand. I cry for the girl I was at eight years old, happy and innocent, not knowing a monster was already watching her from the shadows. I cry for the woman I became, desperate enough to walk into a monster’s arena and call it choice.
And I cry for the part of me that still needs him.
That stillwantshim, even now, even knowing what he’s done. That still aches with the emptiness he trained me to feel, still craves his touch, still reaches for him through the bond like an addict reaching for poison.
