That’s the cruelest part. The bond doesn’t care about betrayal. Doesn’t care about manipulation or manufactured destiny. It just pulses with warmth and belonging, reminding me thatsomewhere in this fortress, my Alpha is waiting. My body still craves him. My omega instincts still reach for him through the bond, seeking comfort from the very creature who caused my pain.
I want to vomit.
I want to scream.
I want to find him and drive a blade through his heart and watch the light leave his golden eyes.
But even as I think it, my treacherous body remembers his hands on my skin. His voice calling me good girl. The peace I felt when he held me, when I finally let myself stop fighting, when I surrendered to someone strong enough to carry me.
He built that peace on the graves of everyone I loved.
And some part of me still wants to crawl back to him and beg him to make the pain go away.
I don’t know how long I stay there.
Long enough for my tears to dry. Long enough for the sobs to fade to shuddering breaths, then to silence. Long enough for the rage to crystallize into something cold and hard in my chest, sharp as the crystal shards still cutting into my knees.
I make myself stand. Make myself look at the destruction around me—sixteen years of surveillance, shattered on the floor. The images are fractured but not gone. I can still see glimpses of my life scattered across the stones like broken memories.
The girl at eight, riding her father’s shoulders.
The teenager at sixteen, standing over her parents’ grave.
The woman at twenty-four, walking into an arena to face a monster she thought she understood.
I was never the author of my own story. I was just a character in his.
But not anymore.
I gather the broken pieces of myself and fit them back together in a new configuration. Not the naive girl who believed in fairness. Not the grateful omega who thought she’d been chosen out of all the women in the world because she was special. Not the fool who let herself need her captor and thanked him for the privilege.
Something else. Something harder. Something that will look the monster in his golden eyes and demand answers, even if the truth destroys whatever fragile thing was growing between us.
Was growing. Past tense. Because whatever I thought I felt for him died in this room, surrounded by the evidence of his manipulation.
I stand up. The crystals crunch under my feet as I walk toward the door. My knees are bleeding. My palms are bleeding. I don’t care.
He’s going to tell me everything.
Every plan. Every manipulation. Every tragedy he engineered to turn me into what I am.
And then I’m going to decide what to do about it.Chapter 18: Karax
She’s different today.
I notice it the moment she enters the training room—something shuttered behind her eyes, a tension in her shouldersthat wasn’t there yesterday. The bond tells me she’s troubled, but not why. She’s learned to guard her thoughts from me, building walls I could break through but choose not to.
I want her to trust me. Real trust, not forced intimacy.
“You’re distracted,” I observe, circling her on the training mat. “Your guard is dropping.”
“Then hit me.” She adjusts her stance, but her eyes don’t quite meet mine. “That’s what training is for.”
I don’t hit her. Instead, I stop circling and close the distance between us, tilting her chin up with one finger.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” She pulls away from my touch—the first time she’s done that since the heat. “Can we just train?”
