“I feel something now—”
“Now.” She finally turns, and her eyes are red-rimmed but dry. The ice has frozen everything. “Now that you’ve fucked me. Now that you’ve knotted me and bonded me and made me beg for your cock. Now you feel something.”
“Hannah—”
“Was that part of the plan too? Getting me to need you?” Her voice cracks on the word. “Getting me to crave you so badly I can’t think straight? Or was that just another opportunity you seized?”
I can’t answer. Because she’s not wrong. The heat, the bonding, the conditioning—I planned all of it. Executed it deliberately. Turned her body against her mind until she had no choice but to surrender.
She sees the answer in my silence.
“That’s what I thought.” She turns back to the door. “Don’t follow me. Don’t look for me. I need to decide what to do about the fact that I’m bonded for life to a monster who spent sixteen years turning me into his perfect victim.”
She walks out.
The door closes behind her, and I’m left standing in the cracked stone of my training room, feeling her grief and rage and devastation flooding through the bond.
I did this.
Not just the years of manipulation. Not just the circumstances I nudged into place.This—this moment of shattering, this destruction of trust—is my fault. I had the chance to tell her the truth. Had weeks, months even, to explain what I’d done and why.
I chose not to. Chose to let her believe our meeting was fate, our bond was destiny, whatever was growing between us was something pure and untainted by my scheming.
I was a coward.
I told myself I was taking opportunities. Told myself I wasn’t really planning, wasn’t really orchestrating—just watching, waiting, nudging when I could. As if that made it better. As if the distinction between a master plan and opportunistic predation meant anything at all to the woman whose life I destroyed.
She’s right. I would have done it to anyone who fit the requirements.
And that’s the worst part. Because somewhere in the last three weeks, she stopped being a means to an end. Stopped being just a prophecy requirement or an omega to claim. She becameHannah—fierce and brave and so fucking tired of carrying everyone else’s weight. She became someone I wanted to protect, someone I wanted to see smile, someone whose laughter made something long-dead stir in my chest.
But I didn’t start feeling that until after I’d already destroyed her.
I stand in the training room for a long time, feeling her move through the fortress, feeling her pain like a blade in my own chest.
And I don’t know how to make this right.
I don’t know if I can.Chapter 19: Hannah
I don’t go back to our chambers.
The words echo in my head as I walk—our chambers, like we’re something, like any of this was real. The thought makes bile rise in my throat.
I wander the corridors of Stone Court until the training room is far behind me, until I can barely feel Karax’s presence through the bond. He’s not following—I would sense that—but he’s aware of me. Concerned. The emotion bleeds through our connection like water through cracks in stone.
I don’t want his concern. I don’t want anything from him except answers.
He admitted to the fever. Admitted to “nudging” circumstances. Admitted he saw opportunities to hurt me and seized them.
But he was vague about the details. Evasive about the scope.
I need to know everything. Need to see the full shape of what he did to me, even if it destroys whatever’s left of the woman I thought I was.
The scrying room draws me back like a moth to flame.
This time, I don’t let myself feel the horror. I push it down, lock it away, become the cold strategist who kept Ironhold alive for eight years. Emotion is a luxury I can’t afford right now. What I need is information.
I light more crystals, gather the ones I scattered in my earlier rage. Some are cracked but still functional, the images inside fragmented but visible. I organize them by date, by location, by what they show.
