Everything after that was just… maintenance. Keeping me isolated. Keeping me desperate. Keeping mehis, even before he claimed me.
The bond pulses in my chest, warm and steady, and I want to tear it out with my bare hands.
Because even now—even knowing all of this, even seeing the full scope of what he did—some part of me wants to go back to him. Wants to feel his arms around me. Wants to hear him call me good girl and let the warmth of his approval wash away the horror of what I’ve learned.
That’s what he designed me to want. That’s what sixteen years of isolation was for—to make me so starved for connection,so desperate for someone to carry the weight, that I would cling to my abuser like he was salvation.
And it worked.
God help me, itworked.
I still crave him. Still feel the pull of the bond urging me toward him. Still catch myself thinking about the peace I felt in his arms, the relief of surrender, the pleasure of submission.
He trained me to need those things. Spent sixteen years making sure I had nothing else, and then offered himself as the only solution to a problem he created.
I should hate him. I do hate him.
But the hate and the need exist in the same space, tangled together so tightly I can’t separate them. I want to destroy him. I want to crawl into his lap and let him hold me while I cry. I want to drive a blade through his heart. I want to feel his knot inside me again.
The contradiction is going to tear me apart.
I don’t know how long I sit there, letting the truth settle into my bones.
Long enough for the crystals’ light to dim and brighten again with the passing of the day. Long enough for my legs to go numb and my back to ache from hunching over. Long enough for the initial devastation to crystallize into something colder.
Not acceptance. Never acceptance.
But clarity.
I know what he did now. Know the full scope of it, the meticulous patience, the calculated cruelty. I know thatnothing about my life was an accident—not the deaths, not the departures, not the exhaustion that drove me to his arena.
I know that the woman he claimed was a woman he built from scratch, breaking a child down and rebuilding her into exactly what he wanted.
And I know that despite all of that, the bond still ties me to him. The need still burns in my blood. The omega instincts he awakened still reach for him through the connection between us.
I can’t undo what he did.
But I can decide what happens next.
I stand up slowly, my joints protesting after hours of stillness. The crystals surround me, sixteen years of evidence, sixteen years of proof.
He’s waiting somewhere in this fortress. I can feel him through the bond—patient, worried, wanting. He knows I’m processing something. He doesn’t know how completely I’ve mapped his crimes.
Good.
Let him wonder. Let him wait.
When I’m ready, I’ll find him. And then we’re going to have a very different conversation than the one we had in the training room.
One where I have all the information.
One where I decide what happens to us.Chapter 20: Karax
She doesn’t come back that night.
I feel her through the bond—alive, unharmed, somewhere deep in the fortress—but she’s blocked me out as completely asshe can. The walls she’s built are thick, reinforced by anger and hurt and something that feels dangerously close to hatred.
I pace my chambers like a caged beast, fighting the urge to go to her. To drag her back. To make her listen.
