But that’s what got me here. Seven centuries of taking what I wanted, and now the one thing I want most is slipping through my fingers because I can’t stop being what I am.
She finds me in the library the next evening.
I’m not reading—haven’t been able to focus on anything since she walked away—but I’m sitting with a book open in my lap, maintaining the pretense of function. When she appears in the doorway, something tightens in my chest that I refuse to name.
“We need to talk,” she says.
Her voice is flat. Controlled. The voice of a woman who’s spent the last day and night processing something terrible and has come out the other side with a plan.
“Yes.” I close the book, set it aside. “We do.”
She enters the library but doesn’t sit. Stays standing, arms crossed, watching me with those gray eyes that see too much.
“I found the evidence,” she says. “All of it. The chaos-beast attacks. The mentors who were bought off or driven away. The tribute demands designed to force my hand.” Her jaw tightens. “The council meeting where you discussed when I would be ‘ready.’”
I don’t deny any of it. Can’t.
“You’ve been manipulating my entire life,” she continues. “Isolating me. Breaking me down. Making sure I had nothingand no one, so that when you finally came for me, I’d have nowhere else to turn.”
“There’s context you’re missing.”
“Context.” She laughs, bitter and sharp. “You want to give mecontextfor ruining my life?”
“I want to show you why it started. And why you.” I stand slowly. “Come with me.”
She doesn’t move. “Why should I?”
“Because you came here for answers. I’m offering them.” I walk toward the door, not waiting to see if she follows. “What you do with them after is your choice.”
A moment of silence. Then footsteps behind me.
Good. She’s still a warrior. Still needs to understand the battlefield before she decides her next move.
I take her to the oldest part of Stone Court—a chamber carved so deep in the mountain that even I rarely visit it. The walls here are natural stone, unworked by Fae hands, and the air smells of ages and the slow patience of geological time.
In the center of the chamber stands a single crystal. Not a scrying crystal—something older. Something that pulses with the same silver-and-starlight magic as the High King himself.
“The prophecy,” I say. “The original. Written in the language of creation before the Sundering.”
Hannah approaches the crystal cautiously. I watch the light play across her face as she studies the symbols etched into its surface.
“I can’t read this.”
“No one can anymore. Not fully.” I move to stand beside her, close but not touching. “Eight bonds between Fae alphas and human omegas. Eight children who will reshape the world. The prophecy doesn’t describe the future—itrequiresspecific conditions. Specific people.”
“People like me.”
“Yes. But you need to understand something first.” I turn to face her. “What I did to you—the manipulation, the isolation—it wasn’t unique. It’s how the Fae courts have always operated.”
Her eyes narrow. “Explain.”
“Stone Court controls the mountain passes. The ore deposits. The chaos-beast migrations.” I gesture at the ancient walls. “We’ve been shaping human territories for centuries. Applying pressure. Adjusting tribute demands. Encouraging certain outcomes. Every village under our protection has been manipulated in one way or another. It’s how the balance between our kinds has been maintained.”
“So you’re telling me Ironhold wasn’t special.” Her voice is cold. “We were just another village you were squeezing.”
“You were. Until the prophecy showed me something.” I look at the crystal, remembering. “Decades ago, I had a vision. A human woman with gray eyes and a warrior’s spirit, standing in my arena with blood on her blade. My blood. The fourth bond.”
“You saw me before I was born?”
