“I saw a possibility. A shape in the mist.” I turn back to her. “When you were born, I felt it. A stirring in the mountain. So I started watching Ironhold more closely. At first, you were just one of many children I was monitoring—the prophecy pointedto your village, but I didn’t know which bloodline would produce the omega I needed.”
“But you figured it out.”
“By the time you were twelve, I was certain. You had the spirit the prophecy described. The potential.” I hold her gaze. “So yes—I shifted focus. The pressure that had been spread across your village became concentrated on you. The mentors removed, the friends driven away, the isolation engineered—that was targeted. That was deliberate.”
“That wasevil.”
“That was necessity.” The word tastes like ash, but I say it anyway. “The prophecy requires sacrifice, Hannah. It requires someone who would walk willingly into certain death for the people they love. Someone whose courage is born from desperation, not hope. I couldn’t court you like a normal suitor. I needed you to be forged in fire, and I—”
“You were the fire.” Her voice cracks. “You burned away everything I loved so I’d have nothing left to lose.”
“Yes.”
The admission hangs between us.
“And my parents?” She’s shaking now, tears threatening. “The attack that killed them—was that you too?”
“No.” I hold her gaze, willing her to see the truth. “I didn’t engineer that attack. The bandits were opportunists—I had nothing to do with them. But the fever that kept you home that day…” I pause. “That was me. I needed you to survive. I couldn’t risk losing the only candidate the prophecy had identified.”
“You poisoned me so I’d be orphaned.” Not a question.
“I poisoned you so you’d live. I didn’t know the attack was coming—if I had, I would have stopped it. Your parents’ deaths served no purpose for me. I wanted you isolated, not destroyed.”
“There’s a difference?”
“There was supposed to be.” For the first time, I look away. “I watched you grieve. Watched you pick up a sword at sixteen and teach yourself to fight because there was no one left to teach you. Watched you become exactly what the prophecy required—a warrior, a protector, a woman with nothing left to sacrifice except herself.”
“And you felt nothing.”
“I felt…” I stop. Consider the question honestly. “I felt that it was working. That you were becoming what I needed. Whatever else I felt, I buried. The prophecy mattered more than your suffering. That’s what I told myself.”
“What you told yourself.” She laughs, hollow and broken. “And now? What do you tell yourself now?”
“That I was wrong.” The words come harder than any I’ve spoken in seven centuries. “That the prophecy didn’t require me to enjoy your pain. That I could have found another way, if I’d been willing to look for one. That somewhere in the last sixteen years, I stopped seeing you as a means to an end and started—”
“Started what?”
I meet her eyes. “Started wanting you for reasons that had nothing to do with prophecy.”
She stares at me, and I see the war happening behind her eyes. The part of her that wants to believe me fighting the part that knows better.
“You’re a monster,” she says finally. “You know that, right? Sixteen years. You spent sixteen years torturing me into becoming your perfect omega, and now you want me to believe youcare?”
“I’m not asking you to believe anything. I’m telling you what’s true.”
“And what’s true?”
“That I did monstrous things. That I don’t regret the outcome—you’re here, you’re mine, the prophecy is fulfilled. But I regret…” I pause, searching for words I’ve never had to find before. “I regret that I didn’t see another way. I regret that the woman standing in front of me knows exactly what I am, and I can feel through the bond how much that knowledge is destroying her.”
“It’s not destroying me.” Her chin lifts—that warrior’s pride, still intact despite everything. “I survived losing my parents. I survived eight years of defending Ironhold alone. I survived the arena and the heat and finding out my entire life was a lie. I’ll survive you too.”
“I know you will.” Something that might be pride flickers in my chest. “That’s what the prophecy saw. That’s why it had to be you.”
“The prophecy.” She shakes her head. “You keep coming back to that. Like it justifies everything.”
“It doesn’t justify anything. It explains why I started. It doesn’t excuse what I became.”
She’s quiet for a long moment, studying me with those gray eyes that have always seen too much.
