The third day, I try to train.
It’s a disaster.
My muscles have turned to water. I can barely lift the practice sword, and when I try to run through basic forms, I collapse before finishing the first sequence. I lie on the cold stone floor of the training room, gasping like a landed fish, and Irage.
This isn’t fair.
None of this is fucking fair.
He spent sixteen years breaking me down, manufacturing my isolation, engineering my desperation—and now my own body ispunishing me for trying to escape? The biology he exploited is now the chain he doesn’t even have to hold?
I scream.
The sound echoes off the stone walls, raw and primal and full of every ounce of fury I’ve been suppressing since I found those crystals. I scream until my throat tears. I scream until my voice gives out. I scream until I’m nothing but a heap of trembling flesh on the floor, too exhausted even to cry.
The bond pulses with Karax’s distress. He felt that too.
Good. Let him feel it. Let him feel a fraction of what he’s done to me.
On the fourth night, the hallucinations start.
I see him everywhere.
In the shadows of my tiny room. In the flicker of candlelight. In the patterns on the stone ceiling. His golden eyes watching me, his massive form looming over my bed, his hands reaching for me with that terrifying gentleness that makes my whole body ache with want.
“You’re not real,” I whisper to the shadows.
They don’t answer. Shadows never do.
But I can smell him. Mountain stone and deep earth andAlpha, so strong it makes me dizzy. My hand moves between my legs before I can stop it, seeking relief I know won’t come. I’m so wet it’s soaking the mattress, my body producing slick like it’s preparing for a heat that isn’t coming.
I touch myself anyway.
It doesn’t help. If anything, it makes the ache worse—highlighting everything that’s missing, everything I need, everything I’m denying myself out of principle and fury.
I come with his name on my lips and tears streaming down my face.
The orgasm provides no relief. Just emptiness. Just the hollow certainty that nothing excepthimwill ever fill this void.
On the fifth night, I dream of my parents.
They’re in the forge, the way they always were when I was young—my father hammering at the anvil, my mother tending the fire, neither of them looking at me. I’m standing in the doorway, eight years old, waiting to be noticed. Waiting to be seen.
They don’t turn around. They never turned around.
“Father,” I say, but my voice comes out small. A child’s voice. “Father, can I help?”
“Not now, Hannah.” He doesn’t look up from his work. He never looked up from his work. “Go practice your letters. The forge isn’t for children.”
“But I want to learn—”
“I said not now.” His voice is sharp, impatient—the voice I remember better than any words of love, because there weren’t any words of love. Just duty. Just expectation. Just the weight of a legacy that mattered more than I did.
The dream shifts. I’m older now—twelve, maybe thirteen—standing at the same doorway with bruises on my knuckles from training I wasn’t supposed to be doing. My mother is alone in the forge, banking the fire for the night.
“Old Marcus says I have talent,” I tell her. “He says I could be a real fighter someday.”
She doesn’t look at me. She’s never looked at me the way she looked at the forge, at my father, at anything that wasn’t the burden of her own disappointment. “A fighter.” She says it like the word tastes sour. “And what use is a fighter? The village needs a smith. Your father needs someone to carry on his work.”
