“But I don’t want—”
“What you want doesn’t matter.” She straightens, finally turning to face me, and her eyes are flat. Tired. The eyes of a woman who gave up on happiness so long ago she’s forgotten what it looked like. “We all do things we don’t want to do, Hannah. That’s what it means to be part of something larger than yourself.”
I wake up gasping, the dream still clinging to me like cobwebs.
The bond is screaming—mine and his, tangled together in the dark—but underneath the physical agony, there’s something worse. Something I’ve been burying for eight years, refusing to look at, because looking at it meant admitting a truth I couldn’t bear.
My parents didn’t love me.
They needed me. Needed an heir, a legacy-keeper, a continuation of the Mitchell line that had been working that forge for generations. But love? The warm, unconditional thing I’ve been mourning since I was sixteen?
I’m not sure they were capable of it.
I think about the crystals in Karax’s scrying room. The images of my childhood, my parents alive and working, me hovering atthe edges hoping to be seen. Did he watch those moments? Did he see what I refused to see—that I was an afterthought in my own family, a tool being shaped for a purpose I never chose?
Is that why he targeted me? Because I was already alone, even before he started taking people away?
The thought makes me want to vomit. Makes me want to scream. Makes me want to crawl back to him and beg him to make me forget, because at least his manipulation wasdeliberate. At least hechoseme, even if the choice was monstrous.
My parents’ indifference was just… indifference. The casual cruelty of people too wrapped up in their own disappointments to notice they were creating the same emptiness in their daughter.
And now they’re dead. Killed by bandits on a road while I lay sick in bed with a fever Karax engineered, and I’ll never get the chance to ask them why I wasn’t enough. Never get to hear them say they loved me, even if it would have been a lie. Never get to stop carrying the weight of their forge, their legacy, their expectations—
The forge.
I’ve been defending that fucking forge for eight years. Protecting it like a sacred trust, like the last piece of my parents I had left. But what I was really protecting was their indifference. Their burden. The weight they strapped to my back before I was old enough to understand what it would cost me.
I think about Ironhold. About the village council that sent me to fight and negotiate and sacrifice while they wrung their hands and offered nothing. About the elders who accepted my protection without ever asking if I could bear it, just like myparents accepted my presence without ever asking if I wanted to be there.
I’ve spent my whole life being useful to people who never saw me as anything more than a tool.
And then Karax came along and did the same thing—used me, shaped me, broke me down into something he could claim.
But at least hewantedme.
The thought surfaces unbidden, toxic and true, and I can’t shove it back down. My parents kept me out of obligation. Ironhold kept me out of need. But Karax—Karax watched me for sixteen years, orchestrated my suffering, manipulated every aspect of my existence—because hewantedme. Specifically me. Not just any omega, not just any warm body to fulfill a prophecy.
Me.
That’s fucked up. That’s so fucked up I can’t even begin to untangle it. But somewhere in the wreckage of my chest, in the hollow space where my heart used to be, something responds to it anyway.
I was chosen. I was wanted. I wasseen, even if the seeing was monstrous.
That’s more than my parents ever gave me.
The sixth day, I can barely walk.
The bond sickness has progressed beyond anything I imagined. My legs shake when I try to stand. My hands tremble too badly to hold a cup. I catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror and barely recognize the creature staring back—gaunt, hollow-eyed, skin stretched tight over bones that seem sharper than they should be.
I’m dying.
Not metaphorically. Not dramatically. Actually dying, piece by piece, because my body has decided that existence without him is not worth sustaining.
I think about the old woman’s words:The law exists because no one has ever drawn the Guardian’s blood. It’s meant to be a death sentence dressed as a chance.
She was wrong about one thing: I did draw his blood. But she was right about everything else. It was never a chance. It was a trap, baited with my own desperation and sprung the moment I thought I’d won.
And now the trap is killing me.
