I don’t look back.
If I look back, I’ll turn around. And if I turn around, I’ll never know if I’m choosing him or just surrendering to the sickness. I’ll never know if what I feel is real or just another cage, another burden, another weight that someone else strapped to my back.
The road ahead is long. I might not survive it.
But at least I’ll die trying to find out who I am when I’m not being useful to someone else.Chapter 22: Karax
I feel the moment she passes through the gates.
The bond stretches impossibly thin, a thread of agony connecting us across growing distance. Every instinct I have screams at me to follow—to catch her, bring her back, drag her to my chambers and pin her beneath me until she remembers who she belongs to.
I don’t move.
She asked for space. She’s taking it. And if I have any hope of keeping her—truly keeping her, not just caging her—I have to let her go.
Even if it destroys me.
The first night, the mountain screams.
Not literally—not in any way the court can hear. But I feel it in my bones, in the magic that’s been woven through my flesh for seven centuries. Stone Court responds to my emotions, always has, and right now my emotions are tearing themselves apart.
Crystals crack in their settings. Walls groan with stress they’ve never experienced. The floor of my chambers splits in ajagged line from the door to the bed—the bed where I claimed her, where I held her through three days of heat, where I thought I was building something that would last.
I stare at the crack and feel it mirror something inside me.
Through the bond, I sense her suffering. The burning skin. The nausea. The way her body is turning against her because she dared to separate from her Alpha. I feel echoes of it in my own flesh—a phantom ache that has nothing to do with physical injury. My hands shake when I try to pour wine. My appetite has vanished. Sleep comes in fragments, broken by dreams of gray eyes and the smell of her hair.
I did this.
Not just the manipulation. Not just the sixteen years of engineering her isolation.This—the bond sickness that’s consuming her right now—is my fault. I claimed her knowing what the separation would do. Knowing that if she ever tried to leave, her own biology would punish her for it. Knowing that the bond would turn her body into a cage more effective than any stone walls I could build.
I told myself she’d never want to leave. Told myself the bond would be enough, that the pleasure would outweigh the cage, that she’d eventually stop fighting and accept what she was.
I was a fool.
The first day, I try to function.
Guardian duties don’t stop because my omega has left me. Territorial disputes still need resolution. Resource allocations still need approval. The endless politics of Stone Court hierarchy still grind on, indifferent to my personal catastrophe.
But I can’t focus.
Every few seconds, I reach for the bond—checking her location, her emotional state, her physical condition. She’s still in Stone Court, holed up in some servant’s quarters on the far side of the fortress. She’s in agony. She’s fighting it with everything she has, building walls against the pain, refusing to give in.
She’s so fucking strong.
Stronger than I gave her credit for. Stronger than I needed her to be. I spent sixteen years breaking her down so she’d have no choice but to become unbreakable, and now that strength is turned against me. The weapon I forged is being used to cut herself free, even if it kills her in the process.
I excuse myself from a council meeting halfway through. Lord Varen is droning on about mining quotas, and I realize I’ve been staring at the wall for ten minutes without hearing a word. The other lords exchange glances. Let them think what they want. Let them whisper about the Guardian who can’t control his own omega.
I need to be alone with the weight of what I’ve done.
The second day, I feel her try to train.
The bond carries everything—her determination, her failure, her collapse. I feel her hit the floor of the training room, feel the impact shudder through her exhausted body. Feel her rage explode outward in a scream that echoes through the stone around me even though she’s on the opposite side of the fortress.
I’m in the hallway outside my chambers when it happens. The sound tears through the bond like a blade, and I stagger against the wall, my hand pressed to my chest where her fury is burning a hole through me.
She’s screaming atme. I know it. Even if the words are wordless, the message is clear.
