One by one, I pick up the crystals and hurl them against the walls. Hannah at eight, playing alone in the mud while her parents work. Hannah at ten, crying in her room while her mother sews in the next room and doesn’t come. Hannah at thirteen, burying a dog she’d loved with her own hands because her father said he didn’t have time to help. Hannah at sixteen, standing over her parents’ graves with a face like carved stone, already learning to lock her grief away where no one could see it.
Sixteen years of surveillance. Sixteen years of manipulation. Sixteen years of watching a neglected child become a desperate woman and telling myself it was necessary, telling myself the prophecy required it, telling myself the ends justified the means.
I destroy them all.
When I’m done, the chamber is a wasteland of shattered crystal and broken stone. My hands are bleeding—the shards have cut deep into my palms, and silver blood pools on the floor like mercury. The pain is distant, unimportant. What’s another wound? What’s a little blood compared to what I’ve done?
These crystals were the record of my crimes. Every moment of her suffering I observed and did nothing to prevent. Every opportunity I took to make her life harder. Every year she spent carrying burdens that should have broken her, while I watched and waited and planned and told myself I was doing what needed to be done.
Gone now. All of it. Nothing but dust and fragments.
It doesn’t undo what I did. Doesn’t erase the knowledge that I spent sixteen years perfecting the isolation her parents started. But at least I won’t be tempted to watch those images again. Won’t be able to tell myself I was studying her potential when I was really just feeding an obsession I refused to name.
On the sixth day, a messenger arrives from Ironhold.
“For the Guardian,” he says, presenting a sealed letter with hands that tremble slightly. He can see the state I’m in—the shadows under my eyes, the silver blood still crusted on my palms, the cracks spreading through the floor beneath my feet. “From the village elder.”
My hands are steady as I break the seal. My heart is not.
Guardian Karax,
Your omega arrived in Ironhold three days ago. I use the word “arrived” loosely—she collapsed from her horse at the village gates and has been unconscious for much of the time since. The bond sickness has progressed further than any I have seen in my eighty-seven years.
She has been reunited with the villagers she spent eight years protecting, and they have welcomed her with joy and relief. They have also seen what the separation has done to her, and many blame you for it. I cannot say they are wrong.
I do not know what passed between you. I do not know why she left your court, or what drove her to flee a bond that should have brought her comfort. But I know this: she is dying. Whether by bond sickness or by choice, she is letting herself fade. And she will not accept help from anyone. She lies in her childhood bed, in the room behind the cold forge, and she waits for death like an old friend.
Come for her, or let her go completely. This halfway state will destroy her. And if she dies—I suspect you will not long survive the loss. That is not a threat, Guardian. It is simply what I have observed about bonded pairs who lose each other too soon.
The choice is yours. But make it quickly. Time is running out.
Elder Miriam
I read the letter three times.
Come for her, or let her go completely.
Let her go. The words echo in my mind, and something in my chest recoils so violently it’s almost physical. Let her go. Releasethe bond. Sever the connection that ties her to me and set her free to live or die without my shadow hanging over her.
I could do it. The magic exists—old, painful, rarely used. A severing ritual that would cut the bond at its root, would give her back the autonomy I stole when I claimed her. She could return to Ironhold, to the village that loves her, to a future that doesn’t include me. She could find someone else. Someone who didn’t spend sixteen years engineering her desperation. Someone who deserves her.
It would be the right thing to do. The kind thing. The thing a better male would do without hesitation.
I’m not a better male.
I’m the Guardian of Stone Court, and what’s mine stays mine. She can hate me. She can fight me. She can scream and rage and curse my name until the mountains crumble. She can look at me with those gray eyes full of fury and betrayal until the day one of us dies.
But she doesn’t get to die in some village hovel because her own stubbornness won’t let her accept what she is. She doesn’t get to waste away in her parents’ cold forge, surrounded by memories of people who never saw her, letting the bond sickness take her because she’s too proud to come back to me.
She’s my omega. My claim. My responsibility.
And I’m going to get her back.
I summon my steward and begin issuing orders for the journey to Ironhold. Provisions for a week. A small escort—enough to be safe, not enough to look like an invasion. Medical supplies for bond sickness, in case she’s too weak to travel.
The steward doesn’t ask questions. He knows better.
By nightfall, I’m on the road, riding hard toward the village where the woman I broke is waiting to die.
