She can hate me for coming. She probably will.
But she’s going to live. Even if I have to drag her back to Stone Court over my shoulder. Even if she never forgives me. Even if she spends the rest of our lives looking at me the way she looked at me in that training room—like I’m the monster who stole everything she ever had.
She’s mine.
And I don’t let go of what’s mine.Chapter 23: Hannah
Ironhold feels like a dream I can’t quite wake from.
The village is the same as I remember—the forge, the market square, the walls I helped repair a hundred times—but I’m not the same. I walk through streets I used to patrol and feel like a ghost haunting her own past. Like I died somewhere on that mountain road and this is just the echo, going through motions that don’t mean anything anymore.
Everyone is sohappyto see me.
They pour out of their homes when word spreads that I’ve returned, surrounding me with embraces and tears and questions I can’t answer. Where have I been? What happened at Stone Court? Is she staying? Is she well?
I smile. I nod. I say the things they need to hear.
I feel nothing.
No—that’s not true. I feel the hollow ache of the bond, the constant pull toward something that isn’t here. I feel the wrongness of standing in my childhood village while my body screams that I’m in the wrong place, that I need to go back, thatevery mile between me and Karax is a wound that won’t stop bleeding.
But for the villagers themselves? For the people I spent eight years protecting, sacrificing for, nearly dying for?
Nothing.
I watch them cry with relief that I’m alive, and I wonder: where were these tears when I was fighting chaos-beasts alone at seventeen? Where was this concern when I came back bloody and broken and no one asked if I was okay? Where was this love when I needed it, instead of now, when I’m too empty to feel it?
The bond is killing me.
I know it now with a certainty that settles into my bones like winter frost. This isn’t metaphor. This isn’t drama. The distance from Karax is a constant agony that doesn’t fade with time—it gets worse. Every hour, every day, my body consuming itself because I dared to separate from my Alpha.
The nausea has faded into something worse: a complete inability to keep food down. I try to eat—bread, broth, water—and my stomach rejects it all. My body has decided that sustenance from any source excepthimis poison, and it’s slowly starving me to death in protest.
I catch glimpses of myself in windows, in the still water of the village well, and I barely recognize what I see. Gaunt. Hollow-eyed. Skin stretched tight over bones that seem sharper every day. I look like something that’s already dead and just hasn’t had the courtesy to lie down.
I miss him.
I hate that I miss him. Hate that my body aches for his touch, that my dreams are full of his voice, that I wake up reaching for warmth that isn’t there.
Is this love?
The question surfaces unbidden, and I can’t shove it back down. I’ve been calling it need, calling it conditioning, calling it withdrawal from a drug I was never meant to take. But what if it’s more than that? What if somewhere in the wreckage of manipulation and heat and desperate claiming, something real took root?
I don’t know what love is supposed to feel like. My parents’ version was cold and distracted, more obligation than affection. The romances I read as a girl—stolen moments with tattered books while my mother wasn’t looking—described something bright and clean and uncomplicated. This isn’t that. This is dark and tangled and shot through with betrayal. This is wanting someone who destroyed my life. This is aching for hands that shaped my suffering.
But it’s also remembering the way he held me after the heat, like I was precious. The way he defended me against Greymun without hesitation. The way he looked at me sometimes—like I was the first real thing he’d seen in centuries.
Maybe love isn’t supposed to be clean. Maybe it’s supposed to be exactly this messy, this complicated, this impossible to untangle from all the other things wrapped around it.
Or maybe I’m just trying to justify wanting my abuser. Maybe the conditioning runs so deep that I’m rewriting the story to make it bearable.
I still don’t know. And I’m starting to think I might die before I figure it out.
I spend the first three days in the room behind the forge.
It’s smaller than I remembered. The bed where I slept as a child, the desk where I practiced letters my mother said were more important than sword forms, the window that looks out on the smithy where my parents spent every waking hour. The forge is cold now—has been cold since I left, since there was no one to tend it—and the silence feels like an accusation.
I lie in this bed and I stare at the ceiling and I remember.
