She’s on the hill.
I feel her through the bond before I see her—a pull so strong it takes all my willpower not to run. The connection has been starved by distance, and now that we’re close again, it’s screaming at me to close the gap, to touch her, toclaimher all over again.
The alpha instinct roars through me like wildfire. She’s sick. She’s weak. She’smine, and every primitive part of my brain is demanding that I go to her, pin her beneath me, flood her with my scent and my seed until the bond sickness breaks and she remembers who she belongs to.
I could do it. She’s too weak to fight me. I could have her on her back in seconds, could remind her body what it was made for, could override her resistance with pleasure until she stopped fighting and accepted what she is.
I don’t.
Not because I’m noble. Because I want more than her submission. I want herchoice.
She looks like death.
The vibrant woman who walked into my arena, all fire and fury—she’s a ghost of herself now. Thin. Pale. Her gray eyes are sunken, her cheeks hollow, her hands trembling as they rest on her parents’ grave markers. The fighting leathers she wore whenshe left Stone Court hang loose on her frame, and I can see bones that shouldn’t be visible, angles that shouldn’t exist.
I remember the crystals I destroyed. The ones showing her parents working at the forge while she hovered in the doorway, waiting to be noticed. The ones showing her eating dinner alone while they talked over her head. The ones showing a lifetime of small neglects that laid the foundation for everything I built.
She’s been waiting her whole life for someone to see her.
And now she’s dying on the hill where she buried the people who never did.
I force myself to walk, not run. Force myself to approach like a supplicant, not a predator. Whatever happens next, I will not take anything from her that she doesn’t willingly give.
She turns when I’m still a hundred feet away. Her gray eyes find mine across the distance, and I see everything in them—anger, grief, longing, confusion. The same tangled mess I’ve been drowning in since she left.
“You weren’t supposed to come.” Her voice is rough, cracked, barely loud enough to carry on the mountain wind.
“Miriam wrote to me. Told me you were dying.” I stop at the base of the hill, looking up at her. She’s silhouetted against the sunset, and even gaunt, even dying, she’s the most magnificent thing I’ve ever seen. “Did you think I’d just let that happen?”
“I didn’t think you’d care.”
“Then you don’t know me as well as you think.”
“I don’t know you at all.” She comes down the hill toward me, each step deliberate, controlled, but I can see the effort behind it. She’s holding herself together through sheer willpower—thesame stubborn strength that drew me to her in the first place. “Everything I thought I knew was a lie. The months you said you’d been watching—it was sixteen years. The coincidences that brought me to your arena—they were all engineered. Every moment of my life since I was eight years old has been shaped by your manipulation.”
“Yes.”
She stops a few feet away, close enough that I can smell her—underneath the sickness, underneath the exhaustion, there’s still that scent that drives me mad. Still the omega I claimed, the woman I broke, the only thing in seven centuries that’s made me feel anything at all.
“Why are you here, Karax?”
“To give you something.” I reach into my cloak and pull out the dissolution crystal. It pulses with ancient magic, casting strange shadows in the fading light. “Something I should have given you from the beginning.”
She eyes it warily. “What is that?”
“The key to breaking the blood debt.”
She goes very still. So still I’m not sure she’s breathing.
“The bond between us was created by blood magic,” I continue, holding the crystal out to her. My hand is steady—I won’t let her see what this costs me. “Ancient law, older than Stone Court. But every law has an exception. Every cage has a key. This is how we undo it. Completely. Permanently.”
“You’re offering to break the bond?” Her voice is barely a whisper.
“I’m offering you a choice.” I take a breath. “The dissolution requires sacrifice. Blood for blood. If I break the bond, I lose my position as Guardian. My power. My ability to sire children. Everything I’ve built over seven centuries, burned away to ash.”
“And in return?”
“In return, you’re free.” I step closer, close enough to see the tears forming in her eyes. “Truly free. The bond severed. The blood debt erased. You would be exactly who you were before the trial—no omega biology, no connection to me, no claim on your soul. The bond sickness would end. Your body would heal. You could live a normal human life, find a normal human man, pretend we never met.”
