She stares at me, and the tears spill over, tracking down her hollow cheeks.
“You would give up everything,” she says. “For me?”
“I already took everything from you.” I step closer still, close enough to touch but not touching. Not until she asks. “I stole sixteen years of your life. I isolated you, exhausted you, broke you down until you had nothing left. I watched your parents die—not by my hand, but because I’d ensured you wouldn’t be there to save them. I saw a girl waiting to be noticed, and instead of noticing her, I used her loneliness as a weapon.”
“Karax—”
“The least I can do is give you the key.” I press the crystal into her hands, feeling its ancient magic pulse against both our skin. “The least I can do is burn down everything I built on your suffering and let you walk away clean.”
She’s crying openly now, tears streaming down her face, but she doesn’t let go of the crystal. Doesn’t push me away.
“And then what?”
“Then you decide.” I let my hands fall to my sides, resisting every instinct screaming at me to pull her close. “If you want to walk away—from Stone Court, from the prophecy, from me—you can. You’ll be free. I won’t follow. I won’t watch. I won’t do anything except wait, and wonder, and regret.”
“And if I don’t want to walk away?”
The question catches me off guard. For a moment, I can’t speak. Can’t breathe. Can’t do anything except stare at her, searching for the trap, the trick, the angle I’m not seeing.
But there’s nothing in her eyes except exhausted honesty.
“If you choose to stay,” I say slowly, “it has to be because youwantto. Not because the bond compels you. Not because you have nowhere else to go. Not because I spent sixteen years conditioning you to need me.” I reach out, brushing a tear from her cheek with my thumb. She doesn’t flinch away. “It has to be real, Hannah. Or it’s not worth having.”
She looks down at the crystal in her hands. Looks up at me. Looks at the village below, at the mountain above, at the sunset painting everything in shades of ending and beginning.
“I need time,” she says finally. “To think. To decide.”
“Take as long as you need.”
“You’ll stay? Here, in the village?”
I nod. “If they’ll have me.”
A ghost of a smile crosses her face—the first I’ve seen since she found the scrying room. “An eight-foot Fae lord sleeping in Ironhold’s inn. That should make for interesting gossip.”
“I’ve survived worse than gossip.”
She laughs—a small, broken sound, but a laugh nonetheless. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve heard in weeks.
“Okay.” She tucks the crystal into her pocket. “Give me tonight. I’ll have an answer for you by morning.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
She turns and walks down the hill, toward the village, toward whatever choice she’s about to make.
And I stay on the hill where her parents are buried, watching the sun set on everything I might lose.
I gave her the key to her cage. Showed her the door, told her she could walk through it, promised I wouldn’t stop her.
Now I wait to see if my gamble pays off.
I’m betting she won’t use that crystal. Betting that somewhere underneath the rage and betrayal, she feels the same pull I do—the same impossible, inexplicablerightnessof what we are together. Betting that when she really looks at her options, she’ll realize that freedom without me is just another kind of emptiness.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe she’ll break the bond and walk away and I’ll spend the rest of my existence as a shadow of what I was, stripped of power and purpose and the only thing that ever made me feel alive.
But I don’t think I’m wrong.
I’ve been reading Hannah Mitchell for sixteen years.
