And I’ve never been wrong about her yet.Chapter 25: Hannah
I don’t sleep.
The crystal sits on my bedside table, pulsing with ancient magic, offering me a freedom I thought I’d never have. All I have to do is use it. Speak the words. Let the blood debt dissolve, and walk away from everything Karax did to me.
Everything Karax is to me.
I lie in my childhood bed, staring at the ceiling I used to stare at as a girl, and I try to imagine my life without him.
No bond thrumming in my chest. No scent of mountain stone on my skin. No massive body curved around mine at night, making me feel small and safe and held for the first time in my life. No golden eyes watching me with a hunger that should terrify me but doesn’t.
No one strong enough to carry me when I’m tired of carrying everyone else.
The thought makes me want to weep.
I press my hand to my chest, feeling the bond pulse beneath my palm. Even now, even with all this distance between us, I can feel him. His anguish. His hope. Something desperate and raw that I can’t quite name, but that echoes in my own chest like a wound that won’t stop bleeding.
Is it real? Is any of it real?
I close my eyes and try to separate what I feel from what the bond makes me feel. Try to find the line between Hannah Mitchell of Ironhold and the omega Karax spent sixteen years creating.
I can’t find it.
Maybe there is no line. Maybe the omega and the woman are the same person now, so intertwined that pulling them apart would destroy both.
Maybe that’s what the crystal would do. Not free me, but hollow me out. Leave me with a Hannah-shaped hole where something was beginning to grow.
Around midnight, I get up and walk.
The village is quiet, most people long since asleep. Moonlight silvers the familiar streets, casting long shadows from buildings I’ve known my entire life. I pass the forge where my father worked—dark now, cold, the fires unlit since his death. The new blacksmith uses a different building. No one wanted to work in the place where Garrett Mitchell used to hammer in silence, too focused on his work to notice the daughter hovering in the doorway.
I press my palm against the door. The wood is rough with age, splintering in places.
I should say something. Should whisper an apology, a goodbye, something to mark this moment. But what is there to say to people who never really heard me when they were alive?
“I spent eight years protecting your legacy,” I say finally. “Your forge. Your village. Your burden that I inherited because you died and left it to me.” My voice is flat. Hollow. “I thought I was honoring you. But I was just… continuing the pattern. Being useful. Being needed. Being everything except seen.”
The door doesn’t answer. My parents never answered, not really. Not when it mattered.
I keep walking.
The market square where my mother shopped without ever asking if I wanted to come. The well where I used to draw water before dawn while everyone else slept. The walls I spent eight years defending, stone by stone, death by death, while the village council wrung their hands and sent me out alone again and again.
This place was my whole world once. My purpose. My prison, in its own way—I was as trapped by duty and obligation as I was by Karax’s manipulation. Everyone needed me. Everyone depended on me. And I couldn’t leave, couldn’t rest, couldn’t be anything except the protector they required.
I was exhausted before Karax ever touched me. He just… used that exhaustion. Sharpened it. Made sure no one else could shoulder the burden until I was so desperate for relief that I’d walk into a monster’s arms.
And the worst part?
The relief was real. When he held me, when he told me I was good, when he took control and I could finally stop fighting—that was real. Not manufactured. Not conditioned. Just… real.
Maybe that’s what I can’t forgive. Not that he trapped me, but that the trap felt like coming home.
I find myself at the hill again, looking up at the graves.
Two simple stones, weathered by eight years of mountain wind. I couldn’t afford anything finer when I buried them. Could barely afford the stones at all. I was sixteen, alone, trying to figure out how to pay for funerals and food and a life I never asked for.
I sink to my knees in the grass.
