For a long time, I just kneel there, staring at the names carved in stone. Garrett Mitchell. Elena Mitchell. Beloved parents. Faithful servants of Ironhold.
Beloved. The word feels like a lie now. Or maybe not a lie—maybe they loved me in their way, the way you love a piece of furniture that’s always been in the room. Present. Functional. Unremarkable.
“I used to dream about making you proud,” I whisper. “Used to practice sword forms for hours hoping you’d notice. Hoping you’d look up from the forge and see me. Hoping you’d say something—anything—that proved I mattered to you.”
The wind stirs the grass around me.
“But you never did. And now you’re dead, and I’ll never know if you even loved me, or if I was just… another obligation. Another burden you carried because that’s what people do.”
I press my forehead to my mother’s gravestone. The rock is cold against my skin.
“Karax saw me,” I say, and the words taste like betrayal. “From the very beginning—before you died, before any of it—he was watching. He saw me practice those sword forms. He saw me wait for you to notice. He saw every moment of loneliness and he catalogued it and used it against me.”
I lift my head, staring at the stone.
“But hesawme. That’s more than you ever did.”
The graves don’t answer. They never do.
I stay there for a long time, kneeling in the grass, feeling the cold seep into my bones. The bond aches in my chest—Karax is awake too, I realize. He can feel my turmoil. He’s probably lyingin that tiny inn room, too large for the bed, counting the hours until I come to destroy him or save him.
He’s waiting to see if I’ll use the crystal.
And the terrible truth is: I don’t want to.
I think about the woman I was before him.
Strong. Capable. Alone.
So fucking alone.
I think about the nights I lay in this very bed, staring at this very ceiling, wondering if this was all my life would ever be. Protecting people who took me for granted. Fighting battles no one else would fight. Carrying a village on my shoulders until my spine cracked under the weight—just like I’d carried my parents’ expectations, their legacy, their cold and distant love.
I think about the way I used to dream of someone coming to save me. A ridiculous fantasy—I didn’t believe in saviors, didn’t believe anyone could be strong enough to carry me the way I carried everyone else. But late at night, when the exhaustion was too much, I’d imagine what it would feel like to have someone else be strong. Someone who could hold me up instead of leaning on me. Someone who could fight beside me instead of hiding behind me. Someone who couldseeme—really see me—instead of just seeing what I could do for them.
Karax gave me that.
In the worst possible way, through manipulation and lies and sixteen years of patient destruction, he gave me exactly what I’d been dreaming of my whole life.
Does that make it wrong? Does the method poison the result?
Or can something real grow from corrupted soil?
I think about love.
I don’t know what love is supposed to feel like. My parents’ version was cold and distracted—obligation dressed up as family. The romances I read as a girl, stolen from traveling merchants and hidden under my mattress, described something bright and passionate and all-consuming. This isn’t that either.
This is darker. More complicated. Shot through with betrayal and rage and grief.
But there’s something underneath all of that. Something that stirs when I think about him—not just the bond pulling me back, not just the biological need the claiming created. Something that started before the heat, maybe. Something that began the first time he looked at me like I was worth looking at.
I think I might be falling in love with him.
The thought terrifies me. How can I love someone who did what he did? How can I feel the beginnings of something real for a monster who spent sixteen years engineering my destruction?
But I felt the beginnings of it before I knew the truth. In the training room, when he pushed me to be better. In his chambers, when he held me and told me I was good. In the quiet moments between the manipulation, when he looked at me like I was the first real thing he’d seen in centuries.
Was that manufactured too? Or was that the one true thing in all his lies?
