My hand moves faster as the fantasy builds. Hannah sobbing beneath me, fighting and yielding and fighting again. The moment her resistance finally breaks and she starts begging for more.
I come with a roar that shakes the stone walls, my release painting my fist in thick ropes while pleasure crashes through me like an avalanche. Seven centuries of discipline, and this human woman has me losing control like a youngling in his first rut.
When the tremors subside, I clean myself with a wave of mountain magic and refasten my breeches. The release helped, but it’s not enough. Nothing will be enough until I have the real thing—Hannah Mitchell writhing beneath me, her body surrendering what her mind refuses to give.
Three days.
I return to the scrying crystal, activating it with a touch. Hannah is still on the ridge, still training, her movements growing slower as exhaustion claims her. I watch the stubborn set of her jaw, the way she forces herself through another form even though her arms are trembling.
She’s preparing for a fight she thinks she understands.
She has no idea.
“Three more days, little warrior,” I murmur to her distant image. “Three more days of freedom. Make them count.”
I watch until she finally sheaths her blade and begins the climb down from the ridge. Watch the exhausted slump of hershoulders, the way she moves like someone carrying weights no one else can see.
Soon, I’ll be the one carrying her. And the prophecy will have its fourth bond—a warrior broken, a symbol made flesh, proof that even the strongest humans are nothing against Fae power.
But underneath the duty, underneath the grand design that’s guided my existence for seven centuries, there’s something else. Something I haven’t felt since that Frost Court general made me bleed four hundred years ago.
Anticipation.
Whatever Hannah Mitchell turns out to be—willing or resistant, sweet or savage—she’s already given me something no one else has managed in centuries.
She’s made me look forward to tomorrow.Chapter 3: Hannah
The Stone Court escort arrives at dawn, and I make myself watch Ironhold disappear behind me without looking back.
Six warriors in bronze-chased armor, their expressions carved from the same granite as the mountains they serve. They don’t speak to me beyond the minimum required for logistics—where to walk, when to rest, how far until the next waypoint. I’m cargo to them. A tribute dressed up as a challenger, walking willingly toward a fate I chose because the alternative was worse.
The path winds upward through terrain that grows harsher with every mile. Ironhold’s valley gives way to jagged peaks and sheer cliff faces, the air thinning until each breath feels like labor. Pine forests yield to bare stone and stubborn lichen, then to nothing but rock and sky and the endless wind that howls between the peaks like something mourning.
I’ve traveled this direction before, escorting merchant caravans to the trading posts at the mountain’s base. But I’ve never gone this far. Never climbed high enough to feel the temperature drop and the pressure change, to watch the world I know shrink to a smudge of green in the valley below.
No human from Ironhold has ever gone this far and returned unchanged.
The thought settles into my chest like a stone, heavy and cold. I keep walking anyway. One foot in front of the other, the same way I’ve been moving through impossible situations for eight years. Don’t think about what’s coming. Don’t think about what you’re losing. Just move.
The escort captain falls into step beside me as the path narrows to a ledge barely wide enough for two. Below us, the drop is sheer—a thousand feet of empty air before the rocks would catch what remained.
“We’ll reach the fortress by nightfall,” he says, his voice flat as the stone beneath our feet. “You’ll be given quarters for the evening. The trial begins at dawn.”
“And if I need to prepare? Train?”
He looks at me with something that might be pity, though it’s hard to tell with Fae. Their faces don’t move the way human faces do—too still, too perfect, like masks carved by artists who understood beauty but not warmth.
“The arena will be available. Though I doubt any amount of preparation will change the outcome.”
I don’t respond. He’s right, and we both know it.
But I’m not preparing to win. I’m preparing to bleed him—and to survive what comes after.
The Stone Court fortress emerges from the mountain as the sun begins its descent, painting the peaks in shades of copper and gold that make the stone seem almost alive.
I stop walking without meaning to, my breath catching at the sight of it.
I expected something brutal. A military stronghold, all sharp edges and defensive walls, the kind of architecture designed to intimidate and repel. What rises before me is something else entirely—a palace grown from the mountain itself, its towers and bridges and cascading terraces flowing from the living rock like water frozen mid-fall. The stone is veined with minerals that catch the dying light, threads of silver and gold and deep amber running through granite the color of storm clouds.
