Chapter 121: Pray

BONNIE

I woke gasping, my body jerking violently as if I had been dragged out of deep water. Sunlight streamed through the window in bright, uneven bars, cutting across the floor and spilling over the edge of the bed. For several seconds, I could only stare at it, blinking against the brightness while my lungs struggled to remember how to breathe normally.

Then Fia’s hand found mine.

She gripped it immediately, her fingers wrapping tightly around mine, almost painfully so.

"Thank the goddess." The words left her in a long, shaky exhale. Her shoulders sagged, and some of the tension that had been holding her upright seemed to leave with it. "I was so afraid for you. Especially near the end."

I turned toward her, still trying to orient myself.

"You started getting hurt," she continued, her voice quieter now. "They were appearing across your skin while you were still under, and I didn’t know whether waking you would make things worse, if I could even do that, or if I should let the dream run its course."

My gaze dropped immediately to my arms.

I remembered the pain. His fingers closing around my wrist. The pressure of his grip. The sharp, phantom ache that still seemed lodged beneath my skin.

But there was nothing there.

My arms were smooth and unmarked.

I pushed the blanket aside and looked down at the rest of myself, searching for evidence of what had happened. Nothing. Not even a faint discoloration remained.

"There were bruises," Fia said, catching the confusion on my face. "Along your forearms. One across your ribs, too. I healed them the moment you started fading back toward waking, before you had even fully surfaced."

My fingers drifted instinctively toward my ribs.

There was no pain.

That should have reassured me.

Instead, it unsettled me more.

Fia watched me carefully, her expression changing as she studied my face. There was something searching in her eyes, as though she were trying to determine whether I had come back from that place completely.

"Did it work?" she finally asked.

I looked at her as she went on.

"Did you succeed?"

For a moment, I couldn’t answer.

I didn’t fully know what success was supposed to look like after something like that.

My father, if that word could even be used for a creature like him, had left the dreamscape wearing a satisfied smile. He had wrapped his threats in tenderness, spoken to me with the familiarity of someone who believed he had every right to claim me, and somehow made every word sound like a promise.

I still couldn’t tell whether I had won anything.

Or whether I had simply survived an encounter he had decided to let me survive.

"Yes," I said eventually.

The answer felt dangerous in its simplicity.

"Whoever they are, they won’t be bothering me again. Not like that."

Fia held my gaze for several seconds. She didn’t look convinced, but she didn’t challenge me either.

"Good."

She squeezed my hand once more before releasing it.

"Whenever you need my help going forward, you have it. Freely given. You can come find me, or I’ll come to you. That offer doesn’t expire."

Something tightened unexpectedly in my throat.

I nodded. "Thank you."

My voice came out rougher than I intended.

"You helped me more than you probably realize."

Fia’s expression softened, but her curiosity won out before the moment could become too sentimental.

"I do have to ask something."

I waited.

"This person. Who were they?" Her brow furrowed. "And why did they want you dead in the first place?"

The word father surfaced immediately.

It sat heavy on my tongue, carrying years of questions, resentment, fear, and things I still wasn’t ready to put into words.

I swallowed it down. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ

"I don’t know."

The lie came more easily than I expected.

Fia’s eyes narrowed slightly.

"And honestly," I added, forcing myself to sound indifferent, "I didn’t care enough to press for details. I warned him off. He got the message. That’s all that matters right now."

It was almost convincing.

Almost.

Because beneath the calmness of my voice, one thought kept circling back.

He had known exactly who I was.

He had known things about me that no stranger should have known.

And when he looked at me, there had been something in his eyes that had nothing to do with hatred.

Recognition. Possession.

Familiarity.

I looked away before Fia could read any of that from my face.

Whatever he was, whatever he wanted from me, and whatever blood tied us together, I wasn’t ready to tell anyone.

Not yet.

"I don’t know about that," Fia murmured, something skeptical threading through her tone, though she didn’t push further. "You should know plenty about your enemies. But let me leave you with one piece of advice, since I doubt this is fully over. Sometimes, to defeat your enemies properly, you have to be willing to be worse than they are, at least for a moment. Good cannot win a fight if it refuses to wade into the same waters evil is already standing in."

I nodded slowly, letting that settle somewhere uncomfortable in my chest, a thought I wasn’t ready to examine too closely yet.

"Well," Fia said, rising and offering me a hand up off the mattress. "Let’s go find Lysander. Tell him everything’s alright now, before he wears a groove into the floor pacing somewhere."

We stepped out into the corridor together, and Delta was already waiting there, straightening the moment she saw us, dropping into a quick bow.

"You’re alright, Luna Bonnie."

"I’m alright," I said. "Where’s Lysander?"

"In the late Alpha King’s study, last I heard."

I motioned for Fia to follow, and we started down the hall side by side, my legs still slightly unsteady beneath me from everything the dreamscape had cost. That’s when I caught two Omegas whispering near a shadowed alcove just off the main corridor, their voices pitched low but not low enough to escape me.

"Did you hear what Prince Johann did? He’s decided to have the imprisoned retainers executed. Isn’t that a bit much, given everything?"

I stopped walking entirely.

"What did you just say?"

One of them went pale immediately, clearly wishing she could take the words back the moment she registered who’d overheard them. The other, braver or simply less careful with her tongue, repeated it plainly, without flinching, and the look she gave me afterward carried an accusation loud enough it didn’t need saying aloud at all. This was my fault. My existence, my survival, had started this entire chain of consequences now unfolding.

Flashes hit me all at once, fast and disorienting.

Cheap alcohol shared after long shifts with the other retainers, laughter that had felt earned rather than performed. Someone patiently correcting the angle of my grip on a blade during training. I had real acquaintances and friendship, somehow, built inside a lie I’d told to survive.

Lysander had promised me. He had sworn, standing in that lounge with his jaw set and his voice steady, that those men would live. That the punishment would be small. Manageable. Nothing close to death.

"Where," I demanded, my voice cracking with something between fury and dread. "When did this start?"

The braver Omega stammered out a location, some courtyard near the west wing, and I was already running before she finished the sentence, my bare feet slapping hard against stone, Fia’s voice calling after me as she scrambled to catch up.

"Bonnie, what’s going on?"

"I can’t let them die," I said, not slowing, not turning back to explain further. "I can’t. He promised me. He promised."

We rounded the final corner into the courtyard just as two heads dropped, one after the other, onto the platform floor in the near distance.

I froze mid-stride.

For one horrible, suspended second, I simply couldn’t process what I was seeing, couldn’t force my mind to accept what my own eyes had just shown me so plainly. I saw Lysander standing there, close enough to have stopped it, and something inside me cracked wide open at the sight of him, because he had failed. He hadn’t kept his word.

Two of them were already gone, and no amount of wanting it undone would put their heads back where they belonged.

My hands flickered blue, frantic and involuntary, and even knowing, somewhere rational, that it was likely already useless, I sprinted for the platform anyway. Lysander’s voice tore across the courtyard behind me, raw and furious.

"Johann!"

And it was in that moment that our eyes met for one fractured, unbearable second as I ran past him without stopping, climbing up onto the platform itself, my knees hitting the rough wood hard beside the nearest body. I lifted the severed head with both hands, careful despite the panic clawing through my chest, and pressed it back against the torn ruin of his neck, willing the flesh to hold, covering the whole devastating mess of him in the source.

"Wake up," I begged, my voice breaking apart on every word. "Wake up. Please. Wake up."

Nothing happened.

I poured more into him, harder now, my whole body trembling with the effort, sweat beading along my hairline despite the cold morning air, and when the light refused to take hold, when his chest stayed still and silent beneath my shaking hands, I did the only thing I had left to try.

I prayed.

I begged the goddess who had disappointed me my entire life, who had let my mother bleed out on a stone floor while I watched, who had abandoned me at birth to a father I’d only just met and already hated with everything in me, to let me have this one single thing.

"Please," I whispered, pouring the last of what I had left into him, my vision blurring with tears I hadn’t noticed starting. "Please let me bring him back. Please, Selene. Please. Just this once. Just give me this."