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CHAPTER ELEVEN

H is nnirae ’s wounds from their travel into the Isshiran Sands were healing slowly. Akoro worked methodically to treat each gash, his hands steady despite the storm raging in his chest.

Maybe my mate died that night.

The words had been echoing in his skull for hours, each repetition carving deeper grooves of understanding he wasn’t sure he wanted to possess.

She’d looked at him with such devastation when she’d spoken them, such finality.

As though she was mourning something already lost rather than rejecting a possibility.

But she’d come to him for lur ennen . She’d come on his tongue, and slept in his arms rather than go back to where these people were keeping her. She was still highly attracted to him and recognized him as her Alpha. She just didn’t want him.

His jaw clenched as he applied salve to a particularly deep cut.

Every instinct he possessed screamed at him to act, to hunt her down and drag her back where she belonged.

The knowledge that she was somewhere in these dangerous Sands, beyond his protection, surrounded by strangers whose intentions he couldn’t gauge, was driving him toward a violence that would solve nothing.

Violence was what had created this problem in the first place.

The admission sat like poison in his stomach. When she’d drawn those parallels between his actions and his family’s historical crimes every word had struck him more brutally than any battle wound. And over the hours that passed he examined every choice he’d made.

Of course, he’d thought he had good reasons for everything he did but his ancestors had justified their crimes too. They called them necessary, claimed they served a greater good. He hadn’t even been claiming that. He just wanted Naya.

Once he realized she was his mate, there was never any question about not keeping her.

She belonged to him, and he would have her no matter what.

He’d known it would be hard for her to overcome his need to invade her land—he’d expected her to hate him for years before she would come to terms with it, if ever.

And he’d accepted that, because she was beautiful and clever and fierce and perfect in every way he’d never dared to dream.

But then he’d had her in her heat, and saw what it looked like when she’d actually wanted him.

That had been an eye-opening experience.

Then, after he’d taken her to the dead forest of his childhood, they’d spent time in her nest together—purring, cuddling, talking—and he couldn’t imagine living without her beside him.

His need for her kept evolving, becoming more consuming and relentless—and so had his actions. Because having an existence without her became more and more unappealing.

He had made mistakes with her, he knew that. Too many fucking mistakes. And he had rationalized them. But now, with that scar on her face, he couldn’t justify it anymore. She’d been right. He had caused that. He couldn’t deny it or blame it on these mysterious people.

And then yesterday, when she talked about him repeating his family’s mistakes, she said something strange: “I’m not sure if you even realize how much you’re repeating them.”

“…Ruthlessly blinded by the needs of his people…”

Those words were broader than simple criticism, as though she’d connected threads between his actions that were bigger than her.

She wasn’t just talking about the nnol ttaehh mael , or his cruelty during those first brutal weeks when he’d held her captive.

This was about something fundamental; destructive tendencies woven through his very nature, choices he made without conscious thought because they were so deeply ingrained in who he’d become.

Her tone carried no heat, no accusation—just the quiet devastation of someone realizing a truth he was blind to.

The idea he was perpetuating the same sins he’d killed his family to stop, sent ice through his veins.

What if everything he’d built, every decision he’d made to distance himself from their legacy, had only created new forms of the same poison?

What if she was right, and he couldn’t even see it?

The nnirae shifted uneasily beneath his increasingly agitated touch, and Akoro forced himself to breathe deeply.

For the first time in his adult life, he was lost about how to move forward.

Every tool he had seemed either lacking or unproductive.

Ultimately, he wanted her to want him, to be with him, but he didn’t know how to be anything else than the Alpha who had made choices she couldn’t abide.

Footsteps approached across the sand, and Akoro looked up to see Oppo walking toward him. His brother moved with his usual slouched demeanor, but approached him with a careful gaze.

“The men are asking about supplies,” Oppo said, settling onto a short boulder. “How long do you plan to maintain this position?”

“As long as necessary.”

“And if she doesn’t return?”

The possibility burned in his chest like hot coals, but Akoro kept his expression neutral. “She will.”

Oppo studied him with the careful attention of someone who’d learned to read his moods over years. “Have you considered what you’ll do when she does return? What you’ll say?”

Akoro’s hands stilled on his mount’s flank. The question went beyond simple curiosity. Oppo was probing, trying to gauge what was happening with Naya. He didn’t know exactly what was said, but he knew it didn’t go well.

Akoro said nothing. The morning silence pressed against his shoulders as he retrieved the grooming brush from his saddlebags, the familiar weight of it grounding him.

He began working through the beast’s thick coat.

Sand and dried sweat came away under the bristles, but the methodical motion did little to ease the tension coiled in his chest.

Minutes passed before he glanced at Oppo, who remained perched on the boulder like a sentinel watching the horizon. “What would you have done?”

His brother’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”

“About our family. If I hadn’t done anything, what would you have done, as the older brother?”

Oppo shifted uncomfortably, his heel scraping on the stone beneath him.

This territory had been dangerous ground between them for years.

Conversations in this direction always led to arguments, opened old wounds that refused to heal.

“I don’t like to think what I would have done, Akoro,” he said, voice low.

“I’m ashamed to say that I’m certain I would be doing something…

terrible, at the result of their teaching. ”

When Akoro had discovered their family was keeping Omega slaves, he’d gone to Oppo immediately, hoping for guidance or advice or…

some kind of answer about what to do. But Oppo couldn’t give him any of that.

He’d been older, supposedly wiser, but he’d still been young himself, and he didn’t know what to do.

He agreed with and supported Akoro, but didn’t act.

The memory of that isolation still burned—facing his entire bloodline alone while his brother wrestled with indecision.

“I know you will always resent that I didn’t support you,” Oppo said after a few moments, his voice low. “I know you felt alone when it came to addressing what our family had been doing, but you spent a lot of time in the settlements while I was with our family.”

“Yet you still didn’t know what was going on,” Akoro said tightly.

Oppo raised his hands as if to surrender. “I know. I’m not arguing about it, I’m stating the facts.”

Akoro exhaled harshly, but allowed him to continue.

“I spent time with our family and I was more… conditioned by their ways than you. I’m not saying it’s an excuse. But it’s the reason I was so indecisive, especially about something so extreme.”

Akoro’s grooming slowed. “You thought it was extreme.”

“Yes.” Oppo frowned. “You know most people wouldn’t even think about killing their parents, don’t you? Most people would have tried to have them imprisoned or found a way to force them to pay for their crimes.”

“Those weren’t options back then,” Akoro said, almost too sharply.

“I know,” Oppo said. “But I’m just saying, killing seemed so final to me, even though I knew it was the only way.

You spent so much time in the villages, Akoro…

among all that death and disease and suffering.

You were conditioned by what you learned out there, what you saw, how you thought about our family, the ruling power.

You didn’t see your own parents or family the way others see theirs, the way I saw them sometimes.

But if you hadn’t done what you did,” Oppo’s voice was barely audible above the desert wind, “Tsashokra wouldn’t exist as it does today.

You’ve restored us to something approaching our former glory.

You did the right thing, and everyone knows that. ”

Akoro absorbed the words, letting the truth settle into his bones.

Oppo was right. Without the Battle of Sy, their region would have continued bleeding under his family’s systematic cruelty.

Omegas would still be chained in palace dungeons, their magic harvested like crops from unwilling soil.

The outer villages would have remained impoverished while wealth flowed to a corrupt center, or even a foreign power, that produced nothing but suffering.

“Do you regret it?” Oppo’s question cut through his thoughts.

Akoro shook his head without hesitation.

It had been necessary, righteous. If Naya believed her mate had died somewhere along his path, it hadn’t been that night.

The boy who’d taken up arms against his own blood in honor of the people and the Omegas who died had been the only version of himself worth preserving.

But what about everything that came after?