Konrad watched you the way a falcon watches a trembling sparrow — patient, sharp, bored and suddenly, dangerously interested. It had been only a week since the two of you signed the papers and wore the rings. Married. The word sat in his mouth like a bullet he hadn’t expected to swallow.

You looked small in his world: frail, weak, and too eager to please. The bruises told him everything his uniform couldn’t — these were not the clumsy marks of a fall. Not even a cadet’s fight could make such careful damage. Your family had been breaking you long before you were handed to him as an arrangement, and the thought made something cold and animal in him stir.

Konrad Falkenrath. The modern warlord. The cold, perfect alpha who had never been permitted messy attachments. Perfect — too perfect to marry anyone, his father had taught him. Yet here he was, bound by legacy to a male omega with the kind of pretty that made people sigh and the kind of silence that set his teeth on edge. He wanted, absurdly, to roll his eyes. To kill someone. How had his life come to this — marrying this… this pathetic thing? You?

You trembled when you thought he wasn’t looking. He watched you fumble toward the mirror-closet in the bathroom, fingers frantic, hair falling into your face as you searched for the orange bottle. The way you swallowed pills with practiced fear was all the proof he needed. His parents had warned him of your “health conditions” — a neat cover for inconvenient truths — but to his eyes you were physically sound, a body that could ride, fight, sleep without complaint. The sickness lived elsewhere.

He traced the pattern of your nervousness the way he traced the edge of his ceremonial dagger: carefully, methodically. It didn’t take long for him to find the truth. Information lived at the tips of his fingers; staff files, financial ledgers, the man who polished your family’s silver — everything fell into place. Your so-called medicines were nothing more than drugs to steady you, to hush your fire until obedience fit like a second skin. Someone had been dosing you to make you small.

The discovery slammed into him like an insult. He was an alpha bred to swallow orders, not feelings — and yet a new, icky pressure rose that he could not file under disgust or duty. Pity was a childish thing; this was sharper, stranger. He hated the warmth at his ribs when he imagined your hands empty, the way your chest rose with frightened breaths. He hated that his hand itched to take whatever hurt you away, even if it meant bending rules he had carved into his own bones.

So he tested you. He took the orange bottle from your trembling hand and slipped it into his palm like a secret. He hid it inside a drawer with the Falkenrath crest, where only he and stubborn fate would find it. He wanted to measure the moment you realized it was gone, to see what small panic unclipped from your face and whether that panic bared anything but habit.

He folded his coat around him and stepped into the doorway of the bathroom, the light catching the scar at his jaw. He let his voice soften in a way the world never heard.

“Looking for this, Schatz?” His eyes were amused, but the smile he offered you was a weapon sheathed in silk.

You froze, swallowed. The chaos of your fingers, the frantic hunt, faltered under that look.

He uncapped the bottle just enough that the white label caught the light. He pretended ignorance, because sometimes the best control was the illusion of it.

“What is this, omega?” he asked, feigning curiosity and keeping his hands steady — though inside, something older and more dangerous hummed: the fierce, private rage of a man who promised to keep what he had claimed safe, no matter how many chains it took to do it.

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