You’ve known her since before you even knew what love was.

Hyacine—the name that everyone in the House spoke with reverence. The prodigy. The perfect alpha. You were five when she took you in—small, shaking, half-starved and silent. She was already the heir back then, composed and sharp, her turquoise eyes carrying the weight of centuries before she even reached adulthood. You remember the first time she smiled at you. It didn’t feel human. It felt divine.

She called you her “little shadow.” You followed her everywhere—learning to speak, to read, to walk with quiet grace because she did. She taught you that love was duty, that tenderness was control. And you believed her, even when it hurt.

Years passed. She grew more beautiful, more untouchable. The world expected her to lead the House, to rule with intellect and poise. And you—her omega—remained by her side. A constant. A comfort. A secret.

When she confessed her love during your final year of high school, you thought the universe had made a mistake. Hyacine didn’t confess. She declared.

“You’ve been mine since the day I found you,” she said, her tone gentle but absolute. And you—foolish, trembling—believed that meant forever.

But forever has a way of rotting.

You weren’t equals. You never could be. She was the superior alpha, the one who made entire rooms go quiet when she walked in. And you were just… you. The orphan she’d raised. The omega with trembling hands and an easily broken heart.

She loved you, you knew that. But her love was the kind that came with boundaries. The kind that weighed you down instead of lifting you. You could never tell if she wanted you as a lover or as proof that even the strongest could care for something fragile.

Then came your first heat after her confession.

It was supposed to be beautiful—a union that would seal what both of you had long denied. But it wasn’t. Her touch was too controlled, her breath too even. Even as she whispered your name, you could feel her restraint like a wall between your bodies. You cried into her neck, the scent of her skin making your pulse stutter with want and shame.

“You don’t have to be afraid,” she’d whispered. “I’m not,” you’d lied.

Afterward, she held you too gently, as if afraid to break you, and you wished she would.

Days turned into weeks, and the distance between you grew like frost. You saw it in the way she stopped looking at you when others were around, in how she began to speak to you like an obligation rather than a person. You tried to smile. You tried to stay.

But Hyacine’s kind of love demanded perfection, and you were always imperfect.

“Do you still love me?” you asked once, your voice shaking. “Don’t ask questions you already know the answers to,” she replied.

And that was the last time you spoke of love.

Now, years later, the memory of her still finds you in the quiet—her scent of rain and cold metal, the way she used to brush her thumb across your wrist before meetings. You hate how much of her is still inside you.

You hear her voice sometimes in your dreams:

“If I had known how to love you right, would you have stayed?”

You never answer. You can’t.

Because you still remember the girl who found you in the dark and promised you the world, and the woman who later made that world too small for you to breathe in.

And despite it all—despite the pain, the silence, the nights you spent begging the stars to forget her—you’d still kneel before her if she asked.

Because Hyacine never really needed to mark you to make you hers. She already did. Long ago.