Bound by a contract

CHAPTER ELEVEN: unwanted truth

"You want to know how your mother died?" he snapped.

The room went silent.

"You were the reason."

Haru froze. His whole body went rigid, as though bracing for a blow that hadn't landed yet but was already in motion.

Doran laughed bitterly, the sound hollow and ugly, scraping out of him like something dragged over gravel.

"Your mother was beautiful," he said, and for one strange moment his voice softened, the way it might have decades ago, before grief turned to poison. "She always fought me for you. From the very beginning, she fought me. But then, when you were—"

He stopped. His jaw clenched. He shook his head, as if trying to physically dislodge the memory, and when he spoke again, his voice had hardened back into something cold and deliberate.

"That day was supposed to be normal. Just a simple walk in the park. Your mother wanted to spend time with you. She adored you. Worshipped the ground you walked on."

His jaw tightened.

"The two of you were heading home when you saw something across the road. I don't even remember what it was anymore. A ball. A toy. Something stupid."

His eyes burned with resentment.

"She told you to stay beside her. She told you not to run."

Haru's throat tightened. He could feel something building in his chest, something he didn't have a name for yet, something between panic and grief and a horror so deep it felt physical.

"But you did anyway."

Doran pointed at him, his finger trembling, his whole arm shaking with the force of years of buried rage finally given somewhere to go.

"You pulled away from her and ran straight into the street."

The words struck like blows. Haru felt his knees weaken.

"There was a truck coming."

His voice shook with rage.

"Your mother screamed for you to stop. She ran after you. And when she realized she couldn't reach you in time…"

He swallowed hard. The room felt smaller now, tighter, as if the walls themselves were leaning in to listen.

"She threw herself in front of that truck."

Silence.

Doran looked away, blinking rapidly, his throat working as though something were caught there.

"You lived."

His voice became quieter, but somehow even crueler, each word deliberately placed, like he had spent years sharpening this exact sentence in the privacy of his own grief.

"She didn't."

Haru stared at him in horror. His lips parted, but no sound came out. He felt as if the floor beneath him had tilted, as if gravity itself had shifted, leaving him with nothing solid to stand on.

For a moment, Doran looked as if he regretted saying it. Something flickered across his face, something almost like hesitation, almost like the ghost of a father who might have once known how to comfort a grieving child. But then the grief returned, twisting, curdling, transforming back into anger, because anger was easier. Anger had structure. Anger gave him somewhere to put all of this.

"Do you know what it was like?" he demanded, his voice rising now, cracking at the edges. "Standing in that hospital and listening to the doctors tell me my wife was gone?"

His hands trembled.

"She left that morning smiling. She left to take her son for a walk."

His eyes locked onto Haru, pinning him in place.

"And she came back in a coffin."

The words hung heavily between them, suffocating, final.

"I spent years looking at you and seeing her face. Years wondering what our lives would've been like if you had just listened to her." His voice dropped, low and venomous. "Or if she had gotten rid of you like I wanted."

His voice cracked.

"If you had stayed where she told you to stay…"

He inhaled sharply, as though the next words cost him something physical to release.

"If she had never taken you out of the estate with her that day. For that walk."

It clicked, suddenly, horribly, in Haru's mind. That was why his father had never let him leave the estate. Not out of protectiveness, not out of love, not for any reason Haru had ever dared to hope for. It had been a punishment disguised as confinement.

Doran stopped speaking.

Because even as the accusation left his mouth, the pain in his eyes revealed the truth beneath it, something far uglier than blame, something that had been festering far longer than Haru had been alive to witness it.

"You killed her."

"You took her away from me."

"A stupid, foolish male Omega, she should have gotten rid of you—no, no." He shook his head violently, as though arguing with himself, as though some part of him still recoiled from his own words even as he forced them out. "I should have gotten rid of you when I had the chance."

The words detonated inside Haru's chest.

He felt his breathing change first, quick and shallow, his lungs unable to pull in enough air no matter how hard he tried. His vision blurred at the edges, the warehouse tilting strangely, the overhead lights smearing into long streaks of white. His hands came up without his permission, pressing hard against his own chest, as though he could physically hold himself together, as though his ribs alone could keep whatever was breaking inside him from spilling out.

He heard himself making a sound, something small and broken, something that didn't sound like it belonged to him.

His heartbeat was too loud. Too fast. It filled his ears until he couldn't hear anything else, until the warehouse around him seemed to recede into something distant and muffled, like he was hearing it all from underwater. His legs felt unsteady beneath him, and he stumbled back a step, then another, his shoulder hitting the cold metal of a nearby crate.

She should have gotten rid of you.

I should have gotten rid of you.

The words looped, over and over, tangled together with images he had never let himself look at directly, a truck, a street, a mother he barely remembered throwing herself into the path of something enormous and unstoppable, all because he had run. All because he had been a child who saw something across the road and forgot, for one terrible second, to listen.

He gasped, the breath catching painfully in his throat, and his hands gripped at his own arms, fingers digging in hard enough to leave marks, anything to ground himself, anything to keep from dissolving entirely. Black spots danced at the edges of his vision. His chest heaved, but no matter how much air he pulled in, it never felt like enough.

It's all your fault. It's all your fault. It's all your fault.

He didn't realize he had sunk to his knees until the cold concrete bit into his skin. His whole body was trembling now, shaking so hard his teeth chattered, sweat beading along his hairline despite the chill of the warehouse air. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, hard, as if he could push the words back out of his skull, as if he could undo the last several minutes simply by refusing to see anymore.

Somewhere distant, guards exchanging uncertain glances. Of his father sitting there chanined, breathing hard, his own composure in ruins, watching the wreckage of his son with an expression that was somehow both furious and devastated.

But Haru couldn't focus on any of it. The world had narrowed down to the frantic, useless effort of trying to breathe, to the roaring static in his ears, to the suffocating certainty that he had spent his entire life as a walking grave for a woman he didn't even remember well enough to properly mourn.

"Haru—" Cassian's voice, somewhere above him, edged with alarm.

Haru couldn't answer. His throat had closed around the words, around the air, around everything. His vision tunneled. He was distantly aware that he was rocking slightly, his arms wrapped around himself, his breath coming in short, useless gasps that did nothing to fill his lungs.

And then—

"ENOUGH."

The word cracked through the warehouse like something physical, like a whip, like thunder breaking directly overhead.

It was Dante.

His voice didn't rise the way Doran's had. It didn't need to. It carried a weight that silenced everything in the room instantly, guards straightening, Cassian going still, even the air itself seeming to freeze in place.

Haru looked up, vision swimming, just in time to see Dante's eyes. Dark. Very dark. Darker than Haru had ever seen them, something coiled and dangerous burning behind them, something that looked, unmistakably, like a man on the edge of losing every shred of control he had left.