ROYA
Icould kill a person seven ways with nothing but a piece of wire. I knew the most accessible points on the body that, when punctured, would result in fatal bleeding. I’d memorized at least ten herbs that brought on a quick, virtually painless, and utterly untraceable death.
For six years, I’d focused on learning all I could about the arts of assassination. Now, I was ready to officially complete my training and take my place in the Assassins Guild. Not that I had killed anyone yet, but I had my first victim all picked out—my instructor, my tormentor, my nemesis… and the man I had loved fruitlessly for years.
Thorn.
“You’re dead,” I breathed, sure he wouldn’t hear me across the room.
“You’re prettier when you smile,” he murmured back, unimpressed.
“You’ll make a very lovely corpse.” I’d deliver his body to the Guildmaster myself.
“Tick tock, Roya. My dinner’s not going to cook itself.”
I gripped the back of the rough, wooden chair at a long, oak table that had held a thousand poisons and their antidotes, but never a meal, to my knowledge. The flames in the hearth nearby winked cheerfully, and I blinked away the rage that threatened to blind me, pretending the smoke was what irritated my eyes. I might love Thorn, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t kill him. Of course, the sexist teasing might be a part of this test…
That made sense. I was the only female assassin trainee in the history of the Guild. Thorn might want to make sure I understood what I was in for, committing to spend my life working for and with lethal misogynists.
Could it have been him who decided I needed one more test to gain my assassin’s cloak? It was a demeaning task, one none of my male counterparts had been given. I had to cook a perfect hard-boiled egg, whatever that meant.
“I detest you.” Normally, I didn’t dare say such things, but then again, Thorn had never treated me like I was a servant before.
Second only to the mysterious Guildmaster, he was the most successful spy in Verdan with a kill count that could only be imagined, as he never left any trace of his presence. He was a ghost, a terrifying specter. The boogeyman of heads of state, wealthy merchants, and anyone who found themselves on the Guild’s removal list.
But to me, he was a hero. Thorn had rescued me six years ago from the harem of the now-dead King Milian. Thorn had convinced the Guildmaster to let me train and explained to Queen Vali of Rimholt that I wouldn’t be joining my two dozen sisters in her care, kept safe and protected as the fragile, broken women they were. Butterflies pinned to a beautiful board.
Until today, Thorn had never even hinted that he’d thought about how pretty I was, though my beauty was always the first thing men saw when they met me.
It wasall they ever saw.
Supposedly, my harem sisters and I all looked like the long-extinct Omegas, a lineage of magical females whose origins were shrouded in mystery. We were blonde, blue-eyed, and attractive beyond reason. After the Great Plagues eradicated Omegas over three centuries earlier, the kings of Verdan had tried their best to re-establish our kind, breeding us like living experiments. Crossing the lines of normal, attractive Beta women and particularly aggressive Alpha men in an attempt to re-establish the lost Omega line.
As far as anyone knew, none of King Milian’s harem were true Omegas with the enigmatic gifts that made them so valuable. The only known Omega of power—a young woman named Vali who had been stolen from her home country of Rimholt and brought briefly into the harem—had helped to free us all from Milian. His surviving “broken” Omegas, the women I called my sisters, were merely curiosities now. Reminders of a vicious tyrant’s insane quest.
But I knew at least one other Omega who wasn’t broken.
Me.
My future as a Guild assassin, my life even, depended on keeping my nature secret. There were only two other people in the world who knew, and Thorn was one of them. He would never betray me; he understood what it was I truly desired. He’d fought to give it to me.
I didn’t want to be an Omega, cosseted and decorative. I wanted to be powerful and lethal, strong enough to keep any future king from enslaving other women. I’d made a promise to myself years before, that I would do whatever it took to attain that goal.
Thorn’s subtle cough startled me. “Detest me or not, you have fifteen minutes, Roya. If you can’t boil an egg, how do you plan to pose as a normal woman—”
I bared my teeth. “Yes, I know what the rationale was, and if there was a test for males to prove their ability to pose asnormal men, I’d buy it.”
No, this was to humiliate me. To make sure I felt my isolation, my inadequacy—as if living with forty male assassin candidates for the past six years hadn’t made that perfectly clear.
Thorn’s eyes glimmered with humor under his ever-present hood. If I hadn’t watched him for years—like he was my target instead of my teacher—I’d never have known he had hair the same shade as his eyes, a gleaming chestnut with flakes of gold. “You don’t know how to boil an egg, do you?”
I cursed him in a few different languages, all of which I spoke fluently and with native accents.
“Temper, Roya,” he murmured.
I shook off my irritation and focused on my ridiculous, demeaning task. “How hard can it be? You boil water, put an egg in, go and slip some poisons into a target’s tea, then come back and voilà! Egg boiled.”
Thorn sat back on a rough wooden bench in the corner of the room where each candidate was graded on their final task, which was normally concocting an effective poison of some sort. Poisons were my very best subject.
