I was a Failed Omega after all.
What had gone wrong? I let my gaze sweep the room, taking in every detail as I had been taught, and found my answer. A strange high-pitched buzzing filled my mind, but I kept my face immobile, my temper for once held in check. I wasn’t angry. Anger was heat and feeling and energy. This was emptiness, my heart plunging in a bottomless drop toward a colder emotion.
Devastation.
There was no arguing with him. No appealing the decision. No trying again.
“Thank you, Spymaster,” I said calmly. “May I be excused to my room?” He nodded, and I slid past, taking one last breath of his leather and almond scent.
It would be the last time I ever smelled it, and I wanted to remember who had destroyed my life. It was the man I had trusted to protect me.
The man who now stood with the tiniest bit of egg yolk on the corner of his sleeve.
* * *
The night was filledwith the sounds of laughter, hooting, shouting, and drunken revelry. I listened to the men who had made my life hell for years celebrating not only their success, but my failure.
“That uppity bitch got what she deserved,” one of them slurred near the window to the barracks. My room was on the far side, closest to the latrines, and every man walking past had said something about my ejection from the Guild. They were trained spies; even drunk, they knew I would hear them.
“Maybe she’ll go do what all those Failed Omegas do best—open their legs wide and say ooooh!” The next man made sounds more like a pig grunting than sex.
I waited, biding my time. Finally, the party ended. I gathered up the things I would need for my journey and slipped out the door, using every single one of the skills I had gained over the years to hide my passage and make it harder for anyone to follow me.
For a moment, I considered leaving the others a gift. Rubbing the inside of the morning porridge pots with a limbane leaf or two. They’d all spend the next few days in the latrines wishing for death, even if limbane only caused explosive diarrhea.
But it wasn’t worth my life to attack a fellow Guild member. Our code was unyielding—we never used our knowledge of poisons on one another, and if we did, we forfeited our lives to the Guildmaster.
It dawned on me too late that I was no longer constrained by the Guild’s code. I was no longer a trainee.
I should have poisoned those assholes.
I walked silently through the forest, using streambeds to cover my tracks, climbing trees when I could to disrupt my trail, dragging a branch behind me in other places. I didn’t stop for two days, my rage preventing me from sleeping.
Thorn may have betrayed me, and the Guild may have rejected me, but that only meant I wasn’t going to work as a sanctioned assassin. Fortunately, I knew where I could get jobs, and exactly who would appreciate my skills.
She was my only friend in the world, now that I knew Thorn was a betrayer. She had suffered with me, and at the end, taken my place when I was being carried away to be mated to a monstrous man. Valerie ta Farthan, the Queen of Death, would welcome me. And then I would begin to pay everyone back who deserved it.
Starting with Thorn.
THORN
Iwatched my obsession make her way through the Fallon Woods with a grace and skill that caused my twisted, blackened heart to thump with pride.
She was so damned good at everything, this little Omega. She would be wonderful at hating me. I had let her think I’d betrayed her, after all, by cracking the eggs I’d forced her to boil, to fail her out of the Guild.
To protect her.
I hadn’t told her why, of course. If she’d known what the threat against her was, what plans had been made and by whom, her temper would have raged unchecked. Roya was so direct, so open in many of her reactions, that she never could have hidden her anger from the true culprit. She would have confronted him and died before I could do anything to stop her.
So I’d let her blame me, to remove her as quickly as possible from the greatest danger to her: the corrupt, duplicitous Guildmaster.
And, if I was honest, to keep her safe from a more insidious threat.
Myself.
She had only been sixteen when I brought her to the Guild, a decision I had regretted more every month as I watched her train and learn. At first, I saw her as the child she was. As the years passed, I dismissed my unreasonable anger at the other trainees’ familiarity with her, believing my anger flared because she was young and vulnerable, easily hurt.
I told myself it wasn’t jealousy when they sparred, and their hands met her flesh. That when she complimented them, they didn’t deserve the praise. I spied on her often, telling myself it was to keep her safe.
