Ilay in the hut, half-naked and bandaged, listening to Roya singing and Altair and Kavin laughing, and wondered how in the Goddess’s hells I had ended up here. The only answer I could come up with was sheer, blind stupidity.
That, or I was cursed.
The past few weeks had been a series of amateur blunders on my part. If I was still a member of the Guild, I would have been laughed out of it for allowing myself to be captured by Regent Gullen’s guards. I deserved the beating they had given me; I had allowed Roya’s fascination with Altair to distract me, and Gullen’s obvious, ham-handed efforts to seduce her to blind me to his true intent.
I had also underestimated his willingness to poison his own men to remove Kavin and myself from our roles as Roya’s protectors. He’d tainted some part of the meal we all ate, but by the time I noticed my slowing reflexes, I was on the way back to my room. I hadn’t even seen the guards waiting behind my door.
By the time I woke, I had been stripped and tied hand and foot, and was in a pit with Gullen standing over me, a whip in one hand. He had obviously tortured before, but wasn’t expert at it. His arms gave out before I had even begun to worry about the whipping. I would take ten years in the clutches of a neophyte like Gullen if it saved me ten days beneath a Guild torturer’s hands.
What I found most enlightening were the questions he asked while he had his guards cut and beat me. Not questions about Roya, but about Omegas in general. It became apparent that he feared they were returning, that some had been left alive after the plagues.
Though he planned to get rid of Roya—my reaction to that earned me three broken ribs—if other Omegas returned to the island, Altair might eventually marry one and she would become queen. Gullen didn’t know that besides Roya, there was only one other Omega left in all the lands – Queen Vali, who was already mated to five ferocious Alphas.
Altair needed Roya to regain leadership of his island. It wasn’t a bad place for her. Maybe, if I helped them overthrow the regent, she would have a safe home there, far from the Starlakian warlord who undoubtedly still sought her—although I had a way to get her free of him, if it came down to it. I had been granted a life debt, what Starlakians called aliefhald, six years before, in payment for saving Milian’s Failed Omegas. In Starlak, a life debt was an unusual form of currency, so far as I could understand, usually traded only between warlords and princes as an indicator of an alliance. Aliefhaldcould be passed from one warlord to another, but they rarely were as their value was inestimable.
Life debts were worth far more than gold. They could be redeemed for almost any price, up to and including a warlord’s entire holdings, or his life. I had been shocked when Vilkurn, one of Queen Vali’s consorts, had so willingly given one to me, along with the unique phrase that made it mine. He confided years later that he earned it saving a great treasure for Wulfram, the Warlord Chief of all Starlak.
I had never called it in, and I thanked the Goddess every day for that. I would make certain my little queen was settled and cared for. Then I could say my last goodbye to her and give her the only gift I had left.
My absence.
Distance from me would keep her safer than anything. Kavin and Altair, maybe even Icarus, would help her find her feet. But something about that last man—wyvern, apparently—raised my internal alarms. Icarus had a secret, one that concerned Roya. My mind went back to that first day on Havira, when a man had sent a pigeon with a message. Someone had been told of our whereabouts. But was it the Anathema they had reported, or the Omega?
Icarus had no love for Gullen, but he owed allegiance to someone, possibly someone he was avoiding. There was a reason we were on this little island, settling in for what appeared to be more than just a reprovisioning, and not traveling on to wherever Icarus had been headed.
We had been here for a week, and it was clear none of the others—save the two crew members—had any intention of leaving. Why would they, when Roya was there, allowing them to touch her?
She had come into the hut smelling of her own honeyed slick and of Altair the very evening we’d arrived. I had tried to stifle my response, but she had seen the censure in my eyes.
“What?” She’d crossed her arms over her chest, making those perfect fucking breasts mound up even higher. “Just because you won’t touch me doesn’t mean others find me equally disgusting.”
“I never found you disgusting.” No one would.
The relative safety of the island had made her less reserved, and I’d seen honest pain in her gaze. “You made a rule that I couldn’t even brush against you, Thorn. You made it very clear that I was so far beneath you…”
She’d broken off and run from the hut, and had mostly avoided me since. I’d spent those first hours mired in confusion and remorse, then the remaining days cursing myself for not seeing how my stance had looked to her. How it had damaged her.
Beneathme? I was still shocked to my core. Where had that come from?
With nothing else to do but think, I let my mind wander back to all the times when I had tried to protect her—from myself, and from others. She thought I had restrained myself for years because she didn’t measure up? That she was unworthy?
Fuck. I hoped the Guild did catch me and kill me. I was too stupid to live. I’d spent every day of the past week trying to discern when my brain had rotted inside my skull. Listening to Roya tease and play with the other Alphas, smelling her as that unmistakable aroma strengthened to the point where it lingered day and night inside the hut where I was hiding.
Yes, hiding. From the choices I’d made in the past few years, not that I could change them now. I was Anathema, and could never be with her. Kavin’s bald statement that I was her first consort, her first love, had shaken me to the core.
That it was the Goddess’s will that I claim her first.
“Thorn?” The wyvern’s voice roused me from my self-pity. He stood in the doorway, the light behind him making it difficult to see his face. “Do you have a moment?”
Something in his tone raised those same alarms again. “Of course. Please come in.” I sat up and moved over so he could join me cross-legged on the woven mat.
“You’re feeling better,” he observed. “I would have bet my ship you would die.”
“I have a lot to live for.”
“Roya.” His voice was cold. “She loves you.” I waited for him to say more, but he fell silent. His eyes were tortured.
Goddess, she had him under her spell as well, though she had been chilly to him since the first day here. That didn’t surprise me. Roya was the most beautiful poison in the world. One taste of her lips, and you would give your last breath for more. You would die happy, thanking the Goddess for the pain of loving this woman.
