“No need for that, love,” Valerie said, reclining in an upholstered velvet chair.
I stilled. How had she seen what I’d done?
“I have great respect for you, Thorn. I know you could kill all of us in minutes—although we would both die together, hmm?” She motioned to the men to leave the room. “Boys, go get some dinner together for me and my friend. We have things to discuss.”
“Yes, Queen,” they all muttered, and left, but not before scowling at me.
“Nice collection of Alphas,” I sighed, and pulled my hands out. “Do you have a cloth I can use to get this verlana sap off? If I eat with these hands, you won’t have to kill me. I’ll already be dead.”
She laughed again and rose to give orders to an unseen person outside the door. When she returned, her face was grave. “Why has the country’s most renowned killer come to my home?”
I stifled a laugh; she was the Queen of Death, and had been responsible for at least as many assassinations as I.
“I was following a different queen,” I admitted. I stared into her eyes for a moment and pondered what I was about to do.
I was going to go rogue. Leave the Guild’s protections, and relinquish the fellowship and bonds I’d worked my whole life to build. Share privileged information with an outsider, breaking the vows I had made the first day I’d begun my training. Lose the respect of every one of my colleagues, and probably lose my life.
Become Anathema.
“The queen you love?”
I caught my breath, then let it out slowly. Of course, she would have made it her business to know how I felt, considering who Roya was to her.
“Yes. She’s being hunted. I have to get her to safety, in a world where nowhere is safe.” A deep Alpha growl rumbled from my throat, startling us both. Valerie’s red painted lips curled up in a genuine smile.
“Tell me everything, and we can work together.” Her sapphire eyes glittered with a mixture of madness and affection, and I knew my own might look much the same. We would kill anyone who came for Roya, and dance in their entrails.
I opened my mouth and spoke the words that would mean my death, but I didn’t care—as long as it saved her. “The Guildmaster gave me a task…”
ROYA
“Are you trying to kill me?” I glared at the woman who was identical to me in almost every way, save for the eighteen years between us.
At forty-two, Valerie was still the most beautiful woman I’d ever known, and not because of her external appearance. All the members of King Milian’s ex-harem were practically identical, as we were bred from a limited number of women who bore what were thought to be the physical traits of Omegas. Then Queen Vali came along with her dark hair and eyes, and showed the world that being an Omega wasn’t about how you looked.
It was about how you smelled.
True Omegas had a sweet, come-hither scent, and for some reason, we also possessed an enhancedsenseof smell. Which was why I might just die from the chore Valerie had assigned me.
Using a long wooden paddle, I lifted the yarn bundles out of the dye bath I’d been stirring them in. This dye was particularly noxious—the ingredients a mix of stale urine, tree bark, some unnamed fungi, and a double handful of gantberries. It smelled like the inside of a bloated carcass in mid-summer. The odor had shot up my nose an hour before, and was scraping my brain out one spoonful at a time.
Across the room, Valerie lifted a large skein of finished, bright red yarn from her copper pot and laughed. “I’m trying to make a profit, dear child. They buy my yarns because of the colors.”
“They buy your yarns because they’re terrified of you. If they knew how you tortured your friends, they would flee Verdan City.”
Valerie dropped the yarn. “If you’re going to complain, do it in Mirrenese. Or Gael. Or—”
I answered her in Pictin, the northern sailor’s language. “Shut the hell up and get over here to help me stir before I throw your scrawny arse out the door.”
More laughter. “Well done. You haven’t forgotten much that I taught you, but you’re mixing your accents. Less Mirren, more Pict.” Her eyes twinkled as she proceeded to curse me and my ancestors out for being lazy, shiftless ne’er-do-wells who wouldn’t know a solid day’s work if it jumped up like a shark and tore off… Well, she listed quite a few body parts, some of which I did not have. By the end, we were both giggling and cursing each other in at least five languages, some more fluently than others.
“You know, I didn’t teach you all those words.” She wiped her eyes, as we both remembered the years in the Omega Suite, when there was little to do besides wallow in fear of when we would be noticed by Milian, or taken away, or worse.
She’d instructed me in languages, knot tying, and poker. She said I’d taught her never to give up hope. I wasn’t sure why she said that, but someday she would explain. Maybe in another six years, when it didn’t hurt so much to talk about it.
“Who taught you to curse so fluently?”
Thorn’s face sprang to mind, and I pushed the thought of him away, locking it down tight. Even thinking of him casually felt like eating glass. He had betrayed me for no reason that I could see or understand. I changed the subject. “Seriously, Valerie, why are we dyeing yarn? We could be doing lots of other things.”
