But somehow, knowing there are two of them makes the silence feel less empty.
The nightmare starts that night.
I'm standing in a room I don't recognize—stone walls with no windows, torchlight throwing jagged shadows, the smell of blood thick enough to taste. My hands are covered in it, red and dripping, and when I look down my stomach is swollen with pregnancy—but wrong somehow. The shape distorted. The skin stretched tight over something that moves in ways babies shouldn't move.
Then I hear the screaming.
A child's voice, high and desperate—a girl, I know somehow, the way you know things in dreams. My daughter. Screaming from inside me, screaming in terror, and when I look down I see why.
Golden claws pressing against my skin from within. Small claws, but sharp, tearing at the walls of my womb. My son—my other child, the other half of this impossible pair—trying to destroy his sister before she can be born.
I try to stop it. Press my hands against the bulge, try to calm whatever is happening inside me. But the claws keep tearing, and the screaming keeps rising, and blood is pouring down my thighs?—
I wake gasping, hands flying to my stomach, heart slamming against my ribs.
"Just a dream," I manage, but my voice shakes. "Just a dream."
Yaern is already beside me, roused by my thrashing. She lights a candle, and the small flame pushes back the darkness enough that I can see her worried face.
"Tell me," she says.
So I do. The stone room. The blood. My swollen stomach and the two lives inside it—one screaming, one tearing, brother destroying sister in the womb before either of them can draw their first breath.
When I finish, my hands are still pressed flat against my belly, searching for any sign of wrongness.
"It felt real," I whisper. "Too real. Like prophecy."
Yaern is quiet for a long moment, her face unreadable in the candlelight.
"Omegas sometimes have prophetic dreams during pregnancy," she says carefully. "Especially when carrying unusual children. But dreams aren't always prophecy, Kess. Sometimes they're just fear given a shape. You learned about the twins today—your mind is processing what that means."
"And if it's not just processing? If it's showing me something real?" The words scrape out. "What if one of them is dangerous? What if the cursed blood—what if he?—"
"Then we'll deal with that if it comes." She squeezes my hand. "But right now, in this moment, both babies are alive. Both held on through everything. That's what's real. That's what matters."
I want to believe her. Want to let go of the nightmare and trust the physical evidence of my healing body.
But the image of golden talons pressing against my skin from inside won't leave me. The sound of my daughter's screaming echoes in my skull even now.
"I need to know more," I say. "About what happens when contaminated omegas carry cursed children. About whethertwins born to a cursed alpha are—" I can't finish. Can't saydangerous to each other.
"The village library," Yaern says. "It's small, but there might be something. We can look tomorrow, when you're stronger."
Tomorrow. One more day of rest. One more day of building strength. One more day before I start searching for answers that might terrify me more than the questions.
One more day of pretending I can do this without him—without his castle full of forbidden texts, his centuries of accumulated knowledge, his mystic who probably knows everything about cursed bloodlines and what happens when they're doubled.
Twins. Both carrying his blood. Both marked by his curse.
What if the nightmare is showing me exactly what that means?
I close my eyes and try to sleep.
The nightmare waits in the darkness behind my eyelids, patient as any predator.
But so do I.
And I've survived worse things than bad dreams.
