"Try the back corner," she says quietly, her voice creaking like old hinges. "Bottom shelf. The books you donated after your grandmother passed."
My grandmother.
The words hit me like a fist to the chest, driving the air from my lungs. I haven't thought about her books in years—the collection she kept hidden in the back room of her cottage, wrapped in oilcloth and tucked behind jars of preserved vegetables where no one would think to look. The texts she made me promise to destroy after she died, pressing my hands between her papery palms and extracting the vow with her last strength. I was fifteen and drowning in grief, and when the time came I couldn't do it. Couldn't watch her last possessions turn to ash, couldn't bear the finality of flames consuming the only pieces of her I had left.
So I brought them here instead. Told myself I was preserving knowledge, honoring her memory. Really I just couldn't face the burning.
I didn't know what was in them. Didn't want to know. She'd kept them hidden for a reason, and some part of me was afraid of what that reason might be.
Now I cross to the back corner with my heart pounding against my ribs, each step feeling like it takes a lifetime.
The books are exactly where Britt said—a small stack on the bottom shelf, spines cracked and faded, covered in a decade's worth of dust that rises in clouds when I pull them free. My grandmother's handwriting on the inside covers, her cramped familiar script labeling each one with dates and sources I don't recognize. The sight of her penmanship after all these years makes my throat close up, makes my eyes sting with tears I refuse to shed.
She knew.
All those years she trained me in secret, waking me before dawn to run through the forest, teaching me to fight with blades and fists and teeth, making me into the warrior omega I am today—she knew what I was. What I could become. What might someday grow inside me.
And she kept these books hidden. Waiting.
For what? For me to need them? For the day I'd come looking for answers she couldn't give me while she was alive?
I pull the stack into my lap and start reading, my grandmother's ghost looking over my shoulder.
The first book is useless—a general history of dragon shifters that tells me nothing I don't already know, dry academic prose that skirts around anything dangerous or real. The second is worse, full of War God propaganda about the noble duty ofomegas to serve as tributes, to sacrifice themselves for the good of the realm, to accept their deaths with grace and gratitude.
I shove it aside with more force than necessary, bile rising in my throat.
But the third book stops my heart mid-beat.
It's a journal. Handwritten, the pages brittle with age and brown at the edges, the ink faded in places to the color of old tea. No author's name on the cover or the first page, but the voice is unmistakably omega—practical and fierce and desperately afraid in ways that resonate through my bones like a struck bell.
My mate is one of the Beast King's elite, the first entry reads, the handwriting tight and slanted as if the writer was pressing too hard, feeling too much.A dragon warrior who drank so deeply of the cursed blood that he carries the War God's rage in his own veins now. The priests say this is an honor. The priests say our children will be blessed.
The priests are liars.
I felt the curse quicken in my womb at month four. Felt my son change from baby to weapon. And now I know—my daughter is not safe. She never was.
I turn pages with shaking hands, scanning entries that span months of pregnancy—months of fear and research and desperate hope that there might be another way. The omega who wrote this was carrying twins, just like me. Her mate carried a diluted version of the same curse that runs through Rhystan's veins—passed down through the blood rituals that bind the dragon warriors to their king. Her son inherited that curse. Her daughter was vulnerable, growing alongside a brother whose very nature would drive him to kill her.
And she was looking for a way to save them both.
Month five, one entry reads, the words smudged as if tears had fallen on the page while it was still wet.The curse grows stronger every day. I can feel my son's instincts sharpening,his tiny body preparing for violence he doesn't even understand yet. He kicks when his sister moves, orienting toward her like a predator tracking prey through tall grass. I have perhaps six weeks before his claws form fully. Six weeks to find another way.
Six weeks. Month five to month six. The same timeline the nightmares have been screaming at me in blood and shadow.
I keep reading, my hands trembling so hard the pages rustle like dry leaves.
The curse passes through male blood, another entry explains, this one written in a steadier hand as if the omega had found some calm in the act of recording what she'd learned.It activates in utero around month six, when the male heir's dragon nature begins to manifest. Claws form first—small and golden and sharp as needles—then the instinct to eliminate competition. Twin sisters are most vulnerable because they share the womb. There is no escape, no protection, no distance that can shield them from a brother who has been shaped by divine rage into a killing machine.
The Beast King's blood is the strongest, another entry notes.His children would carry the curse in its purest form. But even diluted through his warriors, through the blood rituals that bind them to him, it is enough. Enough to transform. Enough to kill.
My hands are shaking so hard I can barely hold the book. If a diluted curse through a blood-bound warrior was enough to threaten this omega's daughter, what chance does mine have? Rhystan's blood isn't diluted. He IS the Beast King. Three hundred years of the War God's rage concentrated in one man, and now growing in my son.
This is it. This is what the nightmares have been trying to tell me in the only language they know—blood and shadow and my daughter's screams echoing through stone rooms that smell likesulfur and death. My son will develop claws at month six. His curse-born instincts will drive him to kill his sister before either of them draws their first breath. And there's nothing I can do to stop it unless?—
I flip forward, searching desperately for a solution, for hope, for anything.
There is a way, an entry near the end reads, the handwriting changing again—shakier now, as if written in haste or fear or both.The curse can be broken. Transferred. A warrior omega with contaminated blood can take the curse into herself, metabolize it the way our ancestors were designed to do. But the cost?—
