The next page is missing.
Torn out, the ragged edge still visible in the binding like a wound that never healed.
No. No, no, no.
I flip through the remaining pages with frantic fingers, but there's nothing else—just household accounts and herb recipes and mundane daily entries that tell me nothing about how to save my daughter's life. The answer was here, written in this journal by an omega who faced the same impossible choice I'm facing now.
And someone tore it out.
Someone didn't want me to find it.
"Did anyone else look at these books?" I demand, carrying the journal to Britt's desk with steps that feel unsteady, my legs threatening to buckle beneath me. "In the years since I donated them? Did anyone come back here, touch them, take anything?"
She blinks at me, startled by my intensity, by the raw edge in my voice. "No one comes back here, child. These shelves haven'tbeen touched in years. No one cares about old books anymore, not when there's work to be done and mouths to feed."
"Since my grandmother died." I open the journal, show her the torn page, the ragged edge that marks where knowledge used to live. "Someone removed this. Someone didn't want me to find what was written here."
Britt studies the damage with clouded eyes, her gnarled fingers tracing the torn edge like she's reading something in the texture of the paper.
"You donated these after she passed," she says slowly, memory surfacing through the fog of age. "I remember—you were just a girl, crying, said you couldn't bear to burn them. Made me promise to keep them safe." She pauses, her brow furrowing. "But your grandmother came by once, before she died. When she was still well enough to walk. Said she needed to check something, remove something dangerous. Something that shouldn't be found until the time was right, or maybe not at all. I didn't watch what she took—seemed like private business, and she was dying. What was I going to do, argue with a dying woman?"
My grandmother.
She tore out the page herself.
The realization settles over me like a shroud, heavy and suffocating. She knew—knew about the curse, knew about the cost of breaking it, knew enough to hide the information even from me. Especially from me.
Why? To protect me from a choice she thought I shouldn't have to make? To keep me from learning something that would destroy me? Or because the cost mentioned in that journal was so high, so terrible, that she couldn't bear the thought of me being tempted to pay it?
I'll never know. She's been dead for seven years, her secrets buried with her bones in the small cemetery at the edge of thevillage where wildflowers grow over the graves of omegas who lived and died without anyone remembering their names.
But I know someone who might have the answers she took with her.
Someone with three hundred years of accumulated knowledge about cursed bloodlines and the ways they twist through generations. Someone whose library contains texts that survived the priests' purges, hidden in mountain fortresses where holy fire couldn't reach. Someone who owes me the truth after months of lies and poisoned tea and choices made about my body without my consent.
Rhystan.
I walk back to Yaern's cottage with the journal clutched to my chest like a talisman, like holding it tight enough might somehow summon my grandmother's ghost to explain what she was thinking, what she was hiding, what price she thought was too high for me to pay.
The curse activates at month six. I'm almost three months along now, my belly just beginning to round beneath my borrowed clothes. That gives me twelve weeks at most—probably less, if my son's dragon nature develops early the way the journal suggested it might.
Twelve weeks to save my daughter from a brother who will be born wanting to kill her.
Twelve weeks to find out what my grandmother knew and didn't want me to learn.
Twelve weeks to face the man who shattered my trust and still holds pieces of my heart in his lying hands.
Yaern takes one look at my face when I walk through the door—sees the journal, the tear tracks on my cheeks, the desperatedetermination that must be written across my features—and sets down her mending without a word.
"You found something."
"My grandmother's books." I sink into the chair across from her, suddenly so exhausted I can barely hold myself upright. The pregnancy, the fear, the weight of knowledge I never wanted to carry—it's all pressing down on me at once, threatening to crush me flat. "She knew, Yaern. About warrior omegas, about cursed bloodlines, about all of it. She kept journals. Research. Information she hid for decades, waiting for me to need it."
"And?"
"The curse activates at month six. My son will try to kill my daughter in the womb—it's what the curse demands, male heirs eliminating threats, ensuring the bloodline continues pure." The words come out flat, drained of emotion because I've already felt too much today and there's nothing left. "There's a way to stop it. Something about warrior omegas taking the curse into themselves, metabolizing it the way we were designed to do. But the page explaining how was torn out."
"By who?"
