Some skills you learn when you grow up wild—when you spend your heats alone in the forest because no alpha will touch you and no cage can hold you. I've slipped into my share of locked rooms, finding places to wait out the heat, stealing what I needed whenever I woke up far from home with an empty stomach and no clothes or provisions. The lock clicks open in under a minute, and I slip through the gate into shadows that feel older than the rest of the library.
These books are different.
The leather bindings are cracked and flaking with age. The pages look brittle enough to crumble at a breath. Whatever knowledge lives in these texts, someone thought it worth protecting. Worth hiding.
I find what I'm looking for on a high shelf, tucked between volumes of religious philosophy:The War God's Covenant: A History of Divine Curses and Their Costs.
The book is heavy in my hands—heavier than it should be for its size, as if knowledge itself has weight. I carry it to a reading desk where light falls through a high window and open it carefully, mindful of pages that want to stick together after decades of disuse.
The handwriting is archaic, the ink faded to brown in places, but slowly the story takes shape.
Over a thousand years ago, Thorian Vhal'kar faced extinction. His omega mate was barren—no heirs to carry on the bloodline, no children to inherit the throne. Rival lords circled like vultures scenting death. Without an heir, everything Thorian had built would crumble.
In desperation, he prayed to Krethar, the War God.
The god answered.
Krethar offered a rut powerful enough to guarantee conception. Feral. Unstoppable. Primal beyond anything natural shifters experienced. But divine gifts always come with teeth—that's the first thing my grandmother taught me about the gods. Their generosity is never free.
The price was this: the rut would be uncontrollable. The beast would dominate completely during heat and rut, subsuming the human mind beneath animal instinct. And it would require the RIGHT omega to survive—one strong enough to weather what the bearer had become.
A test of worthiness, the text calls it. Divine selection through violence.
Thorian accepted.
But the first omega brought to anchor his cursed rut—a gentle village girl chosen for her calming nature—died within minutes. The second survived long enough to bear him sons before dying in childbirth.
And the curse passed to his children like poison in the blood. Growing worse with each generation.
I flip through pages, piecing together fragments and observations scrawled by different hands across centuries.
With each generation, the curse compounds. The debt owed to Krethar grows rather than shrinks.
The beast grows more desperate with each failed bonding. Desperation feeds the feral nature and causes the beast's rut to escalate in violence and intensity.
Divine magic demands balance—power granted must equal suffering endured.
So that's why. Each generation bears the curse worse than the last because the curse was designed to escalate. A debt that grows instead of shrinking, blood spilling more with each century until forty-seven women have died and still the debt isn't paid.
"Looking for anything in particular?"
I spin so fast the book nearly flies from my hands.
Rhystan stands in the doorway of the restricted section, one shoulder against the frame. He's dressed simply—leather pants, loose shirt unlaced at the throat, bare feet pale against the dark stone. His hair is damp, curling at the ends. He looks tired. Human. Nothing like the monster from the stories.
"The gate was open," I say, which is a lie.
"I always lock it, though truthfully, I don't know why." He steps into the alcove properly, moving with that liquid gracethat shouldn't belong to someone so large and deadly. My pulse quickens at his nearness. "Most people are too afraid of what they'll find in here to bother looking."
"I'm not most people."
"No." His mouth curves, not quite a smile. "You're very much not, little lockpick."
We stare at each other across the small space, the book still clutched in my hands. The smell of his soap reaches my nose first, then his skin, the unique scent of dragon shifter. Smoke and maleness and... things I don't want to dwell on.
"You're the first omega who's come to the library, not that many have survived long enough to make it to the castle in the first place," he says quietly. "The others who survived long enough simply searched for escape routes. Unlocked windows, unguarded doors, passages down the mountain."
"Maybe the others were smarter. What's the point of understanding why you're going to die?"
