Every morning I slip out of his chambers before dawn, while the castle still sleeps and the bond tells me he's somewhere far below, pacing corridors I've learned to avoid. I take the spiral stairs two at a time, past the main stacks with their histories and genealogies, up to the restricted section where the gate stands unlocked now—he stopped pretending I hadn't picked it after the first week.
I read until my eyes blur. Until the candles burn down to stubs and the soft light coming in through the windows shifts, all the way from dawn, to midday, and finally to the amber of late afternoon.
The texts blur together after a while. Curse theory and divine contracts and blood magic so old the pages are worn and oily at the edges from so many fingers touching them.
I'm looking for something—anything—that explains what's happening to my body, why the wounds on my hips have healed into something that doesn't feel like human skin anymore. Every morning I check them in the copper mirror, pressing my fingersagainst the puckered scars, feeling the wrongness of it all. Harder. Tougher. Something other than human.
The books offer no answers. Just more questions, more fragments, more references to texts that were lost or burned or hidden somewhere I haven't found yet.
Two weeks pass like this.
I seehimin glimpses—across the great hall when I'm leaving and he's arriving, in the reflection of a window when he passes behind me, once from the library balcony when he crossed the courtyard below in dragon form, his scales catching the morning light like black mirrors.
We don't speak. Don't acknowledge each other really, though the bond is a constant hum, a tether between us that never stops pulling.
The servants have learned my patterns. They leave food outside the library door, leave fresh clothes folded on the chest in my chambers, leave me alone the way I've made clear I want to be left. I eat when I remember to. Sleep when exhaustion drags me under. Spend the rest of my time hunting through ancient texts for something that will tell me what I am and what I'm becoming.
I find references to "contamination" in three separate volumes, but they all say the same thing: cursed blood mixing with human blood during a claiming is inevitably fatal. No timeline. No symptoms. No survivors to give me a way out of it all.
Just death, written in faded ink like a promise. Making me wonder if this was what took the other omegas—not his violent rut or his blackout beast, but his blood itself, pooling in their bodies and rotting them from the inside out.
I should be more afraid of meeting that end that than I am.
Instead I'm afraid of the other thing I've discovered in these books—the War God's curse buried in the original covenant.Omegas that die in greater numbers with each generation. Krethar didn't just curse the Vhal'kar line; he built a death trap that consumed more with every generation.
Forty-seven women were chained to the altar. Most never made it off. The ones who did died in this castle not long after the claiming.
I'm still here.
And I don't know if that means I'm the answer to a three-hundred-year-old prayer, or just another body the curse hasn't finished killing yet.
-
Three weeks after the altar, I feel my heat coming.
The realization hits me in the library, halfway through a text on divine magic that I've read twice already without absorbing a word. One moment I'm squinting at faded script in the candlelight. The next, the words swim on the page as something hot and restless uncurls in my belly, and I know.
This is it.
I set the book down, admitting that I'm not going to be able to read and remember a single passage.
This is wrong. My heats come every three or four months—regular as seasons, predictable as the moon's phases. I've tracked them since I was sixteen, learned to read the warning signs, learned to disappear into the forest before the worst of it hits.
It's been three weeks. Twenty-three days since the altar, since his blood mixed with mine, since everything changed.
Twenty-three days between heats isn't possible.
Except here I am, feeling the familiar restlessness crawl under my skin. Sounds sharpen until I can hear servants moving three floors below, until the scratch of my own breathing seemstoo loud. The candle flames hurt my eyes. The smell of old paper and leather, usually comforting, turns cloying and thick.
And underneath it all, cutting through everything else: his scent. Smoke and stone and winter wind, drifting up from somewhere far below, wrapping around me like hands I can't escape. The only scent my body wants right now, the scent that I crave, the presence my heat demands.
The bond. It has to be the bond—or the contamination, or whatever his blood is doing to my body. Something is accelerating my cycle, pulling the heat forward like the tide being dragged by the moon.
I make myself breathe. In through my nose, out through my mouth, the way I learned when I started to figure out there was something wrong with me. When the other villagers started looking at me with hatred and fear, when Yaern became my only steadfast friend.
I have time. A day, maybe two, before the fever hits in earnest. Enough time to prepare. To find somewhere safe. To figure out how I'm going to survive this without?—
Without him.
