Someone destroyed the information about what warrior omegas could withstand. What they could survive. And based on the gaps I'm finding, someone removed whatever texts might have filled in those missing pieces.
Recently.
While I've been here researching.
I keep searching. Climb ladders that groan under my weight, pull down texts from high shelves, send dust raining onto my hair. Looking for anything they might have missed.
Most of what I find is fragments. A sentence here, a paragraph there. Patterns emerging from the gaps like a picture forming from scattered pieces.
Warrior omegas were common three hundred years ago. They fought. They bonded with powerful alphas. They thrived.
Then, around two hundred eighty years ago, the records stop.
Not gradually. They just disappear.
One text references something called "the purges" but the pages that would explain it have been torn out. Another mentions "eradication of wild bloodlines" but the context is missing. A third describes warrior omegas as "too dangerous to control" but doesn't say what was done about it.
Someone wanted this history erased. And someone else—recently—made sure I wouldn't find the details.
Rhystan.
It has to be. He's the only one who would have known I was researching here. The only one with authority to remove texts from his own archives.
The thought sits heavy in my chest. He's hiding something from me. Something about what I am, or what's happening to me, or both.
I find one more passage in a text so old the binding has disintegrated—just loose pages wrapped in rotting leather:
The ancient bloodlines were forged in violence. Omega warriors who bonded with cursed alphas, who drank their blood in battle, who survived what would kill lesser omegas.
Survived what would kill lesser omegas.
My aunt lasted two days. The omega before her, four. Forty-seven dead in three hundred years, most of them within a week of the claiming.
I've lasted over three weeks.
Whatever warrior bloodline means, whatever my grandmother was protecting when she taught me to fight andhide—it's keeping me alive. It's why I survived the altar when docile omegas didn't.
But surviving isn't the same as unchanged.
I touch the scars on my hips through my shirt. They've grown harder over the past weeks. Tougher. When I tested them with a blade two days ago, it took twice the pressure it should have to draw blood.
Something is happening to me.
And Rhystan knows what it is. Has to know—he's had three hundred years to research his own curse, and he removed the texts that would tell me what I'm becoming.
I should confront him. Demand answers.
But then I'd have to talk to him. Look at him. Acknowledge the bond that pulls at me every time I sense him nearby.
Not yet.
I'll figure this out myself.
Three weeks become four. Then five.
I fall into a rhythm I never expected. Training with Carter every morning until my muscles burn, combing through what's left of the archives every afternoon, eating dinner alone while the bond hums quiet dissatisfaction in my chest.
The castle stops feeling like a prison.
