I learn the servants' names. Bessa who brings my breakfast and never meets my eyes. Old Daven who tends the fires and pretends not to watch me from the corners of rooms.
"Little wolf," he calls me one morning, catching me in the hallway before dawn. His voice is rough as gravel, his eyes sharp despite his age. "You're up early."
"Couldn't sleep."
"Mm." He studies me for a moment, something knowing in his gaze. "The old king—Rhystan's grandfather—he had a wolfonce. Mean thing. Bit anyone who came near." A pause. "Except him. Followed him everywhere like a shadow."
I don't know what to say to that.
"Just an old man's rambling," Daven says, and shuffles past me toward the kitchens.
I watch him go, unsettled in ways I can't name. The cook who leaves honeycakes outside my door some mornings, still warm.
I learn the guards too. Carter is the youngest—barely a century old, delighted to have a sparring partner who challenges him.
"You fight dirty," he tells me after I sweep his legs out from under him for the third time in one session.
"I fight to win."
"Same thing?" He grins up at me from the ground, making no move to get up.
"If you have to ask, you've never been in a real fight."
"Ouch." He clutches his chest in mock offense. "The lady wounds me."
"Not yet. But keep dropping your guard and I will."
He laughs—actually laughs—and something in my chest loosens. I'd forgotten what it felt like to have something like a friend.
Corvith runs the household with quiet efficiency, ancient eyes that see everything. Sera guards the east wing and whistles while she walks. Tomren lost three fingers in a battle he won't discuss.
Dragon shifters, all of them. Serving their cursed king for decades or centuries.
None of them look at me like I'm already dead.
I watch my body change.
The scars harden until they're smooth as polished stone. My reflexes sharpen until I'm reading Carter's strikes before hecommits to them. I'm faster than I was. Stronger. Something taking shape beneath my skin that I don't have a name for.
The changes should frighten me.
They don't.
If my bloodline is doing what it was born to do—surviving, changing, becoming something that can stand beside a cursed alpha instead of dying beneath one—then I'm not broken. Never was.
I'm becoming what I was always meant to be.
I visit the memorial hall once, late at night when sleep won't come.
Forty-seven names in gold. Forty-seven omegas who walked into the sacred grove and didn't walk out. I read them by moonlight—Sina, Lyra, Denna, name after name. Looking for patterns. Looking for anything that explains why I survived when they didn't.
My aunt's marker is near the end. Isla. A small lily carved beneath her name.
I touch the letters and remember her hands in the garden. Her laugh. The day the elders came and she went without fighting because that's what docile omegas do.
She lasted two days.
I've lasted weeks.
