We walk back together, close enough that our shoulders brush occasionally, and I don't pull away. The bond hums between us—still muffled, still wrong somehow—but underneath that wrongness, something stronger. Something that feels like the beginning of trust.
My stomach is ravenous now, the nausea burned away by exertion. I could eat an entire deer by myself. Maybe two.
Strange, how the mornings make me sick and the afternoons make me starving. Strange, how my body has started operating by rules I don't recognize.
But the strangeness feels less frightening when he's walking beside me, matching his pace to mine, his presence steady and warm at the edge of my awareness.
Two monsters who found each other in the dark.
Maybe that's enough.
18
Kess
I wakein the dark with hunger clawing at my stomach like a living thing.
The moon is high outside my window, silver light pooling on the stone floor, and my belly cramps with a need so fierce it drags me out of bed before I'm fully awake. I've been keeping food in my chambers—old habit from the early days when I didn't trust the servants, didn't trust anyone, hoarded dried meat and hard cheese in a storage alcove down the corridor like a squirrel preparing for winter.
I haven't needed the stash in weeks. But tonight my body doesn't care about trust or progress or any of the fragile bridges I've been building with the monster down the hall. Tonight my body wants food, now, immediately, and it's not interested in waiting for morning.
I pull on a robe and slip into the corridor, bare feet silent on cold stone. The castle sleeps around me, torches guttering low in their sconces, shadows pooling in corners like spilled ink. I know the way to my hiding spot by memory now—third door on the left, the one with the rusty hinges that squeaks if you open it too fast.
The storage room is small and dusty, cluttered with old furniture and moth-eaten tapestries that no one's touched in decades. My food cache is behind a cracked armoire, tucked into a hollow where the wall meets the floor. I crouch down and reach for it, fingers finding familiar shapes in the darkness—the wrapped bundle of dried venison, the wheel of hard cheese, the apples I stole from the kitchens last week.
My hand brushes something else. Something that wasn't there before.
I go still.
Slowly, carefully, I feel along the shape of it. Leather. Paper. The unmistakable weight of books, stacked in a pile and shoved into the hollow like someone was hiding them in a hurry.
My heart begins to pound.
I drag the pile out into the thin moonlight filtering through the room's single window, and my breath catches when I see what I'm holding.
Books. Old ones, their spines cracked with age, their covers stamped with symbols I recognize from the archives. These are from the restricted section—the texts about bloodlines and curses and contamination that I've been searching for, the ones with gaps on the shelves like missing teeth.
Someone hid them here.
Someone didn't want them found.
I carry the books back to my chambers, hunger forgotten, and light every candle I own before settling cross-legged on my bed to read.
The first book is a genealogy of omega bloodlines, and the margins are full of handwritten notes in cramped, hurried script—the writing of someone afraid of being caught.
The cursed bloodlines need wild mates. This is what the priests won't tell you.
I turn pages with trembling fingers, devouring the words like my body wanted to devour food an hour ago.
When the War God marks an alpha bloodline with divine fury, it changes them. Makes them feral. Too strong for gentle partners. The beast recognizes soft omegas as prey, not mate. They cannot help but destroy what they're trying to protect.
I knew this already—lived it, watched forty-seven names carved in gold because of it. But the next lines make my blood run cold.
The priests say the curse is punishment. They're wrong. It's a TEST. The gods breed cursed alphas to flush warrior omegas from hiding. Only wild blood can metabolize divine rage. Only a warrior can survive the claiming, can transform contamination into power instead of dying from it.
My hands are shaking now. I force myself to keep reading.
We proved curses could be ENDED through proper bonding. The feral beast quieted, the bloodline stabilized, the suffering stopped. That threatened everything.
