Chapter Eight #2
Something was bothering me about that day, a suppressed memory.
I chased the thought, following it, sensing that it contained the mystery of who I was, what I was.
“I remember pulling and pushing power. Initially pulling power from my mother, then pushing it. She pulled it from me to try to help me.”
“She was trying to drain your power so you could survive the surge,” Thane said.
I shook my head. “Yes. But that’s not what I mean.” I pressed my fingers into the edge of the table to steady them. “I’ve felt it since then. The same pull. My father visits. He embraces me before he leaves. And every time, there’s a tug. Like something being siphoned.”
The word sat heavily in my mouth.
“I’m exhausted after. The same way I was that first night with my mother. I slept for days after she tried to help me. When he comes, I sleep like that again.”
Malric’s posture shifted. Subtle. Dangerous. “He drains you?”
I nodded. “It feels like that. But I don’t understand how. I don’t have magic. I’ve never been able to do anything.”
The fire snapped in the hearth. Thane went still beside me.
Malric exhaled slowly through his nose. “I need to think.” His voice turned inward, focused. “My mother was an omega. Her gift was foresight. She told me omegas aren’t uniform. Like alphas, their abilities vary. Some are subtle. Some are not.”
“And some are hidden,” Thane added quietly.
I swallowed.
“Would your library have anything?” he asked.
The book.
I straightened. “I have one. A history of omegas. It’s old, but there might be something in it.”
Malric nodded once. “Good. That gives us somewhere to begin. Thane will search the rest of the library for anything related—bonding, siphoning, suppression.”
Suppression. The word landed harder than weapon had.
“We don’t have much time,” Malric continued. “Another spike could hit without warning.”
He paused then, as if hesitant to speak. It seemed to cost him something to bring it forward.
“Aveline,” he said at last, his voice lowered, “what was your mother’s name?”
The question slipped between us without warning. I blinked at him, trying to understand why that was the thing he wanted now.
Her name.
The memory was not gone. It was simply distant, as though it had been wrapped carefully and stored somewhere out of reach. I reached for it anyway. I had always called her Mother, or Mama. Nothing else. But others called her…
“Mairead,” I said slowly. The name seemed both strange and known. “Yes. Queen Mairead.”
Malric stopped moving. He did not look confused. He did not look surprised. He simply went very still.
“Are you certain?” he asked.
“Of course I am. She was my mother,” I snapped before I could take the words back.
Thane shifted beside me. The air around him tightened, charged the way it did before a storm rolled in from the sea.
“And how old are you?” Malric asked.
Thane’s jaw flexed. “What does that have to do with—”
“It’s fine.” I reached for Thane without thinking.
My fingers brushed his arm. The muscle beneath my palm was drawn tight. He stilled when I touched him, the tension easing only slightly, as if he were choosing not to react.
Time.
That was the problem with time.
“There are no markers in the tower,” I said.
“No bells. No servants. Sometimes I look outside and the leaves have changed, and I cannot remember when they began to turn.” I tried to count backward the way I had done a hundred times before.
“I was sixteen when my father brought me here. I believe I have been here ten years.”
Maybe. But I was starting to doubt that.
“So I am twenty-six.”
The number sat heavily between us.
Malric inhaled and released it slowly. His gaze did not leave my face. He was measuring something, fitting pieces together in silence.
Then, I noticed the subtle change in the atmosphere. It felt wrong, even though I didn’t grasp its significance.
“What is it?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. Instead, he lifted his hand. The movement was unhurried. Deliberate. He brushed a strand of hair back from my face, his knuckles grazing my temple. The contact was warm. Solid. Nothing like the distant, careful touches I had known before.
My breath faltered. Not because I feared he would hurt me.
In a short time, I had come to trust these men, though I wasn’t sure why. Deep inside, something told me they were honorable and would protect me.
His hand dropped away, but the warmth lingered where he had touched me.
“Take a bath. Go to your nest. Rest. Read if you’re able. We’ll do the same. We’ll speak again at the next meal.”
They were making a plan. With me. Not around me. Warmth spread through my chest. Not the sharp, blinding rush of the spike. Something steadier. Quieter. They believed me.
“I don’t know who I am,” I said before I could stop myself. “Not if everything I’ve ever been told is a lie. If I’m not what he said, then what am I?”
Silence stretched, but it wasn’t empty. Although I felt his draw, Thane did not advance—the restraint in it.
“Then we start with what we know,” he said. His voice was firm. No softness, but no cruelty either. “You are not a weapon he forged. You’re not a curse that killed your mother.”
My throat tightened.
“You’re an omega,” he continued, steady and certain, “who was imprisoned before she was ever allowed to understand what that means.”
The words settled into me, not like chains.
Like a door cracking open, the word no longer echoed quite so strangely. I had not been locked away because I was dangerous. I had been suppressed. Contained. And whatever had begun to stir within me when they crossed the threshold had not been destruction.
It had been awakening.
Malric
Once Aveline departed, the dining space felt hollow.
Not because the tower had gone silent. Its hum continued, the steady thrum of magic threaded through the stone, the floor, the air itself.
The remnants of our breakfast lay scattered across the table, the dishes not yet reclaimed by the tower.
Morning light poured through the windows, brightening the room and reminding us that time was moving whether we were ready or not.
I remained where I was. Thane did the same, picking at the food on his plate without eating it. Neither of us moved immediately. Some things required silence before they could be spoken.
Above us, water began to move through the tower’s channels.
Not the mechanical rush of pipes. The sound traveled through the stone in a slow rhythm, as if the structure already knew what she needed and had begun preparing it. The tower tending her, the way it must have for years.
Perhaps longer than any of our histories admitted.
“Her mother,” Thane said at last.
“Yes.”
He studied the table, not the dishes, but the worn grain of the wood beneath them. “She didn’t describe draining. She described light. Warmth. A transfer.”
“Maybe.” I considered the way Aveline had spoken about it.
“If her mother was a healer and recognized what was beginning in Aveline before Aveline understood it herself, she may have tried to draw the surge into herself. Not to erase it. To redirect it. To keep it from burning through her daughter.”
Thane looked up. The same conclusion was already forming in his expression.
“She was protecting Aveline,” he said quietly. “She didn’t expect Aveline to be that strong.”
“Yes.” The realization settled into place. “She overwhelmed her mother.”
“And he finished it,” Thane said.
I did not correct him.
Aveline had repeated her father’s story the way someone repeats doctrine. The words had the shape of truth but not its structure. In his version, her mother lingered in pain and he ended it out of mercy. Each detail sat close enough to reality to pass inspection.
Thane’s fingers curled along the edge of the table.
“Is it possible the story is wrong?” he said. “She was young. Something else could have happened.”
“It’s possible. I don’t know how we prove it unless her father admits to it.” I paused. “Did you catch her mother’s name?”
Thane frowned slightly. “Mairead. I don’t remember a Queen Mairead.”
“I do.”
He looked up quickly.
I shifted in my chair so I was facing him directly.
“The king has been married many times. Six that I know of. That is why he gathered omegas. He has spent a century trying to produce an heir. His last omega was human. It failed.”
Thane leaned forward.
“His only heir was born to his first queen,” I continued. “His true mate. Queen Mairead.”
Thane stared at me. “I don’t remember a Queen Mairead.”
“That’s because she died,” I said. “Along with her daughter. Over a century ago.”
The color left his face.
“How is that possible?”
“Fae live long lives,” I said. “The king has lived longer still.” I glanced toward the stairs Aveline had climbed. “She told us herself that time behaves strangely in the tower. It’s possible she sleeps through months. Even years.”
The realization reached him slowly.
“What are you saying?”
“If Aveline’s mother is Queen Mairead and her father is the king, then she is far older than twenty-six.”
He sat very still.
“And she has been imprisoned far longer than ten years.”
Thane leaned back in his chair and stared at the table.
The air in the tower still carried traces of Aveline’s scent through the passages. Softer now than it had been during the spike. Honey threaded with something clean beneath it.
The mark beneath my bracer had not cooled since she sat across from us earlier. She had met two armed warriors without flinching, though she had spent most of her life alone in a tower. She had argued with us when necessary and yielded when it made sense.
I pressed my thumb against the leather bracer.
“She’s beginning to trust us,” I said. “Slowly. And she’s questioning the things she’s been told. I’m not ready to give her this information until we confirm it.”
Thane nodded once. “It’s fragile. If her father comes back, she could retreat into the story he built for her.”