Chapter 8 #2
The numbers climb like a staircase descending into hell. One. Three. Seven. Forty-seven. Each number a woman who walked into the forest, was chained to the altar, and didn't walk out. Each one someone's daughter, someone's sister, someone's friend.
My aunt Isla. Ten years ago. One of his forty-seven.
I remember her hands in the garden, showing me which plants healed and which ones killed.
Remember her laugh, low and warm, when I asked too many questions.
Remember the way she looked at me the morning they took her away—not scared, not yet, just sad.
Like she already knew she wasn't coming back to braid my hair for the spring festival.
Six weeks later, they sent back her belongings. Her mother's ring. A lock of dark hair. A scrap of white fabric stained so dark with her blood that it was almost black.
I close the genealogy and set it aside.
The answers I need aren't in family trees. They're deeper, older, hidden in whatever texts explain why this curse exists at all.
The restricted section is on the second level, tucked into an alcove behind an iron gate worked into the shape of dragons devouring their own tails. Ouroboros—the symbol of endless cycles, of things that consume themselves.
The lock is elaborate. Bronze and silver twisted together in patterns that might be decorative or might be magical, marked with symbols I don't recognize.
I study it for maybe ten seconds.
Then I pull out my knife and get to work.
Some skills you learn when you grow up wild—when you spend your heats alone in the forest because no alpha will touch you and no cage can hold you.
I've slipped into my share of locked rooms, finding places to wait out the heat, stealing what I needed whenever I woke up far from home with an empty stomach and no clothes or provisions.
The lock clicks open in under a minute, and I slip through the gate into shadows that feel older than the rest of the library.
These books are different.
The leather bindings are cracked and flaking with age. The pages look brittle enough to crumble at a breath. Whatever knowledge lives in these texts, someone thought it worth protecting. Worth hiding.
I find what I'm looking for on a high shelf, tucked between volumes of religious philosophy: The War God's Covenant: A History of Divine Curses and Their Costs.
The book is heavy in my hands—heavier than it should be for its size, as if knowledge itself has weight. I carry it to a reading desk where light falls through a high window and open it carefully, mindful of pages that want to stick together after decades of disuse.
The handwriting is archaic, the ink faded to brown in places, but slowly the story takes shape.
Over a thousand years ago, Thorian Vhal'kar faced extinction. His omega mate was barren—no heirs to carry on the bloodline, no children to inherit the throne. Rival lords circled like vultures scenting death. Without an heir, everything Thorian had built would crumble.
In desperation, he prayed to Krethar, the War God.
The god answered.
Krethar offered a rut powerful enough to guarantee conception. Feral. Unstoppable. Primal beyond anything natural shifters experienced. But divine gifts always come with teeth—that's the first thing my grandmother taught me about the gods. Their generosity is never free.
The price was this: the rut would be uncontrollable. The beast would dominate completely during heat and rut, subsuming the human mind beneath animal instinct. And it would require the RIGHT omega to survive—one strong enough to weather what the bearer had become.
A test of worthiness, the text calls it. Divine selection through violence.
Thorian accepted.
But the first omega brought to anchor his cursed rut—a gentle village girl chosen for her calming nature—died within minutes. The second survived long enough to bear him sons before dying in childbirth.
And the curse passed to his children like poison in the blood. Growing worse with each generation.
I flip through pages, piecing together fragments and observations scrawled by different hands across centuries.
With each generation, the curse compounds. The debt owed to Krethar grows rather than shrinks.
The beast grows more desperate with each failed bonding. Desperation feeds the feral nature and causes the beast's rut to escalate in violence and intensity.
Divine magic demands balance—power granted must equal suffering endured.
So that's why. Each generation bears the curse worse than the last because the curse was designed to escalate. A debt that grows instead of shrinking, blood spilling more with each century until forty-seven women have died and still the debt isn't paid.
"Looking for anything in particular?"
I spin so fast the book nearly flies from my hands.
Rhystan stands in the doorway of the restricted section, one shoulder against the frame.
He's dressed simply—leather pants, loose shirt unlaced at the throat, bare feet pale against the dark stone.
His hair is damp, curling at the ends. He looks tired.
Human. Nothing like the monster from the stories.
"The gate was open," I say, which is a lie.
"I always lock it, though truthfully, I don't know why." He steps into the alcove properly, moving with that liquid grace that shouldn't belong to someone so large and deadly. My pulse quickens at his nearness. "Most people are too afraid of what they'll find in here to bother looking."
"I'm not most people."
"No." His mouth curves, not quite a smile. "You're very much not, little lockpick."
We stare at each other across the small space, the book still clutched in my hands. The smell of his soap reaches my nose first, then his skin, the unique scent of dragon shifter. Smoke and maleness and... things I don't want to dwell on.
"You're the first omega who's come to the library, not that many have survived long enough to make it to the castle in the first place," he says quietly. "The others who survived long enough simply searched for escape routes. Unlocked windows, unguarded doors, passages down the mountain."
"Maybe the others were smarter. What's the point of understanding why you're going to die?"
"You're not going to die."
"You don't know that."
"No," he admits. "But you've survived more than any omega before you.
The others who made it this far could barely walk, and they were all afraid of me.
You're still standing, still fighting, still looking at me like you're planning my murder instead of your escape.
" Something flickers in his golden eyes.
"There's something different about you, Kessa. "
The sound of my name in his mouth makes my heart skip a beat. I hate it. "My grandmother always said I'm stubborn as all get out. Maybe I'm just too stubborn to die." I tap the book in my hands. "Your family has an interesting history."
"My family has a curse." He moves closer, bringing his scent with him, his warmth and the massive scale of his body.
I hate how my pulse quickens at his nearness, at the memory of his broad hands holding me down, the taste of his skin on my tongue and the way his hips snapped as he found his pleasure in my body—and I found mine in his claiming of it.
"You read about my great-grandfather's bargain with the War God yet? "
"It was the story I was looking for. He started all this.
" I watch his face as I speak. "Fertility in exchange for a feral rut.
Divine magic with a price that keeps getting higher.
Your great-grandfather killed one omega.
Your grandfather killed three. Your father killed seven. " I pause. "You've killed forty-seven."
Something flickers in his golden eyes. Pain, or exhaustion so deep it's carved channels in his soul.
"Three hundred years," he says softly. "Forty-seven omegas. I wish I could stop counting them, but they settle inside me so deep that I'll never forget."
"Seven to forty-seven is a big leap in number. Why has it gotten so much worse?"
"I don't know." He runs a hand through his damp hair—such a human gesture, so ordinary and simple for such a long-lived and powerful beast. "I've read every text in this library trying to answer that question.
The curse grows stronger with each generation.
The beast grows more feral with each failed bonding.
But why I'm so much worse than my ancestors.
.." He stops. Swallows something bitter. "I don't know."
"My aunt," I say into the silence.
He goes absolutely still.
"She was one of your forty-seven. Ten years ago. The tribute from the border villages."
The silence stretches between us.
"Isla," he says finally, barely a whisper. "Her name was Isla. Dark hair. Kind eyes. Hands that smelled like growing things."
The fact that he remembers—knows her name without hesitation, knows details I'd nearly forgotten—does something strange to my chest.
"She lasted longer than most, long enough to make it back to the castle like you," he continues, something broken in his voice. "Two days. I thought—I let myself hope she might be the one. She talked to me during the quiet moments. Told me about her garden. About the niece she was leaving behind."
His throat works, but no sound comes out.
"Then I smelled her blood, and my rut hit again. And I couldn't—she couldn't—"
He can't finish. Doesn't need to. I've read enough now to understand what the curse does during rut, how even the strongest omegas break beneath its weight.
I should feel vindicated. Should feel satisfaction that he's suffering, that Isla's death haunts him like it haunts me. It only seems fair that the lives he's taken weigh heavy on him.
Instead I just feel tired. Bone-deep exhausted by grief that's ten years old and still sharp enough to cut.
"Your mother," I say, changing the subject because I can't carry his grief on top of my own. "The book mentioned she died during your first rut."