Chapter 9
Kess
The library becomes my refuge from my shame and my anger.
Every morning I slip out of his chambers before dawn, while the castle still sleeps and the bond tells me he's somewhere far below, pacing corridors I've learned to avoid.
I take the spiral stairs two at a time, past the main stacks with their histories and genealogies, up to the restricted section where the gate stands unlocked now—he stopped pretending I hadn't picked it after the first week.
I read until my eyes blur. Until the candles burn down to stubs and the soft light coming in through the windows shifts, all the way from dawn, to midday, and finally to the amber of late afternoon.
The texts blur together after a while. Curse theory and divine contracts and blood magic so old the pages are worn and oily at the edges from so many fingers touching them.
I'm looking for something—anything—that explains what's happening to my body, why the wounds on my hips have healed into something that doesn't feel like human skin anymore.
Every morning I check them in the copper mirror, pressing my fingers against the puckered scars, feeling the wrongness of it all.
Harder. Tougher. Something other than human.
The books offer no answers. Just more questions, more fragments, more references to texts that were lost or burned or hidden somewhere I haven't found yet.
Two weeks pass like this.
I see him in glimpses—across the great hall when I'm leaving and he's arriving, in the reflection of a window when he passes behind me, once from the library balcony when he crossed the courtyard below in dragon form, his scales catching the morning light like black mirrors.
We don't speak. Don't acknowledge each other really, though the bond is a constant hum, a tether between us that never stops pulling.
The servants have learned my patterns. They leave food outside the library door, leave fresh clothes folded on the chest in my chambers, leave me alone the way I've made clear I want to be left.
I eat when I remember to. Sleep when exhaustion drags me under.
Spend the rest of my time hunting through ancient texts for something that will tell me what I am and what I'm becoming.
I find references to "contamination" in three separate volumes, but they all say the same thing: cursed blood mixing with human blood during a claiming is inevitably fatal. No timeline. No symptoms. No survivors to give me a way out of it all.
Just death, written in faded ink like a promise. Making me wonder if this was what took the other omegas—not his violent rut or his blackout beast, but his blood itself, pooling in their bodies and rotting them from the inside out.
I should be more afraid of meeting that end that than I am.
Instead I'm afraid of the other thing I've discovered in these books—the War God's curse buried in the original covenant. Omegas that die in greater numbers with each generation. Krethar didn't just curse the Vhal'kar line; he built a death trap that consumed more with every generation.
Forty-seven women were chained to the altar. Most never made it off. The ones who did died in this castle not long after the claiming.
I'm still here.
And I don't know if that means I'm the answer to a three-hundred-year-old prayer, or just another body the curse hasn't finished killing yet.
-
Three weeks after the altar, I feel my heat coming.
The realization hits me in the library, halfway through a text on divine magic that I've read twice already without absorbing a word. One moment I'm squinting at faded script in the candlelight. The next, the words swim on the page as something hot and restless uncurls in my belly, and I know.
This is it.
I set the book down, admitting that I'm not going to be able to read and remember a single passage.
This is wrong. My heats come every three or four months—regular as seasons, predictable as the moon's phases. I've tracked them since I was sixteen, learned to read the warning signs, learned to disappear into the forest before the worst of it hits.
It's been three weeks. Twenty-three days since the altar, since his blood mixed with mine, since everything changed.
Twenty-three days between heats isn't possible.
Except here I am, feeling the familiar restlessness crawl under my skin.
Sounds sharpen until I can hear servants moving three floors below, until the scratch of my own breathing seems too loud.
The candle flames hurt my eyes. The smell of old paper and leather, usually comforting, turns cloying and thick.
And underneath it all, cutting through everything else: his scent. Smoke and stone and winter wind, drifting up from somewhere far below, wrapping around me like hands I can't escape. The only scent my body wants right now, the scent that I crave, the presence my heat demands.
The bond. It has to be the bond—or the contamination, or whatever his blood is doing to my body. Something is accelerating my cycle, pulling the heat forward like the tide being dragged by the moon.
I make myself breathe. In through my nose, out through my mouth, the way I learned when I started to figure out there was something wrong with me. When the other villagers started looking at me with hatred and fear, when Yaern became my only steadfast friend.
I have time. A day, maybe two, before the fever hits in earnest. Enough time to prepare. To find somewhere safe. To figure out how I'm going to survive this without—
Without him.
The thought of going to him makes something twist in my chest, something more complicated than simple desire or shame.
The memory of his arms around me after the altar, gentle in the aftermath of violence.
The memory of his voice in the library, telling me about his mother with his reflection ghosting in the window glass.
I don't want to want him.
But my body remembers what happened on that altar. Remembers and wants it again with a ferocity that terrifies me.
I leave the library without bothering to reshelve the books.
-
I spend the next two days inventing ways to avoid someone in their own home.
I stay in my chambers with the door locked—not that a lock would stop him if he really wanted in, but leaving it unlocked is unthinkable.
I pace back and forth until I've worn a visible path in the thick red rugs.
I try to eat, but nothing tastes right, everything too strong or too bland or too something.
I strip down and examine the scars on my hips like they'll reveal something new to me, when they're the same as they've been for weeks, shiny and hard and too thick.
I press my fingers against the largest scar and feel my pulse beating beneath it, steady and strong. Whatever the contamination is doing to me, it hasn't killed me yet. Hasn't even slowed me down.
Maybe the books are wrong.
Or maybe I'm just dying slower than the others did.
The heat builds in agonizing waves. Restlessness on the first day, a constant low-grade agitation that makes it impossible to sit still.
Fever on the second, sweat dampening my hairline and pooling in the hollows of my collarbones.
By the morning of the third day, I'm pacing in nothing but a thin shift because even that much fabric against my skin feels like too much, like sandpaper, like fire.
The bond pulses between us with every beat of my heart, reminding me that there's a way out of all this now.
I can feel him somewhere below, his presence like an anchor on my heart. His rut is rising to answer my heat, and I can sense it through the bond, can feel the beast stirring in him the way something feral is stirring in me.
I told myself I wouldn't go to him, that I would ride this out alone the way I've ridden out every heat since I was sixteen.
In caves and abandoned barns and deep in the forest where no one could find me, where I could let the red haze take me and wake up days later with blood under my nails and no memory of what I'd done.
But during those heats I blacked out, losing hours, sometimes days, my conscious mind retreating while my body did whatever it needed to survive. The darkness was a mercy. A refuge. The only way I knew to endure the howling emptiness that no amount of my own touch could fill.
This time is different. For some reason—probably the bond—I'm conscious and aware, present for every wave of need that crashes through me, every pulse of want that tightens my belly and slicks my thighs. The bond won't let me retreat into darkness. Won't let me escape.
This time I have to feel all of it.
And know that somewhere, not far from me, he's waiting for me to break.
-
The fever hits on the third day like a fist to the stomach.
One moment I'm pacing back and forth, miserable but managing. The next, heat crashes over me and I'm on my knees, hands flat against cold stone, gasping for breath while fire blazes through my blood.
I make it to the bed on shaking legs. The sheets are cool against my fever-hot skin but it's not enough—nothing is enough.
The bond pulls at me, insistent and demanding, pulling me toward him with a force that makes my chest ache.
I can feel him through it. His presence is like a fire burning somewhere below, heat I can sense through stone and distance.
His scent reaches me even through closed doors—smoke and stone and something that makes my mouth water, makes slick flood between my thighs, makes every instinct I possess scream mate mate mate.
I press my face into the pillow and try to breathe through it. Try to think about anything except the emptiness yawning inside me, the desperate need for something to fill it.
My grandmother's voice echoes in my memory: You're not like the other omegas, Kessa. Your blood is older. Wilder. The heats will be harder for you, but you're strong enough to survive them.
She never told me what to do when the heat was amplified by a bond I didn't choose. Never told me how to survive this.