Chapter 11 Kess
Kess
The archives are missing exactly what I need, and I suspect that's by design.
I've been back every day since I found the War God's Covenant, working my way through the restricted section shelf by shelf. Looking for more about the curse, about what happens to omegas who survive the claiming, about why my body is changing in ways I don't understand.
But the texts I need aren't here.
I noticed it three days ago. Gaps in the shelves where books should be—dust outlines showing where volumes sat for decades before being removed.
References in one text to another that doesn't exist anywhere I can find.
A index listing twelve treatises on omega bloodlines, but only four remaining on the shelves.
Someone cleaned this place out. Recently, by the freshness of the disturbance in the dust.
I pull down another crumbling journal, older than the others, hidden behind a row of genealogies like someone shoved it there and forgot about it. The leather binding flakes under my fingers.
Omega Classifications and Their Traits, the title page reads. A Comprehensive Study.
Most of it is standard breeding documentation. Docile bloodlines producing docile daughters. Which families threw strong heats, which ones bonded easily, which ones gave their alphas sons. The dry observations of someone who viewed omegas as broodmares.
Then, mentioned almost as an afterthought on a water-damaged page:
Warrior bloodlines, descended from the old families of the southern forests, possess traits unsuited to civilized bonding. They do not soothe. They challenge. Their heats bring rage instead of submission.
I read it three times.
Warrior bloodlines.
My grandmother's stories. The way she described our family—wild, she called us. Different. The reason we had to hide.
The text continues, though parts are damaged:
These bloodlines were valued in earlier times when omegas fought beside their alphas in territorial wars. They could withstand—
The page ends there. Torn cleanly, deliberately. The next page discusses something unrelated entirely.
I want to scream.
Someone destroyed the information about what warrior omegas could withstand. What they could survive. And based on the gaps I'm finding, someone removed whatever texts might have filled in those missing pieces.
Recently.
While I've been here researching.
I keep searching. Climb ladders that groan under my weight, pull down texts from high shelves, send dust raining onto my hair. Looking for anything they might have missed.
Most of what I find is fragments. A sentence here, a paragraph there. Patterns emerging from the gaps like a picture forming from scattered pieces.
Warrior omegas were common three hundred years ago. They fought. They bonded with powerful alphas. They thrived.
Then, around two hundred eighty years ago, the records stop.
Not gradually. They just disappear.
One text references something called "the purges" but the pages that would explain it have been torn out. Another mentions "eradication of wild bloodlines" but the context is missing. A third describes warrior omegas as "too dangerous to control" but doesn't say what was done about it.
Someone wanted this history erased. And someone else—recently—made sure I wouldn't find the details.
Rhystan.
It has to be. He's the only one who would have known I was researching here. The only one with authority to remove texts from his own archives.
The thought sits heavy in my chest. He's hiding something from me. Something about what I am, or what's happening to me, or both.
I find one more passage in a text so old the binding has disintegrated—just loose pages wrapped in rotting leather:
The ancient bloodlines were forged in violence. Omega warriors who bonded with cursed alphas, who drank their blood in battle, who survived what would kill lesser omegas.
Survived what would kill lesser omegas.
My aunt lasted two days. The omega before her, four. Forty-seven dead in three hundred years, most of them within a week of the claiming.
I've lasted over three weeks.
Whatever warrior bloodline means, whatever my grandmother was protecting when she taught me to fight and hide—it's keeping me alive. It's why I survived the altar when docile omegas didn't.
But surviving isn't the same as unchanged.
I touch the scars on my hips through my shirt. They've grown harder over the past weeks. Tougher. When I tested them with a blade two days ago, it took twice the pressure it should have to draw blood.
Something is happening to me.
And Rhystan knows what it is. Has to know—he's had three hundred years to research his own curse, and he removed the texts that would tell me what I'm becoming.
I should confront him. Demand answers.
But then I'd have to talk to him. Look at him. Acknowledge the bond that pulls at me every time I sense him nearby.
Not yet.
I'll figure this out myself.
Three weeks become four. Then five.
I fall into a rhythm I never expected. Training with Carter every morning until my muscles burn, combing through what's left of the archives every afternoon, eating dinner alone while the bond hums quiet dissatisfaction in my chest.
The castle stops feeling like a prison.
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 wolf once. 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 he commits 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.
I leave before dawn and don't go back.
We circle each other, Rhystan and I. Pass in hallways with careful nods. Exist in the same castle without ever occupying the same room.
Until we do.
Four weeks in, I round a corner and nearly collide with him. Close enough to see the gold flecks in his eyes, to smell smoke and something wilder underneath. Close enough to touch.
We both freeze.
"Kess." My name in his mouth, rough and low.
"Rhystan."
Silence stretches between us. The bond screams at me to close the distance, to press myself against him, to—
"You've been in the archives," he says.
"You've been watching me train."
Something flickers across his face. "I watch everything in my castle."
"Everything?" I hold his gaze. "Or just me?"
He doesn't answer. Doesn't have to. The bond tells me what his face won't—want, guilt, that desperate restraint that's costing him as much as it's costing me.
"Excuse me," I say, and step around him.
His hand twitches like he wants to reach for me. He doesn't.
I keep walking. Don't look back.
But I feel his eyes on me until I turn the corner, and my hands are shaking by the time I reach my chambers.
The bond hates the distance between us.
That invisible thread between us pulls taut every time I sense him nearby, demanding I close the distance. My body remembers what my mind is trying to forget—his hands on my hips, his teeth in my shoulder, the devastating fullness of his knot locking us together.
I ignore it.
He watches me train sometimes. I feel his gaze from the shadows, that weight of attention that makes my skin prickle. He never approaches. Never speaks. Just watches, then disappears before I can decide whether to acknowledge him.
Some nights I feel him outside my door. Standing there in the dark, not knocking. The bond singing between us like a plucked string.
I pretend to be asleep.
He pretends not to be there.
We're both good at pretending.
But pretending doesn't change what I feel through the bond—his guilt, his want, the careful distance he maintains like penance. Doesn't change the way my body responds to his proximity, heat pooling low in my belly even when my mind is screaming at me to stay away.
Doesn't change the fact that I want him.
Hate that I want him.
Can't stop wanting him.
I throw myself into training instead. Push Carter harder, spar until my arms shake and my lungs burn, until I'm too exhausted to think about golden eyes and scarred hands and the memory of being so full I couldn't breathe.
It doesn't help.
Nothing helps.
Five weeks after my heat, I find the last fragment.
It's tucked into the back of a hollowed-out book on agricultural law—hidden, not removed. Someone wanted this preserved even as they destroyed everything else.
A single page, edges charred like it was pulled from a fire.
On the matter of contamination, the heading reads.
My heart stops.
When cursed alpha blood enters an omega through wounds rather than being taken willingly, the taint spreads through her like poison through water. In docile bloodlines, such contamination brings swift death.
Warrior bloodlines show resistance. Their blood fights the curse rather than succumbing to it. In rare cases—
The page is burned from there. Just black char where the rest should be.
Rare cases.
Rare cases what?
I read what's there again. And again. Trying to pull meaning from the damaged words.
Contamination. His blood mixing with mine through the wounds on my hips. His curse seeping into me while I bit his throat and swallowed him down.
Docile omegas die from it. Warrior omegas resist.
But what happens after that? What are the rare cases? What am I turning into?
The answers have been removed or burned.
Someone wanted me to survive without understanding why.
Someone wanted me in the dark.
I fold the page carefully and tuck it into my shirt, against my skin where no one will find it.
Then I go find Carter.
If I can't have answers, I'll have violence instead.
"You're fighting angry today."
Carter blocks my strike but barely, stumbling back two steps. We've been at it for an hour already, both of us soaked in sweat despite the cool morning air.
"I'm always angry."
"More than usual." He resets his stance, sword raised. "Want to talk about it?"
"No."
I attack instead of explaining. Drive him back across the training yard with strikes that come faster than they should, faster than I could manage even a week ago. My body knows things my mind hasn't caught up to yet.
Whatever's happening to me, it's happening faster now.
Carter yields when I disarm him for the third time, shaking out his wrist with a rueful grin. "I think you cracked something."
"You'll heal."
"Cold." But he's still smiling. "Same time tomorrow?"
I nod and turn away before I have to make conversation. Before I have to pretend I'm fine, that I'm not changing into something I don't understand, that I'm not furious at a king who's hiding answers I need.
The bond tugs at me as I cross the courtyard.
He's watching. I can feel him in the shadows of the eastern colonnade, that weight of golden eyes on my back. And then his scent hits me—smoke and cedar and something darker underneath, something that makes my thighs clench and my pulse jump no matter how much I hate it.
I don't turn around.
Don't acknowledge him.
But my body remembers. The scrape of his stubble against my throat. The bruising grip of his hands on my hips. The way he filled me so completely I couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't do anything but take what he gave me and beg for more.
I keep walking. Force my legs to move even as heat pools low in my belly, even as slick threatens to gather between my thighs.
The hidden page presses against my skin like a secret. Like a weapon I'm not ready to use yet.
He removed those texts. I'm sure of it now. Cleaned out everything that might tell me what I'm becoming, what his blood is doing to me, whether I'm dying slow or turning into something else entirely.
He's keeping me in the dark.
And I'm going to find out why.
Five weeks since my heat. Five weeks of training and research and changes I can't explain. Five weeks of wanting a monster I should be trying to kill.
The bond hums between us as I walk away from his hidden gaze. I feel him track my movement, feel the weight of his attention like hands on my skin.
I ignore it.
For now.