Chapter 18 Kess
Kess
I wake in 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.
If curses can be broken, the War God's priests lose their greatest weapon. Berserker blood—the elixir that makes soldiers into monsters—comes from alpha suffering. From maintained curses. From omegas dying year after year while the curse stays deliberately intact.
So they burned our records. Hunted our families to extinction. Made sure cursed alphas kept suffering, kept killing, kept producing the blood that builds empires.
The writing becomes more erratic, letters slanting wildly.
Forty-seven omegas have died in the Vhal'kar claiming grounds. Every single one was chosen by the priests. Every single one was selected to FAIL.
They're not tributes. They're sacrifices.
I set the book down because my hands are shaking too hard to hold it.
Forty-seven omegas. Forty-seven names Rhystan carved with his own bleeding hands. Forty-seven deaths he carries like stones in his pockets, drowning in guilt for three hundred years.
And every single one was deliberate murder.
The priests knew gentle omegas would die. Selected them specifically because they would die. Kept the curse active, kept Rhystan suffering, kept his blood potent for their war machine.
Three hundred years of calculated cruelty dressed up as divine will.
Three hundred years of a man believing he was a monster when he was actually a victim.
And someone hid these books. Someone didn't want this truth found.
I think about the gaps in the archive shelves. The dust outlines showing where volumes sat for decades before being removed. The way Rhystan always seems to know when I've been researching, always appears with tea and careful questions about what I've found.
He hid these books.
He knows.
He knows what I am, knows about warrior omegas, knows the priests engineered his suffering—and he's been keeping it from me.
The rage that floods through me is hot and clean and clarifying, burning away everything else until there's nothing left but fury.
I find him in his study, bent over texts by candlelight, and I don't bother knocking.
The door crashes open and he's on his feet in an instant, golden eyes flashing, body tensing for a threat. When he sees it's me, something in his expression shifts—relief, then wariness, then something that looks almost like fear when he sees what I'm carrying.
The books. His hidden books.
"Kess—"
"You knew." I throw the genealogy text onto his desk, pages splaying open to those damning margins. "You knew what I was. You knew about warrior omegas, about the priests, about all of it. And you hid it from me."
He doesn't deny it. Doesn't try to explain or excuse. Just stands there, shoulders tense, jaw tight, looking at me like I'm a blade aimed at his throat.
"How long?" My voice comes out raw, scraped rough by betrayal. "How long have you known?"
"Since the beginning." The words fall between us like stones. "Since you survived the first claiming. No docile omega could have lived through that. I knew what you had to be."
"And you said nothing."
"I was trying to protect you."
"From what?" I step closer, close enough to see the guilt carved into the lines of his face. "From the truth about my own bloodline? From knowing that your suffering was engineered? From understanding that those forty-seven omegas were murdered by priests who wanted you broken?"
He flinches like I've struck him.
"Yes," he says quietly. "From all of it. You already carry so much—the contamination, the transformation, the knowledge that you're becoming something the world tried to erase. I didn't want to add the weight of my guilt to your burden."
"That wasn't your choice to make."
"I know." He looks away, throat working. "I know. I just—I couldn't bear the thought of you looking at me and seeing what I see. A man too weak to save any of them. A king who let his priests send forty-seven women to their deaths because he was too broken to question why they kept dying."
"You didn't know—"
"I should have." His voice cracks. "Three hundred years, Kess.
Three hundred years of watching them die, and I never once questioned why the priests kept sending the same kind of omega.
Never demanded to see the selection records.
Never looked for patterns. I was so convinced I was the monster that I never thought to look for the men who made me one. "
The rage is still there, banked but burning. But underneath it, something else is stirring—something that aches for this broken man who's spent centuries blaming himself for crimes committed against him.
"What else are you hiding?" I ask. "What else haven't you told me?"
He's quiet for a long moment. Too long. Something moves behind his eyes—a calculation, a decision being made about what to give me and what to keep.
"The contamination is changing you faster than it should," he finally says. "Your heats are coming too frequently, burning too hot. The transformation is accelerating, and I don't fully understand why."
"I know that. I've been living it." I cross my arms over my chest. "What else?"
"That's all I know for certain." He meets my eyes, and I can't tell if he's lying. "The rest is fragments. Speculation. Things I'm still trying to piece together."
But his jaw is tight, and his hands have curled into fists at his sides, and I know—I know—there's more. Something he's decided I don't need to know. Something he thinks he's protecting me from.
Not just the truth about what I am. Something bigger. Something about what I could do, maybe. What I could become. What it might cost me.
He's always trying to protect me from costs. From risks. From anything that might hurt me, even if I'd choose to take that hurt willingly.
It's infuriating. It's also, in a twisted way, the most loving thing anyone's ever done for me.
I want to push harder. Want to crack him open and spill out every secret he's keeping. But I'm tired—bone-deep exhausted from the rage and the revelations and the weight of everything I've learned tonight.
And part of me understands. He's spent three hundred years watching omegas die for him, because of him. Of course he'd rather carry the weight alone than risk putting any of it on me.
Even if I'm strong enough to bear it.
Even if bearing it together is the whole point.
"No more secrets," I say. "About what I am, about the priests, about any of it. If you find something, you tell me. If you suspect something, you tell me. I'm not a fragile thing that needs protecting from hard truths."
Something flickers across his face—guilt, maybe, or fear. "I know you're not."
"Then trust me with the hard things. Even the ones you think might hurt me." I hold his gaze. "I'd rather know and choose than be kept in the dark."
He's quiet for a long moment. Then, softly: "What if knowing puts you in danger? What if the truth comes with a cost I'm not willing to let you pay?"
There it is. The thing underneath all his careful protection.
He's not just hiding information. He's hiding a choice. Something I could do, some risk I could take, some sacrifice I could make—and he's decided for me that I won't.
"That's not your decision," I say. "What I risk, what I sacrifice, what I choose to do with my own life—that's mine. Not yours."
"I know." His voice is rough, cracked. "I know it's not my right. But I can't—" He stops, swallows hard. "I've watched forty-seven women die because of me. Because of what I am, what I carry. I won't add you to that number. I won't let you destroy yourself trying to save me."
The words hang between us, heavy with meaning he didn't quite intend to reveal.
Trying to save him.
There's something in those texts—something he found, something he's hiding—about how warrior omegas can save cursed alphas. About what it might cost. And he's decided I'm not going to pay that price.
I file the information away for later. Another thread to pull, another secret to unravel.
"I'm not planning on destroying myself," I say carefully. "But I'm also not planning on letting you make my choices for me. We clear?"
He nods slowly, and something in his expression eases—but not completely. There's still something guarded behind his eyes, something he's holding back. More than one secret, I think. Layers of them, built up over weeks of watching me change and refusing to tell me why.
"I'm going back to bed," I say. "We can talk more tomorrow."
"Of course." He hesitates, then: "Kess? Thank you. For confronting me instead of just... leaving."
"Where would I go?" The question comes out softer than I intended. "This is my home now. You're my—" I stop, not sure what word fits. Mate? Partner? The monster I'm learning to love?
"Yours," he says quietly. "Whatever word you want to use. I'm yours."
I leave before I can say something I'm not ready to say, walking back through quiet corridors to my chambers, my mind churning with everything I've learned.
The priests engineered three hundred years of suffering. They sent forty-seven omegas to die deliberately, needing them to die so the curse would stay active.
Rhystan hid the truth because he was trying to protect me. Wrong, but understandable.
And there's still something he's not telling me. I felt it in the gaps between his words, saw it in the way he couldn't quite meet my eyes. More secrets, buried deeper than the ones I dug up tonight.
I climb back into bed, pulling the covers up to my chin. The hunger has faded, replaced by exhaustion so deep it feels like drowning.
My hand drifts to my stomach without my permission. The nausea that comes every morning. The hunger that's never satisfied. The way my body feels different in ways I can't name.
I'm not stupid. I know the mathematics of biology. Four heats, four claimings, his seed flooding me over and over while my omega body did exactly what it was designed to do.
But I'm not ready to think about that yet. Not ready to see a mystic and hear confirmation of what I'm already starting to suspect.
One crisis at a time.
I think about the tea waiting on my bedside table—the cup I forgot to drink before all of this happened.
I should get up and drink it. It helps with the nausea, smooths the rough edges of the transformation.
One of the kindest things he's done for me, having it made specially, bringing it to me every day.
But I'm too tired to move.
Tomorrow. I'll drink it tomorrow.
Tonight, I sleep, and try not to dream about the secrets still hiding in the spaces between us.