Chapter 24 Kess
Kess
The bleeding doesn't stop.
Three days I've been lying in Yaern's narrow bed, watching dawn light creep across the thatched ceiling and fade again into dusk, and the spotting continues—light pink staining the cloths she changes for me, never heavy, never accompanied by the cramping that would signal true loss, but there.
Constant. A reminder written in my own blood that something might be wrong.
That I might be losing the only thing I have left.
Yaern's cottage is small in a way the castle never was—one room that serves as kitchen and bedroom and everything else, walls of rough-hewn timber gone silver with age, a fireplace where her kettle steams with herbs meant to settle my stomach and calm my nerves.
The bed beneath me is soft with quilts her grandmother stitched decades ago, the patterns faded now but still beautiful in their way.
Everything here is worn, patched, making do with what little the village can provide.
So different from stone walls thick enough to withstand dragon fire. From tapestries and servants and endless corridors I never had time to explore.
From him.
"Still light," Yaern says when she checks the cloth for the third time today. Her hands are gentle, efficient, but I can hear what she's not saying in the careful neutrality of her voice. "That's good. Heavy bleeding would be worse."
"But it's not stopping."
"No." She won't lie to me. Never has, not even when the truth was something I didn't want to hear. "It's not stopping yet."
I turn my face toward the wall and count the knots in the wooden beams. Seventeen on this side. I counted them yesterday too. And the day before.
"Tell me again," she says quietly, settling onto the edge of the bed. "What happened. All of it."
I've told her twice already—once when I arrived bleeding and sobbing, barely coherent with fear and rage, and once yesterday when the shock wore off enough for proper sentences. But she keeps asking, and maybe that's what friends do. Maybe hearing it again will help something click into place.
It won't. But I tell her anyway.
"He knew I was pregnant." The words come out flat, drained of the fury that fueled them days ago. I've said them so many times they've lost their sharp edges, worn smooth like river stones. "For weeks. He had the mystic examine me, confirm it. Told her not to tell me."
Yaern makes a sound—not quite agreement, not quite surprise. Just acknowledgment that she's listening.
"And the tea." My throat tightens around the words.
"Bond-weakening herbs. He's been dosing me since before I even—" I stop, swallow hard.
"Before I fell in love with him. Before I trusted him.
He was already poisoning the bond while I was still falling.
And now I don't know if any of it was real.
If I would have loved him anyway, or if the weakened bond made it easier somehow.
Safer. Made him feel less like a threat. "
The uncertainty is almost worse than the betrayal itself. Not knowing if my own heart can be trusted.
"He thought the bond would kill you," Yaern says carefully. Not defending him. Just laying out the pieces. "The transformation, the pregnancy, the strain of it all together. He was afraid."
"I didn't ask him to save me." The anger flickers, brief and hot, then fades back to ash. I'm too tired to sustain it. Too scared. "I asked him to trust me. To let me make my own choices about my own body. He couldn't do that."
"No." Her hand finds mine, her fingers rough with work calluses. "He couldn't."
We sit in silence while the fire crackles and pops, while the kettle sends fragrant steam curling toward the rafters.
Outside, I can hear the village coming alive—footsteps on packed dirt paths, voices calling morning greetings, the bleat of goats being herded toward the high pastures.
Normal life in a normal omega village, where no one has to worry about dragon shifters or cursed bloodlines or transforming into something that shouldn't exist.
Everything I left behind when I volunteered as tribute.
It feels like a lifetime ago. It feels like yesterday.
"Do you love him?" Yaern asks, and the question lands in my chest like a stone dropped into still water.
"Yes." The admission hurts more than the bleeding. "I hate that I do. But yes."
"Does he love you?"
"He says he does." I press my free hand against my stomach, against the slight swell that might still hold life or might already be empty. "But love without trust is just—it's nothing. It's worse than nothing. It's a pretty lie wrapped around a knife."
"It's fear," Yaern says quietly. "He loves you so much he's terrified of losing you. So he tried to control everything, make all the choices, keep you safe even if it meant destroying what you were building together."
"That's not love."
"It is." She squeezes my fingers. "It's just broken love. Damaged love. Love that doesn't know how to be healthy because he's been alone for three hundred years with nothing but guilt and corpses for company."
I close my eyes against the sting of tears I don't want to shed. "That doesn't make it okay."
"No. It doesn't." A pause, weighted with things unspoken. "But it means maybe it could be fixed. If you both wanted to fix it badly enough."
"I can't go back there." The thought makes my chest constrict, makes it hard to draw breath.
"I can't look at him. Can't trust him. Can't—" My voice breaks and I have to stop, have to breathe, have to push down the sob trying to claw its way up my throat.
"What if I lose the baby because of what we did? The fighting, the—the way we—"
"Shh." Yaern's thumb strokes across my knuckles, slow and soothing. "The healer said stress can cause spotting. Light bleeding in early pregnancy isn't uncommon. It doesn't mean you're losing it."
"But it might."
"It might." She won't offer false comfort, and I love her for that even as I hate it. "But it might not. You're strong, Kess. Warrior omega. Your body was made to survive things that would kill anyone else."
"What if that's not enough?"
She doesn't answer.
Can't answer.
Because we both know the truth that neither of us wants to speak aloud: sometimes being strong isn't enough. Sometimes you fight with everything you have and still lose. Sometimes the universe takes things from you just because it can.
The village healer comes that afternoon.
She's ancient in a way that speaks of survival rather than fragility—hands gnarled with age but steady as stone when she examines me, eyes sharp despite the cataracts filming them white at the edges.
She smells like the herbs she grows in the small plot behind her cottage: feverfew and moonwort and blood-root, their scents mingling into something that reminds me of my grandmother's workroom.
The same herbs the mystic uses in the castle. But different somehow. Less refined, more raw. The mystic serves a dragon king with centuries of accumulated knowledge. This woman serves omegas who can't afford anything better, and she's kept them alive through sheer stubborn skill.
"Still spotting?" she asks, her voice creaking like old leather.
"Yes."
"Cramping?"
"No."
"Heavy flow? Clots?"
"No. Just light. Pink."
She presses on my stomach with fingers that know their work, palpating gently, searching for signs I can't feel.
I wonder if she can sense the difference in me—the contamination threading through my blood, the transformation slowly remaking my body into something not quite omega. If she notices, she doesn't say.
"Any pain when I press here?"
"No."
She sits back, studying me with eyes that have watched forty-seven girls leave for the dragon king's castle and never return. Eyes that watched me leave expecting the same fate.
"Could be stress," she says finally. "Could be strain from... physical activity." A diplomatic way of not saying rough sex in the forest while you were both crying. "Early pregnancy is delicate. Body's still adjusting, deciding whether to commit."
"Will I lose it?"
The silence stretches too long before she answers.
"I don't know. If the bleeding gets heavier, if cramping starts, if you pass tissue—then we'll know. But if it stays light like this, if it stops in the next few days, then you might be fine."
Might.
The word lodges in my chest like a splinter.
"What should I do?"
"Rest. Complete bed rest—no getting up except to use the chamber pot. No activity. No stress." She pushes herself to her feet, joints popping in protest. "Let your body do what it needs to do without interference. And pray, if you're the praying type."
I'm not.
But maybe I should learn.
That night, the bleeding is lighter.
Not gone—still there when I check, a faint pink trace on the white cloth—but less than before. Noticeably less.
Hope is a dangerous thing. I learned that with Rhystan, learned that opening yourself to possibility just means giving the universe a bigger target. But I can't help the way my heart lifts when I see the nearly-clean cloth, can't stop the desperate wanting that floods through me.
I want this baby.
Didn't know how much until I might lose it. Never thought of myself as maternal, never imagined tiny hands reaching for me or small feet learning to walk. But now the thought of my body empty again, of losing this small fierce life before it even had a chance to begin—the thought is unbearable.
"It's lighter," I tell Yaern when she comes to check.
"Good." She actually smiles, the expression transforming her tired face. "That's very good, Kess."
"Does that mean—"
"It means your body is settling. Calming down. Deciding to keep fighting." She adjusts the blankets around me, tucking them close. "Rest more. Give it time. Let your body do what it knows how to do."
I rest.
Lie in her narrow bed and stare at the ceiling and try not to think about him.
Fail utterly.
I can't stop my mind from circling back no matter how hard I try.
The look on his face when I told him to leave—devastated, accepting, like he'd been waiting his whole life for me to confirm that he was exactly the monster he'd always believed himself to be.
His voice breaking when he apologized, ragged and raw with grief.
The way he held me in the forest while we were still locked together, his tears hot against my temple, his body shaking with sobs he couldn't control.
The way he destroyed everything we were building, and I still love him anyway.
I hate that I love him.
Hate that even now—betrayed and bleeding and terrified—part of me wants to go back. Wants to hear his explanations again, really hear them this time. Wants to believe we could find a way through this wreckage to something worth saving.
But I can't.
Some broken things stay broken no matter how much you want to fix them. Some trust, once shattered, can never be fully rebuilt. Some lies are too big to forgive, even when you understand why they were told.
Even when you love someone.
Especially when you love someone.
Day five.
The bleeding is lighter still—barely a trace now, so faint I have to look twice to confirm it's there. Almost gone.
But not quite.
Still present, still threatening, still a reminder that my body hasn't made up its mind yet. That this pregnancy hangs in the balance, waiting for some internal verdict I have no power to influence.
I lie in Yaern's bed and wait.
Wait for the bleeding to stop completely, for the fear to ease, for certainty in either direction.
Wait for my body to decide if it's keeping this baby or letting it go.
Wait for something—anything—to tell me what comes next.
Outside the cottage walls, the village moves through its rhythms without me.
Children's laughter drifting through the gaps in the thatch.
Women calling to each other across vegetable gardens.
The distant clang of the blacksmith's hammer shaping horseshoes or plow blades.
Life continuing in all its ordinary persistence, indifferent to the fact that my world has narrowed to this bed, these walls, the space between one heartbeat and the next.
"You need to eat," Yaern says, appearing with a bowl of porridge sweetened with honey from her neighbor's hives.
I eat because she asks. Because the baby might need the nourishment. Because I don't know what else to do with my hands, my mouth, my desperate need to do something when there's nothing to be done.
The hours stretch like taffy, slow and endless. The bleeding doesn't stop. Doesn't get worse. Just hovers there at the edge of nothing, faint and uncertain, refusing to give me an answer either way.
Like everything else in my life right now.
That night, I lie in the dark and listen to Yaern's breathing slow into sleep, and I think about what it will feel like if the bleeding gets heavy. If the cramping starts. If I lose this child I didn't know I wanted until it was almost gone.
"Please," I whisper into the darkness, not knowing who I'm addressing—the gods I don't believe in, the curse that shaped my bloodline, the tiny life clinging to existence inside me. "Please let it be okay. Please let me keep it. Please—"
The word fractures into silence.
I don't believe in mercy. Don't believe in prayers or divine intervention or any power that gives a damn about one omega bleeding in a village cottage while a dragon king grieves alone in his castle.
But I pray anyway.
Because what else is there?
The bleeding continues through the night. Light. Faint. But there, always there, a thread of uncertainty woven through every breath I take.
And I lie awake counting ceiling beams and wondering if it's already over. If my body knows something my heart refuses to accept. If I'm grieving a loss that happened days ago, my womb just too stubborn to admit defeat.
Dawn finds me still awake, still waiting, still caught between hope and despair with no way to know which one will prove justified.
Maybe it's already gone, I think as pale light creeps across the rafters.
Maybe I've already lost everything.
Or maybe—just maybe—something in me is still fighting to hold on.