Chapter 25 Kess
Kess
On the sixth day, the bleeding fades to barely a whisper.
I stare at the cloth too long when Yaern changes it, searching for the rust color that's haunted the past week. But there's only the faintest trace of pink—so pale it might be nothing.
Might be hope.
"Better," Yaern says, her voice carefully neutral. "Definitely better than yesterday."
"Or it's stopping because there's nothing left to save."
She doesn't answer. We both know that's possible—that my body might simply be giving up, surrendering the pregnancy it couldn't sustain. But she squeezes my shoulder before turning away, and that small gesture says what words can't.
I'm here. Whatever happens.
I lie back against pillows that smell like lavender and wood smoke.
Count the ceiling beams for the hundredth time.
Seventeen of them, each one mapped in my memory now—the crack in the third from the left, the water-warped one near the chimney, the knot in the center beam that looks like a closed eye.
Outside, the village pulses with morning life. Chickens squabbling. Children's voices raised in some game I can't make out. The rhythmic clang of the blacksmith's hammer shaping metal into useful things.
Life continuing. Indifferent to mine hanging suspended between one heartbeat and the next.
"You need to eat." Yaern appears at my bedside with a bowl of oat porridge drizzled with honey. The scent makes my stomach clench—hunger or nausea, I can't tell anymore.
"Not hungry."
"I don't care." She sets the bowl down with a firm thunk. "Your body needs fuel to heal. So does whatever's growing inside it."
Whatever's growing inside it.
My hand drifts to my stomach, still flat beneath the borrowed shift. No flutter of movement. No visible swell. Nothing to prove there's anything there except the bleeding that's finally slowing and the terror that refuses to fade.
"What if it's already gone?" The words emerge small and cracked. "What if I'm just waiting for my body to catch up to what's already happened?"
Yaern settles onto the edge of the bed, her weight dipping the mattress, and takes my hand. "The healer said bleeding happens sometimes. Said stress is the most common cause in early pregnancy, and you've been under more stress than any ten people should have to bear."
"So my body responds to stress by bleeding out my baby?"
"By adjusting." Her thumb traces slow circles across my knuckles. "It's slowing down, Kess. Each day there's less. That has to mean something."
I want to believe her. Want to take the fragile hope she's offering and cradle it close to my chest.
But hope is a trap with teeth. I learned that in his arms, in his bed, in all the moments when I let myself believe we were building something real.
Hope just makes the fall hurt more.
Still—I eat the porridge. Force it down spoonful by spoonful even though it sits in my stomach like wet sand.
Because maybe she's right. Maybe my body needs the fuel.
Maybe there's still something inside me worth fighting for.
Day seven dawns gray and soft, rain pattering against the thatch overhead.
When I check the cloth there's almost nothing there.
"It's barely spotting now," I tell Yaern, and my voice comes out strange—thin and high, afraid to claim too much. "Just barely anything."
She checks for herself, then looks up at me with eyes that have gone suspiciously bright. "It's stopping. I think it's actually stopping."
I don't let myself celebrate. Can't afford to. "Or this is the calm before everything gets worse."
"Gods, you're exhausting." But she says it with a watery smile—the exasperated fondness that comes from years of friendship. "Come on. Sit up. You smell like a week of fear sweat and I'm going to help you wash."
I haven't bathed properly since I arrived—too terrified that any movement would tip the balance toward loss. But the bleeding is lighter. And I can smell myself, sour and sharp with anxiety.
Yaern helps me to the washbasin, her hands steady at my elbow when my legs wobble.
A week of bed rest has stolen my strength, left my muscles weak and trembling.
The water she's heated is warm against my skin as she washes my face, my arms, the back of my neck where tension has knotted the muscles into stone.
"You've lost weight," she observes, running the cloth down my spine. "Need to eat more."
"Working on it."
She helps me into a clean shift—one of hers, too big in the shoulders, but soft and worn and blessedly free of the smell of blood.
Small victories.
I make it back to the bed without falling. Yaern props pillows behind me so I can sit upright and look out the rain-streaked window at the village beyond. The storm is gentle, almost warm, turning the dirt paths to mud and beading on the new leaves of the apple tree in her small yard.
"Do you ever wonder what it would be like?" I ask, watching rain trace patterns down the glass. "If I hadn't volunteered. If someone else had gone."
She's quiet for a long moment. The only sound is the soft patter of rain and the crackle of the fire.
"Every day," she says finally. "But not because I wish you hadn't. Because I can't imagine this world without you in it."
"Even contaminated? Even transforming into something that shouldn't exist?"
"Especially then." She settles beside me on the bed, our shoulders just touching.
"You survived what killed forty-seven others.
You're growing stronger instead of dying.
You're pregnant with a cursed dragon's child and you're still here, still fighting, still too stubborn to give up.
" Her hand finds mine. "You're extraordinary, Kess.
You always have been. The contamination just made the rest of the world see what I've always known. "
"I don't feel extraordinary." The admission slips out before I can stop it. "I feel terrified. All the time. Like I'm standing on ice and waiting for it to crack."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive." She squeezes my fingers. "You can be both."
On the eighth morning, the bleeding stops entirely.
I check three times before I believe it—once when I first wake, once after breakfast, once more in the afternoon light slanting through Yaern's window like honey.
Nothing. No pink trace. No rust-colored warning. Just clean cloth and the absence of fear.
"It stopped," I tell Yaern, and my voice cracks on the words. "It actually stopped."
She checks for herself, methodical and careful. When she looks up, her eyes are swimming with tears she's trying not to shed. "It stopped. You're okay. The baby—" She has to clear her throat. Try again. "You're both okay."
I don't cry. Can't cry. Afraid that if I start, something will break loose inside me that I won't be able to put back.
Instead I just sit there with my hands pressed flat against my stomach, trying to feel something I can't feel yet—a flutter, a presence, any evidence of the life that somehow held on through everything.
We survived. Both of us.
"Thank you," I whisper, not sure who I'm addressing. The gods I've never believed in. My stubborn warrior omega body that refuses to quit. The baby itself, clinging to existence with a determination it must have inherited from me.
Yaern hugs me carefully, like I'm made of something that might shatter. Maybe I am. Maybe survival is just learning which broken pieces are worth keeping.
"What now?" she asks when she pulls back.
"Now?" I press my palms harder against my stomach, willing the baby to feel my presence the way I'm trying to feel its. "Now I figure out how to keep this pregnancy. How to navigate the transformation while I'm carrying a child. How to—"
I can't say his name. Can't even think it without my chest constricting.
"How to do this alone," I finish.
"You're not alone. You have me. The village—"
"I'm alone in the ways that matter." The words come out harsher than I intended.
"He's the father. He has information I need—about cursed bloodlines, about what happens to children born from contaminated omegas.
But I can't go back there. Can't face him.
Can't look at him without remembering every lie he told while I loved him. "
Silence stretches between us. Everything I'm not saying. Everything she knows better than to push.
"Then you stay here," Yaern says finally. "We'll figure it out together. The village has a healer, a small library. It's not castle resources, but it's something."
"Is it enough?"
"I don't know." She won't lie to me—never has, never will. "But it's what we have."
I nod. Close my eyes. Try to imagine a future where I do this without him. Raise a child alone. Transform into whatever warrior omegas become when they're pregnant with cursed dragon spawn. Navigate a world that wanted me dead from the moment it learned what I was.
"I can do this," I say, and it's more prayer than statement. "I survived the first claiming. I survived contamination. I can survive this too."
"You can." Yaern's hand tightens on mine. "You will."
On day nine, I get out of bed without help.
It takes everything I have—muscles protesting, head swimming, the world tilting before it steadies—but I make it to Yaern's small table and lower myself into a chair like a normal person eating a normal meal.
Small victory. Enormous victory.
I eat breakfast properly: porridge with honey, bread with butter, tea that isn't laced with bond-weakening poison. Everything tastes sharper than it has in weeks, cleaner, like my body is finally remembering what to do with food that isn't designed to betray me.
The healer comes that afternoon, her ancient hands sure and gentle as she examines me. But this time she's more thorough—pressing deeper into my abdomen, her brow furrowed, her lips moving as if counting something only she can sense.
"Lie still," she murmurs when I shift. "I need to feel something."
I lie still. Watch her face for clues. Her expression gives nothing away—just focused intensity, clouded eyes seeing something beyond the physical.