Chapter 27 #2
"Since my grandmother died." I open the journal, show her the torn page, the ragged edge that marks where knowledge used to live. "Someone removed this. Someone didn't want me to find what was written here."
Britt studies the damage with clouded eyes, her gnarled fingers tracing the torn edge like she's reading something in the texture of the paper.
"You donated these after she passed," she says slowly, memory surfacing through the fog of age.
"I remember—you were just a girl, crying, said you couldn't bear to burn them.
Made me promise to keep them safe." She pauses, her brow furrowing.
"But your grandmother came by once, before she died.
When she was still well enough to walk. Said she needed to check something, remove something dangerous.
Something that shouldn't be found until the time was right, or maybe not at all.
I didn't watch what she took—seemed like private business, and she was dying.
What was I going to do, argue with a dying woman? "
My grandmother.
She tore out the page herself.
The realization settles over me like a shroud, heavy and suffocating. She knew—knew about the curse, knew about the cost of breaking it, knew enough to hide the information even from me. Especially from me.
Why? To protect me from a choice she thought I shouldn't have to make? To keep me from learning something that would destroy me? Or because the cost mentioned in that journal was so high, so terrible, that she couldn't bear the thought of me being tempted to pay it?
I'll never know. She's been dead for seven years, her secrets buried with her bones in the small cemetery at the edge of the village where wildflowers grow over the graves of omegas who lived and died without anyone remembering their names.
But I know someone who might have the answers she took with her.
Someone with three hundred years of accumulated knowledge about cursed bloodlines and the ways they twist through generations.
Someone whose library contains texts that survived the priests' purges, hidden in mountain fortresses where holy fire couldn't reach.
Someone who owes me the truth after months of lies and poisoned tea and choices made about my body without my consent.
Rhystan.
I walk back to Yaern's cottage with the journal clutched to my chest like a talisman, like holding it tight enough might somehow summon my grandmother's ghost to explain what she was thinking, what she was hiding, what price she thought was too high for me to pay.
The curse activates at month six. I'm almost three months along now, my belly just beginning to round beneath my borrowed clothes. That gives me twelve weeks at most—probably less, if my son's dragon nature develops early the way the journal suggested it might.
Twelve weeks to save my daughter from a brother who will be born wanting to kill her.
Twelve weeks to find out what my grandmother knew and didn't want me to learn.
Twelve weeks to face the man who shattered my trust and still holds pieces of my heart in his lying hands.
Yaern takes one look at my face when I walk through the door—sees the journal, the tear tracks on my cheeks, the desperate determination that must be written across my features—and sets down her mending without a word.
"You found something."
"My grandmother's books." I sink into the chair across from her, suddenly so exhausted I can barely hold myself upright.
The pregnancy, the fear, the weight of knowledge I never wanted to carry—it's all pressing down on me at once, threatening to crush me flat.
"She knew, Yaern. About warrior omegas, about cursed bloodlines, about all of it.
She kept journals. Research. Information she hid for decades, waiting for me to need it. "
"And?"
"The curse activates at month six. My son will try to kill my daughter in the womb—it's what the curse demands, male heirs eliminating threats, ensuring the bloodline continues pure.
" The words come out flat, drained of emotion because I've already felt too much today and there's nothing left.
"There's a way to stop it. Something about warrior omegas taking the curse into themselves, metabolizing it the way we were designed to do.
But the page explaining how was torn out. "
"By who?"
"My grandmother." I press my hands to my face, feeling the heat of tears I'm too tired to shed.
"Before she died. She came back to the library and removed it herself.
She didn't want me to know—or she was protecting me from something—or maybe the cost was so terrible she couldn't bear to leave me the choice.
" A broken laugh escapes me. "I'll never know.
She's gone, and she took the answer with her. "
Yaern is quiet for a long moment, the fire crackling between us, the afternoon light slanting golden through her small window.
"You need his library," she says finally. Not a question.
"Yes."
"You need to go back."
"Yes."
She doesn't say anything else. Doesn't need to. We both know what this means—that my pride and my justified anger and my broken trust don't matter anymore, not when measured against my daughter's life.
That night, I dream of him.
Not the nightmare this time—something different, something that aches in ways the terror never could.
I'm flying on his back through clouds that taste like rain and smell like the sky after a storm, his scales warm and solid beneath my hands, the world spread out below us in shades of green and gold and deep forest shadow.
The bond pulses between us, stronger than it's been since I stopped drinking his poisoned tea, and through it I feel his emotions like they're my own—grief and guilt and desperate hope braided together so tightly I can't tell where one ends and the next begins.
He knows I'm thinking about coming back. Can feel it through the connection the same way I can feel his longing, his terror that I'll change my mind, his bone-deep certainty that he doesn't deserve another chance but will beg for one anyway.
Please, his emotions whisper through the dream, wordless and raw. Please come home. Let me help you. Let me save them. Let me try to fix what I broke.
I wake with tears cooling on my cheeks and his phantom warmth still wrapped around me like a blanket I can't quite shake off.
"Today," I tell Yaern when she stirs on her pallet by the fire, gray dawn light filtering through the cracks in the shutters. "I'm leaving today. Before I lose my nerve."
She doesn't argue, doesn't try to talk me out of it or into waiting longer. Just rises with a grunt and starts packing the bag she's had ready for a week, moving with the efficient purpose of someone who knew this moment was coming.
The walk to the edge of the village feels longer than it should, each step heavy with everything I'm leaving behind and everything I'm walking toward.
My belly is visible now beneath my cloak—not huge yet, but obvious enough that the women I pass look and know.
Some of them nod, small gestures of acknowledgment or maybe encouragement.
Most of them look away, afraid of what I am, what I'm carrying, what I might become.
I'm contaminated and transforming and pregnant with a cursed dragon's twins—I'm everything the War God's priests would burn on sight, everything this world tried to erase centuries ago.
I don't blame them for being afraid.
I'm afraid too.
Yaern walks with me to the mountain pass, her hand steady on my elbow when the path grows steep and my pregnant body protests the climb.
Neither of us speaks—there's nothing left to say.
We've talked through every angle, every fear, every possible outcome until the words wore thin and transparent. Now there's only the doing.
At the edge of the tree line, where the path turns upward toward the mountains and the castle that waits beyond them, she stops.
"This is as far as I go."
"I know." I pull her into a hug, careful of my belly, breathing in the familiar scent of her—woodsmoke and herbs and the wool of her shawl. "Thank you. For everything. For taking me in, for feeding me, for not letting me drown in my own anger."
"Come back when it's done." Her voice is fierce against my shoulder, thick with tears she's trying not to shed. "Whatever happens with him—whether you forgive him or not, whether you stay or not—you come back and tell me how it ends. Promise me, Kess."
"I promise."
I pull away before I can lose my nerve, before the safety of her presence can convince me to stay. Turn toward the path that leads up and over the mountains, toward the castle, toward him.
The bond in my chest aches with every step, pulling me forward like a thread tied around my ribs, like a fish hook caught in the soft meat of my heart.
Through it, faint but growing stronger with each step that closes the distance between us, I feel his emotions shift—grief giving way to desperate, terrified hope as he senses me coming.
He knows.
He's waiting.
And despite everything—the lies, the tea, the betrayal that still burns in my chest like swallowed fire—part of me is relieved to be going back.
Part of me has been waiting for this since the moment I left, counting the days until I could stop pretending I didn't still want him, didn't still love him, didn't still feel the pull of the bond like gravity holding me to the earth.
I hate that part of me.
But I keep walking anyway.
Because my daughter's life is worth more than my pride.
And somewhere in that castle, in those forbidden texts, in the centuries of knowledge Rhystan has accumulated about his own cursed blood—somewhere there's an answer.
I just have to find it before it's too late.