The Omega He Couldn't Find

Lark The pin was wrong. I knew before Isolda’s hand had finished reaching for it. Tips should face left. I’d handed it tips-right. A tiny thing. The kind of mistake no one in the world would notice except the woman sitting at this vanity, who had spent seven years teaching me that there were no tiny things. Her mouth pursed, and my stomach dropped before the rest of me caught up. She’d noticed. I knew her tells the way rabbits knew the shadow of a hawk. Every shift in her posture. Every micro-expression. Everything that separated acceptable from you will regret this. “Lark,” Isolda said. She didn’t raise her voice. She never raised her voice. She extended her palm and waited, and the waiting was the point—she had made a silence shaped exactly like my fear, and I was supposed to stand inside it until she decided I’d been there long enough. I took the pin back. Turned it. Set it across her palm with the tips facing left, evenly spaced from the others, because that was how she liked them. Uniform. Ordered. Controlled. Like everything in this house. Like me. “The Lunar Ball is tonight.” She slid the pin into her dark hair without looking at me. Her reflection did it for her—brown eyes in the vanity mirror, sharp and assessing, tracking me the way you tracked something you owned. “I trust I don’t need to repeat the expectations.” “No, ma’am.” “Then say them.” She puckered her lips and applied a deep red lipstick that made my stomach turn. It was too close to blood. My fingers found the edge of my sleeve before I could stop them, a habit I’d been trying to break for years because she noticed fidgeting and fidgeting read as anxiety and anxiety was an admission that I was affected and being affected meant she’d won something. And Isolda always wanted to know she’d won. I let go of my sleeve. Her gaze tracked the movement. “Stay along the east wall. Serve drinks. Don’t speak unless spoken to, and keep answers short.” My voice came out flat and rehearsed, which was what she wanted—proof that the words lived in me now, that I didn’t have to think before I said them. “Stay visible to you at all times. Don’t interact with guests beyond the service.” She dabbed a linen handkerchief on her lips to remove the excess lipstick. That’d be a b***h to scrub out later. “And?” The back of my neck prickled. The new rule. She’d said it this morning while I was slicing bread. What was the rule? My throat went dry and my hands found my sleeves again. “Don’t—” she started. “Don’t draw attention,” I quickly finished. She paused and in that pause silence turned to dread in my stomach. I’d forgotten. Forgetting was bad. The scars on my back stretched as I stood a little straighter. “And why would I need to say that to you specifically, Lark?” Because last week Rowena had caught me talking to a healer from one of the border packs who’d come through Ashvale looking for supplies. That was all. Just—talked. About yarrow. About poultice ratios. About the kind of thing no one in this house cared about except me, and for ten minutes I’d forgotten where I was. I’d forgotten what I was. My hands had moved when I spoke and my voice had had a shape to it that wasn’t flat, careful, or small. I’d been animated as Rowena had put it when she’d reported it to Isolda. The correction had been swift and quiet, the way Isolda’s corrections usually were. Three days locked in my room after that. No food. No water. On the third night Isolda had opened the door and stood there and said, very gently, “Do you understand now?” I’d understood. What I’d done wrong wasn’t talking to the healer. What I’d done wrong was forgetting my station. Wolfless. Omega. Worthless. I was lucky to be serving in this house and that they continued to provide a roof over my head and protected me. I could be out in the wild where the rogues were and be torn to pieces. Anything was better than that. “Because I’m an omega,” I said. “And omegas don’t draw attention.” It was the answer she wanted. It was also the answer I believed. I couldn’t tell which one had come first anymore. “Good girl.” The words landed like a lock clicking shut. She stood and smoothed the front of her dress—black, tailored, impeccable. Isolda at forty-three looked exactly like Isolda at thirty-four, when she’d married my father: a blade in silk. Beautiful, precise, and purposeful in every direction she cut. Her hair was pinned in a way that made her neck longer and her jaw sharper, and every piece of jewelry she was wearing tonight was a decision, not a decoration. She didn’t adorn herself. She armed herself. Tonight was not about a ball. It was about survival–Ashvale’s survival, which meant Isolda’s survival. Ashvale had been hemorrhaging members since my father died. An alpha-less pack was a slow collapse, and Isolda had been holding the walls up with politics and posturing for five years. What she needed—what she had needed since the day my father’s body went cold in the room I was no longer allowed to enter—was a new alpha. A powerful one. One she could install at the head of this pack through Rowena, her eldest, her mirror. Rowena was the bait. The Lunar Ball was the trap. And I was the girl who carried the trays while it happened. “Rowena’s hem needs adjusting,” Isolda said on her way to the door. “And Liana’s neckline. Don’t keep them waiting.” She left. The room held her shape for a few seconds after—the faint pressure of her perfume and presence that loosened in slow degrees, like a fist unclenching one finger at a time. My hands were trembling. I pressed them flat against my thighs until they stopped, and then I went to Rowena’s room. The pins should face left. Always left. *** Rowena was standing on a low stool in a green dress that fit her to her every curve, enticing any alpha that should look her way tonight. Her black hair was pinned up with jeweled bobbles that shone when the light hit them. She was Isolda’s clone or damn near it, especially in the way she held her chin, angled upward, exposing the column of her throat in a gesture that was supposed to read as confidence but to me read as a dare. She didn’t look at me when I knelt at her feet. I’d have been surprised if she had. I’d been kneeling at the edges of her life since I was fifteen, and the most Rowena had ever given me was the kind of look you’d give a stain you were annoyed hadn’t been cleaned yet. “Higher on the left side,” she said to her reflection. I pinned the hem. The hardwood bit through my thin pants—Liana’s old ones, too short at the ankle, loose at the waist because they were made for someone who ate three meals a day. My fingers worked the fabric with the steadiness of long practice. If I pinned it wrong, I’d need to redo it. If I redid it too many times, Rowena mentioned it to Isolda. Everything in this house was currency. Every mistake accrued interest. I finished hemming and stood, my knees aching. Rowena was already turned, signaling me to tighten her corset. Liana was sitting on the edge of her bed in a silver tulle ballgown that was all glitter and puff. Nothing like the sleek satin of Rowena’s emerald green dress. But Liana wasn’t going to catch an alpha. That was her sister’s job. Hers was not to embarrass the family. Mine was to be invisible. Her hands were in her lap, hair undone. She looked less like someone getting ready for a ball and more like someone sitting in a waiting room for news she didn’t want. “My dress is so much uglier than yours,” Liana complained. Rowena just tsked and turned to check herself from a new angle. The green satin caught the light and for a second she looked like a painting of a powerful Luna hung in a great hall. “Silver suits you better.” It didn’t. Silver just didn’t suit Rowena, and they didn’t have enough money to buy a second new dress. “Besides the Alpha of Thornhollow will be there tonight. I have to look my best,” Rowena said aloud, not to me, but the words landed in my body anyway—a cold pulse behind my ribs. The Alpha of Thornhollow. Every unmated wolf in the territory had been thinking about him. Rowena had been thinking about the Alpha of Thornhollow specifically and loudly for three weeks, and I knew more about the man than I had ever wanted to know. He was supposed to be the most brutal alpha in a generation next to Alpha Fen of Blackridge and—according to Rowena—also had “incredible shoulders,” which apparently were not contradictory qualities. Even in Ashvale, which barely registered as a footnote in pack politics, that name carried weight. The kind of wolf other alphas didn’t challenge. The kind that ended things by entering into a room. The kind Isolda had been angling Rowena for. “Mother thinks he’s looking for a mate,” Rowena continued. I tied off her corset before she could ask me to go tighter, because one more inch and she genuinely would not be able to sit down, and if the Alpha of Thornhollow asked her to dance and she fainted into his arms, that’d be a story I’d be hearing for the rest of my natural life. “She says if I position myself right, he won’t be able to ignore the bloodline.” She meant her genes. Rowena was alpha-blooded—had a strong wolf, shifted at sixteen like clockwork. She was everything Isolda had built her to be. A match worth making. The alpha of Thornhollow would get good stock and a strong heir, and Isolda would get her lifeline: a mating bond she could pull strings through from behind the curtain. “That’s not fair. What if he’s my fated mate?” Liana whined. Rowena huffed a laugh. “As if.” Her gaze flicked to me. “Well? Does it look right?” She was asking about the dress, but something in her voice wanted more–wanted me to confirm that she looked the part, that she was ready, and shower her in praise like everyone else always did. When I didn’t immediately respond, her face hardened back into place and all I saw was a younger Isolda looking down at me. “It looks good,” I finally said. Because it did. Rowena was beautiful the way Isolda was beautiful, deliberately, strategically, with edges. My comment was too little too late. She sneered. “What would you know.” She waved a dismissive hand at me and glided to the dresser where her jewelry was laid out—emerald earrings, a thin gold chain necklace, and golden bangles Isolda gifted her last winter that she wore like a medal she earned. “Liana’s waiting,” she said without looking back. I turned to Liana who was still on the bed. She looked up at me. Green eyes—her father’s, not Isolda’s. Maybe that was why she’d always seemed slightly out of place in this family. She was the wrong color in an otherwise coordinated room. “The neckline?” I asked. She nodded and stood and turned so I could reach the clasp at the back. The silver fabric was itchy under my fingers, and for a few seconds it was just the two of us and a simple task, and the air was as close to neutral as it ever got in this house. “Are you nervous?” I asked, and the question surprised me. I didn’t usually start things. Words were expensive here and I’d learned to spend carefully. Liana was quiet for a beat too long. “No,” she said, “are you?” I adjusted the clasp. My fingers brushed the skin at the nape of her neck—warm, soft—and it struck me how strange this was. We were the same age. We’d lived in the same house for nine years. She knew nothing about me and I knew almost everything about her, because watching was what you did when you weren’t allowed to participate. “Omegas don’t get nervous about balls,” I said. “We get nervous about what happens if we spill something.” It came out drier than I’d meant it to. Almost like a joke. Liana made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh and wasn’t quite a breath, and then swallowed it like she’d been caught. “Don’t encourage her.” Rowena’s voice cut across the room from the dresser, flat and bored, not even bothering to turn around. “She’ll start thinking she’s funny.” Liana’s gaze dropped to the floor. Just like that—whatever had been there a second ago was gone, tucked back behind the same careful blankness the rest of us wore around Isolda and Rowena. We didn’t speak after that. I fixed the neckline, checked the drape and stepped back. “Finished,” I said. Rowena looked back from her musings and scoffed. “Doesn’t matter how much you fiddle with it. The dress still makes her look like a silver cupcake.” She turned back to her vanity. “Go get dressed, Lark. You can’t be walking around in those rags at the ball.” “Yes, Rowena,” I mumbled. Rags. They were her hand-me-downs. I curtseyed like I’d been taught to do and turned toward the door. Then, tossed over her shoulder like it was nothing, “And do try not to embarrass us,” Rowena said. Us. As though I’d ever been part of an us in this house. I took my pins and went. I closed the door behind me and stood in the hallway for a moment, my hand on the knob, my forehead almost touching the wood. The house was full of noise—footsteps, voices, the sounds of a pack getting the car ready for Isolda and the girls and of cleaning to get ready for Isolda’s ruthless inspection later. But here, in this small stretch of hallway between Liana’s door and the staircase, it was quiet enough to hear my own breathing. I was twenty-two years old. I had never shifted. Not once. There wasn’t a flicker of wolf behind my eyes, no matter how hard I tried, no matter how still I sat or how deep I reached. Somewhere behind my ribs, in the place where everyone else carried their wolf–their second self—the presence that ran with them and slept with them and told them you are not alone, you are more than this—there was nothing. A room with the door sealed shut. I used to press my ear against it and listen for something on the other side. I’d stopped a long time ago. Isolda said it was because of my mother’s blood. Sage had been an omega like me—gentle, quiet, a healer who’d grown herbs behind the house and known every plant by touch. When I’d presented as omega and couldn’t shift, Isolda had called it contamination. Your mother’s weak blood thinned the line. You’re proof of it. An alpha’s daughter who can’t shift is worthless. She’d said it the way she said everything—calmly, factually, like she was reading from a chart and not dismantling a child. I pushed off the door and went to my room.