The Omega Who Knew Too Much

Fear

I stepped back from the door so fast I nearly tripped over my own feet.

‘The new girl.’

That was me. Whatever happened to that missing omega, someone had already connected it to me — which meant whoever was responsible already knew my name, already knew I'd been seen, already knew exactly where to find me.

The door opened again and the King stepped back inside, his face carved into something even colder than before. Lucien followed him in — the same tall, brown-haired man I now realized must be his Beta, his closest ally, his right hand.

Lucien's eyes landed on me and narrowed. "She's the one?"

"She didn't take anyone," the King said, voice flat and final, leaving no room for argument. "She was with me."

"That's not what it'll look like to the council," Lucien said, glancing between us. "Hana of the Red Moon Pack was last seen talking to her in the entry hall. Now Hana's bunk is empty and nobody can find her anywhere in the palace."

My knees nearly gave out. Hana. The girl with the shaking hands. The girl who held onto my wrist like I was the only safe thing in that hallway.

"No," I whispered. "She was scared, that's all, she wouldn't just —"

"Nobody just disappears from a locked dormitory," Lucien said, not unkindly, but not gently either. "Not unless someone wanted them gone."

The King's jaw was tight enough to crack stone. "Search the east wing again. Quietly. I don't want the council knowing we're looking until we have something solid."

Lucien nodded and turned to leave, but stopped at the door, looking back at me with an expression I couldn't quite read — caution, maybe, or warning. "Your Majesty, if word gets out that this omega was the last one seen with her—"

"It won't," the King said. "Because as far as anyone outside this room is concerned, she was with me the entire night."

Lucien's eyes flicked between us one more time before he disappeared into the hallway, the door clicking shut behind him.

Silence settled over the room, thick and suffocating. I sank into the nearest chair because my legs simply stopped working, and I pressed my hands over my mouth to keep myself from making a sound.

"This is real," I said, more to myself than to him. "This is actually happening. She's gone because of me."

"She's gone because of whoever is doing this," the King said, kneeling in front of my chair so we were eye level, his voice losing some of its sharp edges. "Not because of you. You didn't do this."

"You don't know that."

"I know that if you hadn't found that room, hadn't asked the question you asked me, we'd have no idea anyone else went missing tonight. You didn't cause this, Emilia. You're the only reason we even know to look."

I wanted to believe him. Some small, stubborn part of me did. But mostly all I could see was Hana's face, scared and trusting, asking me if the rumors about the King were true.

"I need to know what happens to them," I said, looking up at him, my voice shaking but certain. "I need to know where she is. Whatever it takes."

The King studied me for a long moment, like he was measuring something, deciding something.

"There's a passage," he said finally, "below the east wing. Sealed off, supposedly unused since before my father's time. I've never been able to get inside it — every key that's supposed to open it has gone missing, every guard I've sent to check it reports nothing unusual. But three of the names on that wall disappeared the same week guards reported strange noises coming from beneath that wing."

My pulse picked up. "You think that's where they're taking them."

"I think it's the only place in this palace I haven't been able to search," he said. "And I think that's not a coincidence."

"Then we need to get in there."

"Tonight, if Hana is still alive, every hour matters," he said, standing, already moving toward the door, his whole body shifting into something sharper, more dangerous, more like the King the rumors warned me about. "But the only door into that passage is sealed with an old lock only one bloodline has ever been able to open."

"Whose?"

He stopped with his hand on the door, and when he looked back at me, something in his expression had changed — careful, searching, like he was about to hand me something he couldn't take back.

"The bloodline of the first Alpha line of the Red Moon Pack," he said slowly. "Your father's bloodline, Emilia."

The floor seemed to tilt under me.

"Mine," I whispered.

"If I'm right," he said, "you might be the only person in this entire kingdom who can open that door."

A door slammed somewhere far below us — a deep, heavy sound that echoed up through the stone like a heartbeat.

Then, from somewhere beneath our feet, faint but unmistakable, a scream.

Move," Damian said.

That was all. One word, low and sharp, and then he was already at the door, pulling it open before I could even push myself out of the chair.

My legs caught up with my brain a second later and I followed him into the hallway, my heart slamming against my ribs with every step.

The scream had stopped.

That was the thing that scared me more than the scream itself. A scream meant someone was still alive enough to make noise. Silence meant the noise had been stopped — by something, or someone.

Damian moved fast for a man his size. His strides were long and deliberate, not running but close to it, and I had to half-jog to keep up with him. The hallways of the palace looked different at this hour — the torch flames guttered low, the shadows heavier, every doorway a possible mouth waiting to swallow us whole.

"Stay close," he said without looking back.

"I am close," I said.

"Closer."

I pulled up beside him and he adjusted his pace slightly — not slowing down, but keeping me in his peripheral vision instead of behind him. Like he needed to see that I was still there.

We cut through the east corridor, down a staircase I hadn't seen before, the walls here older and rougher than the polished stone of the upper floors. The air changed as we descended — colder, heavier, like air that hadn't moved in a long time.

"How deep does this passage go?" I asked.

"I've never been past the first door," he said. "Every time I've sent men down here, they've reported nothing. No passage, no stairs, nothing beyond the entry. Which means either they're lying, or something in this tunnel doesn't want to be found."

A chill moved through me that had nothing to do with the cold air. "Or someone told them to lie."

He glanced at me sideways. "Yes."

I thought about that as we walked, about how deep a conspiracy had to go before the King of the entire kingdom couldn't trust his own guards to tell him the truth. Whoever was running this was patient. They had been building this for years, quietly, carefully, right under Damian's nose, while the world outside believed he was the monster.

We reached the sealed door.

It was older than everything else down here, the stone around its frame carved with faded markings I didn't have time to examine. The door itself was iron, dark and cold, with a single handle and no visible keyhole — just a solid, flat panel to the left of the door where a lock should have been.

Damian put his hand on the panel.

Nothing.

He pressed harder, every muscle in his forearm tensing with effort.

Still nothing.

"What am I supposed to do?" I asked, looking at the panel. It looked like plain iron. There was nothing special about it, nothing that said only certain bloodlines could pass.

"Touch it," he said. "Just put your hand flat against it."

I almost argued that it was absurd — that I wasn't special, that my father was right about me being nothing, that whatever bloodline power supposedly ran through the Red Moon Pack hadn't even given me a wolf, so why would it give me this?

But I put my hand on the iron anyway.

And the panel moved.

Not a click, not a creak — it sank inward smoothly and soundlessly, like it had been waiting. Like a door finally finding the key it was built for. A low vibration moved up through my palm, through my arm, and settled somewhere in the center of my chest, and for a second I couldn't breathe.

"I don't understand," I whispered.

"I'll explain later," Damian said. "Can you push it?"

I pushed. The iron door swung open, and beyond it were stairs — rough, unlit, carved straight down into the rock, disappearing into blackness.

Damian produced a small torch from the wall bracket beside us and lit it, holding it through the doorway so the light fell down the steps. They went deep. Too deep for the light to touch the bottom.

From somewhere below us — faint, barely a thread of sound — came a voice.

Not a scream this time. Something worse. Quiet, rhythmic, the sound of someone who had given up on screaming and was just talking softly to themselves in the dark, the way people do when they've been alone too long.

My feet moved before my head caught up.

"Emilia—"

I was already on the stairs, one hand on the rough wall for balance, the other reaching back for the torch. Damian pressed it into my hand and I felt him right behind me, close enough that I could hear his breathing — controlled, tense.

We took the stairs carefully, quickly. The air down here was worse — stale and thick, with an undercurrent of something that made my stomach turn. Old fear. Old rot. Something living and something dead, pressed together in the dark.

I counted thirty steps before the staircase leveled out into a passage so narrow we had to move single file, Damian's bulk nearly filling the space from wall to wall.

The torch threw orange light ahead of us, and that's when I saw it.

The wall to our left.

Names.

Not carved neatly in a list like the ones upstairs. These were scratched into the stone, desperate and ragged, like they'd been done by someone with no tools and no time — a fingernail, maybe, or a loose piece of rock. The cuts were shallow but there were hundreds of them, cramming every available inch of the wall, some overlapping, some so faint I had to lean close to make them out.

And they were recent. The stone was pale where it had been scratched, fresh in the way only new wounds look.

My hand shook as I raised the torch.

Name after name after name.

These weren't just the ones from the list upstairs. Those had dates, symbols, a kind of careful record-keeping. These were something else — proof of life, scratched into stone by girls with nothing else left to leave behind.

*I was here.*

That's what all of it said. Hundreds of ways of saying: I was here, and I was real, and someone should know my name.

My throat closed so hard I couldn't speak.

I heard Damian behind me exhale.

"They were kept here," I said, my voice coming out barely above a whisper. "For long enough to scratch their names. Days. Maybe longer."

"And then moved," he said. "Somewhere we still haven't found."

I moved the torch along the wall, reading, until the light caught something near the end of the row.

One name, started and unfinished.

H-A-N-