Omega's Revenge

Chapter One

Chapter One

Lyra POV

The blood staining my hands was not all mine.

I had been sitting on the freezing dungeon floor for the last three hours, watching it dry beneath my fingernails while the guards outside my cell rotated in almost predictable intervals.

The one on the left limped slightly on his right leg–likely an old injury. He favored it when he thought no one was watching, but that didn't stop me from noticing the large gash across his face–one I had given him in our scuffle.

I smiled. It was bright red and still healing.

Slowly.

They had not expected me to fight back when they ambushed me.

The lock on the cell door was iron, single-bolt, the kind used at the border stronghold when it wasn't expecting anyone important enough to warrant something stronger.

The cut along my ribs burned when I breathed too deeply, a sharp reminder of the hunt I had not managed to finish before they found me.

I pressed my back against the cold stone wall, breathed shallowly, and took stock of everything I could use to my advantage when the time came.

My father had taught me, on the very first day of my training.

“When you walk into a room, Lyra–any room–count the exits first. Then count the threats. Then decide which ones are the same thing.”

There were two exits. Four guards.

The exit to the west was a threat and three of the guards were going to be a problem.

I filed it away and kept watching.

Two years.

Two years since they had stripped the Valen name from my shoulders like a cloak I no longer deserved to wear.

Two years since I had stood in the main hall of our pack's seat and listened to charges of treason read aloud against my father–a man who had served as Alpha with more loyalty than most of them had blood in their veins–and been told, calmly, by the Beta Council that as his heir, I would not be permitted to remain.

I had not wept then.

When I looked at my father's brother,Baron–who always smiled too easily and offered too many flattering words as he avoided my eyes.

I understood him at that moment.

Everything I hadn't let myself fully absorb until much later, alone in the dark, thrown out of my pack with nothing but cold ground and colder wind.

I was abandoned, alone and no one would defend me.

Not even my promised mate.

Aldric.

He hadn't even looked at me.

He had stood at the front of the hall, looking polished, like everything an Alpha was supposed to be, as he denounced me and I had felt nothing standing there.

Not the pull of a breaking bond or the ache that other Omegas described–like a physical unraveling when a mate turned away.

Nothing.

Because there had never been anything to break.

I had been joined to Aldric for two years of a formal engagement and felt, always, exactly nothing.

It irked him to the bone, I knew that, but I couldn't change it.

Most Omegas could not resist an Alpha's presence. The pheromones alone were enough to quiet the room, to soften the spine of any omega, making her body lean into the alpha before her mind had formed a thought.

I had never experienced that.

Not once, with Aldric, not even with my father.

A healer had told my father privately that my constitution was unusual. My resistance was not defiance, just simply how I was built.

In another life, where I was an alpha or a beta, that might have been considered strength. For an omega, it meant I was defective.

In that hall, on that day, it had been the final evidence against me.

My uncle's daughter–Sera, soft-faced and careful–had stepped forward from the back of the room and taken the place beside him that had been mine. She had not looked at me either.

They had exiled me the same afternoon.

I had walked out of the only home I had ever known with the clothes on my back, my father's signet ring hidden inside my boot, and a solemn promise that I would not die until I had taken back everything I was owed.

I had not expected to be brought back so soon.

The cell quieted for a brief moment as the guard who favored his right leg made his rounds and then went to the wall.

I had survived worse than this.

The next footsteps came sooner than I expected. There weren't the unhurried tread of the guards.

I was on my feet before the door opened.

The guard that walked in didn't belong to the prison.

Two of them.

The insignia on their shoulders was not the pack's mark. It wasn't something I recognized either. These men did not report to the pack's border captain.

"On your feet," the first one said.

“I'm already on them,” I mumbled, showing him my shackled hands.

He frowned but said nothing else. The other guard, who preferred roughness, shoved me toward the door.

"Where am I being taken?" I asked.

As expected there was no answer. The door swung open, and I walked out ahead of them because I had no intention of being shoved.

The moment we walked past, the atmosphere changed. The nobles clustered in the doorway fell silent. A steward hurried past with an armful of correspondence, glancing at me like I was a house monster that had come out of the walls.

I kept my face neutral and kept moving.

"–the King's selection–"

"–alliance bride–"

These fragments of conversation reached me as I walked through the hallway.

I didn't let it show that I had heard anything, but my mind was already working things out.

An alliance bride with the Alpha King.

Why?

I had heard his name spoken in the borderlands and deserted pack lands.

They mentioned him with fear.

They hated him but couldn't get rid of him either.

Darius Kael.

The Alpha King who had unified the territories through brute force, leaving very little room for negotiation.

And someone had apparently decided that I–exiled, disgraced, half-bloodied from a failed hunt–was a useful piece in whatever arrangement he was building.

I almost wanted to laugh.

Almost.