Slave to Royal: The Omega Moon goddess

Chapter - Five

CHAPTER FIVE

POV: Tarek

"You are not strong enough for what I carry." Celene's voice came back to me exactly as pleasant as it had been live, exactly as casual, like she was commenting on the weather instead of ending the only future I had been raised since boyhood to expect, and I had heard her say it so many times inside my own skull since the ceremony ground emptied that I no longer needed to close my eyes to watch Hadeon's hand close around hers all over again. "I will not lower myself to a man who thought a servant girl was worth keeping in secret while pursuing me in public." She had said that part slower. She had wanted every wolf in that clearing to taste it.

She knew. She had known the entire time, and she let me stand there pretending I had something worth offering her while she watched me from somewhere close enough to see every visit I thought was hidden, and the shame of that realization burned hotter in me some nights than the banishment itself. "Of course she did," I said out loud to the empty hut, my own voice sounding foreign after days of barely using it. "Of course the one secret I thought I had kept clean was the one she had been holding over my head the whole time, waiting for the exact moment it would cost me the most."

I hated her for it. I hated Hadeon more, kissing her on that platform with my own cousin's mouth while five hundred wolves cheered like watching me lose everything was the finest entertainment Ironmere had produced in years. But underneath the hatred, uninvited, the way an old wound throbs worse right before it finally starts healing, my mind kept dragging itself back to a different image entirely, not Celene's pleasant cruelty but Nyla's face on the ground beneath the guards' boots, and I despised myself for the fact that even mid the wreckage of my own pride, she was still the one thought I could not push out.

The door of the hut went without a knock, the way it always had since we were boys training together under my father's old captain, because Roan Hale had never once in his life needed permission to walk into a room I was sitting in, not when his own father bled out defending mine, not when I was named heir over men twice his worth, and certainly not now that neither of us had anything left to defer to.

"You are talking to the walls again." He crouched across from me, reading my face the way he had been reading it since we were both too young to hide anything well. "That is the third night this week. Tell me you are at least talking about something useful."

"I am talking about how thoroughly I deserved every part of what happened on that platform."

"You mean Celene." He said her name flatly, no weight given to it at all, which irritated me more than sympathy would have. "I do not care about Celene, Tarek. Celene was never going to break you the way you think she did. You are sitting here nursing a wound to your pride while the actual wound, the one that matters, is rotting in a cell two days from here and you have spent six nights talking to the walls about it instead of doing something."

"You think I do not know what I did to her."

"I think you know exactly what you did to her, and I think hating yourself in this hut is easier than walking back through that gate to fix it, and I am done watching you choose easy."

That landed somewhere I could not argue against. "I gave her the compound thinking I was protecting myself from a bond I was not ready to carry. The practitioner warned me it was not mild, that he could not promise what it would do to a bloodline he could not identify, and I paid him double to stop asking questions." My voice cracked on the next part in a way I did not plan for. "I did not weaken her shift, Roan. I broke the seal that kept the whole of what she was contained inside a body small enough to survive carrying it quietly. I unleashed her. Then I stood in front of five hundred wolves and called her a thief for becoming exactly what my own fear forced her to become."

"And now."

"Now she is still in that palace, weak, kept on wolfsbane, bled daily by Celene's own hand, according to the girl who carries water to the lower cells. The full moon rises tomorrow night. If she is still in that room when it does, none of this, not my pride, not what I owe her, not whatever I am still feeling that I have no right to feel anymore, none of it will matter, because she will not survive it."

Roan studied me a long moment. "Then why are you still sitting on this floor instead of moving."

"Because I am terrified she will look at me and feel nothing but hatred, and some coward part of me would rather sit here hating myself in private than go find out that is true." I said it out loud for the first time, and saying it made my chest hurt worse than the banishment had. "And because some other part of me, the part I am not proud of, knows that without her standing beside me, golden and undeniable, I am nothing but an exiled name nobody has reason left to believe. I do not know anymore where the guilt ends and the use of her begins, Roan, and I hate that I cannot answer that honestly even to myself."

"Then stop trying to answer it tonight and just go get her out alive. You can spend the rest of your life sorting out which feeling is which once she is breathing somewhere safe." Roan rose and reached for the dark cloak by the door. "The first attempt failed because you walked in like a man who still believed his name meant something at that gate. Go in as nothing this time. I will hold the servant gate as long as I can. If the horns sound before you are clear, do not come back for me, get her to the ravine and keep moving."

I took the cloak from his hand and pulled it over my shoulders, every part of me still raw from everything I had just said out loud for the first time, and walked out into the cold beneath a moon that would be full and merciless within a single day, utterly unaware that the man Ironmere had stripped of everything was already moving toward the one wall nobody had thought to guard against him.