Slave to Royal: The Omega Moon goddess

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

POV: Celene

The cell was empty and I stood in the doorway for longer than I should have, long enough for the torch in my hand to feel heavy, long enough for something cold to move through my chest that I refused to name because naming it would make it real and I did not have time for real right now.

I turned and walked back down the corridor and found the guards at the end of it and looked at them with the particular patience I had learned from my father, the kind that was not patience at all but something quieter and more permanent than rage.

"Which of you was assigned to her door tonight," I said.

Neither of them spoke immediately, which was already the answer.

"I will ask one more time." My voice did not rise. It never rose. My father taught me that a woman who raises her voice has already told the room she has lost something. "Which of you was assigned to her door."

The one on the left finally looked at me. "Both of us, my lady. We were both at the end of the corridor. Nobody passed us. Nobody came through."

"And yet she is not in the room." I looked between them. "So either she walked through stone, or one of you is lying to me, or someone came through your corridor while you were not paying attention, and I would very much like to know which of those three it was before I decide what happens next."

The one on the right opened his mouth and I held up one hand and he closed it.

"Do not explain," I said. "Find her. Take every wolf you can pull from the eastern wing and find her before she clears unclaimed territory, and if you come back to me without her I want you to think carefully tonight about what that conversation is going to look like." I turned away from them. "Go."

They went.

I walked back toward my father's study because that was where the answer to every problem I had ever had lived, in that chair behind that desk with that glass of good wine, and I needed the answer tonight more than I needed almost anything else.

He was already awake when I pushed the door open, which told me his sources had moved faster than mine.

"She is gone," I said.

"I know." He did not reach for the wine, which told me he was more concerned than he was willing to show. "Tarek Voss. It had to be. Nobody else had the motivation and the specific knowledge of this palace to find that corridor without being seen." He looked at me carefully. "How much time do we have before the full moon."

"Less than a day."

"Then we pivot." He said it the way he said everything, as though the problem were simply a matter of positioning, as though twenty years of construction could be rearranged in an evening without losing anything structural. "The blood ritual requires her, yes. But there are other ways to ensure the transfer if she is not available for the ceremony. Ways that do not require her cooperation."

"Tell me."

"Her parents." He said it without any particular weight behind it, which was the thing about my father that I had always found both useful and faintly disturbing. He could say anything without giving it weight. "Edric and Maren Croft. They have been in the servant quarters since the ceremony. They have not been questioned, have not been touched, have been left entirely alone because nobody thought they mattered." He looked at me over his glass. "They matter now. Not because of what they know. Because of what she feels about them."

I looked at him for a moment. "You want to use them to bring her back."

"I want to use them to ensure that whatever she is planning, she plans it on our timeline and not her own." He set the glass down. "Bring them in tonight. Put them somewhere she will eventually hear about. She is a girl who spent twenty years watching her parents bow and scrape in this palace without complaint, which means she loves them with the specific ferocity of someone who has never been able to protect the people they love. She will come back. And when she does, we will be ready."

"And if she does not come back in time for the full moon."

He looked at me steadily. "Then you go through the ritual without her blood and you take what you can from it and we find another way to complete the rest. But she will come back, Celene. Girls like Nyla Croft always come back for the people they could not save the first time."

I left his study and gave the order myself, directly, without delegating it to anyone who might handle it with more gentleness than the situation called for. Edric and Maren Croft were in my cells before the hour turned, and what happened to them in those cells I did not observe personally because observation was not necessary. I only needed the result. I only needed Nyla to hear about it from someone frightened enough to carry the news fast and far enough to find her.

What I did not account for was what happened at midnight.

I was in the courtyard when it started. I had come out alone because the walls of the palace had been pressing against me all evening in a way I could not explain, a tightness in my own skin that I kept dismissing as the stress of the night until it became impossible to dismiss as anything other than what it actually was.

The shift took me without warning.

Not the way a normal shift takes you, gradual and manageable, the wolf rising through the body like water through soil. This was total. This was every bone I owned breaking at once and remaking itself in a direction I had not chosen and could not slow down, and I hit my knees on the courtyard stone and the sound that came out of me was not something I had ever made before, not pain exactly, not fear exactly, something older than both.

When it ended I was black.

Not the ceremonial black of the ceremony ground, not the managed darkness my father had been building a narrative around for twenty years. This was a black that came from somewhere the Godsbane compound and the blood ritual and all of Aldric Dray's careful planning had not created and could not control, and I understood in the first moment of standing in it that something had shifted in the balance between Nyla and myself at midnight, something permanent and irreversible, and whatever power she had claimed in her transformation had knocked something loose in mine.

The first guard reached me before I understood what I was doing.

He did not reach me a second time.

I stood in the empty courtyard after, in my own silence, and looked at my hands and felt the black moving through me like something that had been waiting its whole life for this much room, and I did not feel grief about the guard because grief required a belief that things should have gone differently and I had not yet found that belief inside what I currently was.

What I felt instead was enormous.

I felt like the version of myself my father had been promising me I would become since the night he told me the truth in his private study, the version that required no apology and no management and no carefully maintained performance of grace, the version that was simply what it was without asking anyone's permission for it.

My father came running from the corridor entrance, his robe half open, his face showing something I had never seen on it before which was genuine unmanaged fear, and he stopped when he saw the courtyard and he stopped when he saw me standing in the middle of it, and the look on his face when he finally looked at me properly was the first honest look I had ever received from him, stripped of every calculation.

"Celene." His voice was careful in the way voices go careful when the person speaking is deciding very quickly how much danger they are in. "Come inside. Come inside right now and we will figure out what to do about this."

I looked at him across the courtyard.

"There is nothing to figure out," I said pleasantly. "I am exactly what you told me I would be. The question is what I do with it now that you cannot manage it anymore."

He took one step toward me.

I did not mean to. I want that on record somewhere in the universe. I did not decide to. The black simply moved and my father stopped moving and when the courtyard went quiet again I was alone in it and the Vossblack sickness was already spreading outward from where I stood, creeping through the stone like something finally allowed to breathe, and I stood in it and felt it leave my body and enter the world and I did not call it back.

I had spent twenty years being told I was the chosen one.

It turned out that was the only true thing he ever said to me.

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