Slave to Royal: The Omega Moon goddess

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

POV: Tarek

She was sitting at the edge of the clearing when the moon started climbing, her back against a tree, her knees pulled to her chest, and I watched the moonlight find her from across the fire and I knew, the way you know something you read seven times in a cold outpost room until the words stopped being words and started being a weight you carried, exactly what was coming and exactly how bad it was going to be if I did nothing about it.

I crossed the clearing and crouched in front of her.

"Do not," she said, without looking up.

"Nyla."

"Whatever you are about to say, do not."

"I need you to listen to me." I kept my voice even because one of us needed to be even right now and it was not going to be the wolfsbane currently fighting a golden divine bloodline from the inside of her body. "There is something in the original scrolls about this. About a divine wolf shifting under wolfsbane without a blood anchor from her fated mate. I need you to hear what it said."

She looked up at me then, and the firelight caught her eyes, amber and exhausted and furious in the particular way she was furious when something frightened her that she refused to call fear. "Say it."

"The power tears through instead of releasing cleanly. Without an anchor it has nothing to calibrate against, nothing to tell it how fast to move through the body, and it moves at its own speed, which the scrolls described as without mercy and without pause." I held her gaze. "It will break you from the inside trying to get out, Nyla. Every bone. Every nerve. And without an anchor it will keep going after the shift is done."

The clearing was quiet around us, just the fire and the distant sound of the forest settling into night, and Roan had positioned himself far enough back that he could not hear any of this, which I was grateful for.

"And you are the anchor," she said. Flat. Not a question.

"A blood bond between fated mates. My blood in your system before the shift peaks. It gives the power something to recognize, something to move toward instead of just tearing outward." I watched her face. "I know what I am asking you to accept from me. I know exactly what that costs you and I am not pretending otherwise."

"Good." She looked back at the fire. "Then you know why the answer is no."

"Nyla—"

"No, Tarek." Her voice cracked on my name and she pulled it back together immediately, that stubborn seamless way she had of refusing to let anything show for longer than a second. "You do not get to come to me with your scrolls and your careful explanations and your fated mate bond and ask me to put your blood in my body like that is a reasonable thing to request from someone you condemned in front of five hundred wolves three weeks ago. You do not get that."

"This is not about what I deserve from you."

"Everything between us is still about what you owe me." She turned and looked at me and the fury in her face was so clean and so complete that it almost looked like something else, almost looked like the other side of something else. "You owe me the ceremony ground. You owe me three weeks on a dirt floor. You owe me my mother standing in that crowd and not moving while they dragged me across the ground in my servant's uniform. You owe me every single morning of my life I spent believing I was nothing because nobody in that palace ever thought I was worth looking at." Her voice stayed level through all of it, which somehow made it worse than if she had shouted. "I have not decided yet what collecting on that looks like. But I promise you it does not look like lying down and opening my mouth and letting you back inside something that was mine before you touched it."

I sat with that. I let every piece of it land exactly where she meant it to land and I did not defend against any of it, because she was not wrong about a single word and a man who argues against things he knows are true deserves less than a man who simply receives them.

"I know," I said.

"Stop saying that."

"It is the only true thing I have to offer you tonight."

She turned away from me again and I watched the moonlight move across her shoulders and I watched her breathing change, just slightly, just enough to tell me her body was already starting to feel it, the pull of the full moon against the power locked inside her, the wolfsbane pushing back, two enormous forces using her body as the territory between them.

"Nyla." My voice came out lower than I intended. "I am not asking you to forgive me. I am not asking you to trust me. I am not asking you for anything that belongs to you and that you have not chosen to give. I am asking you to let me keep you alive tonight, and I am asking because the alternative is watching you break apart in this clearing and I cannot do that. I cannot sit across this fire and watch that happen and do nothing."

"So this is for you," she said. "Not for me."

"Yes," I said. "Partly. Because I would not survive it and I know that about myself and I am not going to lie to you about it." I looked at her directly. "And partly because you are the Moon Goddess of seven packs and the only person alive who can stop what Celene is doing to people who look exactly like your parents, and the world needs you to survive tonight more than my guilt needs you to punish me with the alternative."

Something moved across her face at that. Something I could not fully read.

"That was a ruthless thing to say," she said quietly.

"Yes it was."

"You used them. My parents. You used them deliberately because you knew it was the one thing that would c***k the argument."

"Yes."

She looked at me for a long time, and I held that look and did not look away from it, because whatever she was deciding in that silence she deserved to decide it with full visibility into whatever was left of me.

Then her spine seized.

Not gradually. All at once, a full body convulsion that snapped her upright against the tree and knocked the breath out of her in a single sound that I felt in my back teeth, and Roan was on his feet across the clearing before I had even registered moving, but I was already there, already beside her, already watching the gold rise through her skin like something enormous finally losing its patience with waiting.

"Tarek." Her voice came out broken and small and nothing like the voice she had been using at me for the past ten minutes. Her hand found my arm in the dark. Not reaching for me. Just finding something solid because everything inside her had stopped being solid all at once. "It hurts."

"I know." I covered her hand with mine. "I know it does. Let me help you. Tell me yes."

Her eyes found mine in the dark and the gold in them was already overtaking the amber, the power running ahead of the shift, and she looked at me with a face that had stopped being able to hold anything back and said nothing, but her grip on my arm tightened, and that was the only yes I needed.