Slave to Royal: The Omega Moon goddess

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER THREE

**POV: Nyla**

Hadeon did not even wait for the crowd to settle before he turned to Tarek.

He turned slowly, the way someone turns when they are in no rush because the outcome has already been decided. Celene was still at his side, her hand in his, and he looked at his cousin with an expression that carried no anger in it at all. Just satisfaction. The quiet, settled satisfaction of a man who had been waiting for this specific moment for a very long time.

"You have taken from me my entire life," Hadeon said. "The seat. The title. Every room I walked into, you had already been given the best position in it. I watched it happen and I said nothing because I was patient." He smiled. "I am done being patient. You are banned from this pack, Tarek. From this territory. From everything that carries the Voss name. Do not come back."

Tarek's jaw moved. I watched him search for the words that would fix this, the argument that would make the room reconsider, the authority he had been carrying his whole life that he expected to still be there when he reached for it.

It was gone.

"Hadeon." His voice was low. Careful. "We are family. You cannot do this here, not tonight, not in front of—"

"Remove him."

It was not Hadeon who said it.

It was Celene.

She said it pleasantly, the same tone she had used when she whispered to me on the ground, and four guards crossed the ceremony ground and took Tarek by the arms and he struggled. He actually struggled, and they dragged him backward through the crowd while people stepped aside to let it happen and nobody, not one person in that clearing, moved to stop it.

I watched him go.

The man who held my face in both hands last night and told me I was the only real thing in his world. Being dragged out of the ceremony ground with his feet barely touching the floor while the woman he chose over me stood on the platform and watched without blinking.

The guards came back for me before I had finished processing it. They took my arms the same way and I had no strength left to resist anything. They carried me across the ground and into a corridor I had swept a hundred times as a servant and through a door at the end of it that I had never been through before, and they put me in a room with stone walls and a dirt floor and a single torch on the outside that threw thin light under the door.

Then they locked it and left.

I sat on the floor of that dark room and I let myself feel it. All of it. The ribs that screamed when I breathed. The swelling on the side of my face. The blood is drying on my skin. The bond that had cracked open in my chest when I shifted and now sat there like a wound with nothing to attach to because the man it pointed at had just been dragged from the pack in disgrace.

But underneath all of that, beneath the pain and the fear and the shock of everything tonight had been, something small and quiet was sitting in my chest that I was not ashamed of.

Karma had moved fast tonight. Faster than I expected. Tarek Voss had stood in front of me and called for my death and within the same hour he had lost everything. His mate. His pack. His dignity. All of it was taken in one night by the same woman he chose over me.

I almost smiled.

Then I remembered what Celene whispered to me on the ground and the almost-smile died before it finished forming.

I want you to cry for death. I want you to beg for it and find that it will not come.

I pulled my knees to my chest, pressed my back against the cold stone wall, and told myself to stay awake. To think. To find a way through this.

I was asleep within minutes. My body simply stopped negotiating with me.

I do not know how many hours passed before they came back.

What I know is that I woke to cold water hitting my face with enough force to snap my head back against the wall. I gasped and choked and tried to get my hands up, and they were already on me, two guards, pulling me to my feet before I had finished understanding where I was.

Then the first strike landed.

Not a fist. Something else. A long strip of thick braided leather that moved through the air with a sound I will never forget and connected with my back and tore. I felt my skin open. I felt the warmth of my own blood before the full weight of the pain arrived and when it arrived, it arrived completely, it swallowed everything, and I screamed.

I screamed in that stone room and my voice broke against the walls and came back at me and I screamed again when the second one came because there was nothing else my body knew how to do.

"Please." My own voice sounded like a stranger's. Cracked and desperate and so small in that room. "Please stop. I have done nothing. I have done nothing to any of you, please—"

The third one landed on my shoulders and I went down on my hands and the blood ran down my back and dripped to the dirt floor and I looked at it and thought, in the strange detached way the mind thinks when pain has taken everything else, why is this happening to me?

I never wanted this.

I never asked for any of this. I was an omega. I swept floors and carried trays and lowered my eyes and asked for nothing. All I ever wanted was to shift into something small and ordinary and go back to my quiet life. I did not ask the Moon Goddess to choose me. I did not ask to be born with whatever I was born with. I did not ask for golden blood or ancient power or any of the things that were being used against me right now.

I looked up at the ceiling of that room and I said it out loud.

"Why did you do this to me?" My voice cracked. "I was fine. I was fine being nothing. I was fine being invisible. Why did you put this inside me and then leave me here alone to bleed for it?"

The fourth strike came, and I stopped being able to form words.

Then Celene's voice cut through everything.

"Leave us."

Footsteps. The door. Silence.

She crouched in front of me the same way she had in the ceremony ground. Same calm eyes. Same pleasant expression. She held a small syringe in her right hand, and she took my arm before I could pull it away and pressed it in. I felt something cold move through my vein, and then she held a small vial beneath the puncture and collected what came out of me and I watched her do it and could not understand what I was seeing.

She stood and looked at the vial in the torchlight.

"You are the Moon Goddess," she said, as she was commenting on the weather. "My father told me the night of the ceremony. I have always known something was wrong. I simply did not know it was you." She looked down at me. "I hated you the moment you turned golden. Standing on my platform in your servant's uniform, taking the one thing that has been mine my entire life." She tilted her head. "And then I found out about you and Tarek."

I still went.

"Did you think I did not know?" She smiled. "I knew everything. I said nothing because a man who lowers himself to a servant was never going to be my mate regardless. I have standards, Nyla. I could not marry someone who has touched something like you." She looked at the vial again. "Your blood tastes like nothing, by the way. I expected more from a goddess."

She tucked the vial into her robe.

"The full moon ceremony is in two days," she said, walking toward the door. "Every day until then, you can expect exactly what you received this morning. And more."

She left.

I lay on the dirt floor of that room alone and stared at the thin line of torchlight under the door and I understood, finally and completely, that nobody was coming for me.

Nobody even knew where I was.