Obsessed With An Omega

Chapter One-The Girl in the Attic

They say a Lycan cannot be born of a woman.

That is the first law every pup learns, whispered before they are old enough to ask why. A Lycan is a thing of the old blood, vast and merciless, and the old blood only ever wakes in males. A female might carry it in her veins for a thousand years and never feel it stir. This is what the packs believe. This is what lets them sleep soundly at night.

But there was a prophecy, older than the law, and prophecies do not care what men choose to believe.

From ash and betrayal she will rise, it said. A daughter of the old blood, and she will unmake everyone who ever wished her gone.

* * *

I did not know any of that yet, the night everything began. I only knew that the Orion pack was throwing another one of its parties, and that I would rather have chewed through my own wrist than go down and smile at it.

From the attic window I could see the whole of the courtyard, torch-lit and heaving. They had strung lanterns between the trees and rolled out the good barrels, and the unmated females of the pack were dressed in almost nothing at all, laughing too loudly, their eyes bright and hungry. Tonight the warriors returned. Trained fighters and future Alphas, back from a season of trials, and the pack would welcome them the way it always did, by offering up its daughters like a bowl of fruit set out for guests.

They called it a ritual. An honour. A tradition older than the treaty stones.

I called it what it was. Barbaric.

A wolf waits for her mate. That is the one thing that is truly ours, the one gift the moon keeps for each of us and no one else, and these girls were throwing it into the dirt for a night of attention from men who would not remember their names by morning. I watched a knot of them gather near the gate, adjusting one another's dresses, pinching colour into their cheeks, and I felt something close to grief.

"Sulking again, trophy?"

I did not turn around. I knew the voice. Everyone in the pack knew that voice.

"Admiring the view," I said. "It's a lovely night to have no shame."

* * *

That was what they called me here. Trophy. Not to be cruel, exactly, though cruelty came easily to some of them, but because it was simply what I was. A spoil of war. Two years ago the Orion pack and a handful of others had come down on my home in the dark, without warning and without honour, and by dawn there had been nothing left of it but smoke and the dead. I was carried out of the ruin like a chair, or a chest of coin. One more thing worth keeping.

I was the beta's daughter. That was what I had always been told, and it was reason enough, they said, to keep me alive, and reason enough to keep me low. An omega now, in a pack not my own. No allegiance owed and none given. I ate at the end of the table and slept at the top of the house, in an attic that smelled of dust and old cedar, and most days I preferred it that way. Up here, no one pretended to be my friend.

But there were nights, and this was one of them, when I would wake with my heart slamming against my ribs and my skin drawn too tight, as though something underneath it had rolled over in its sleep. A pressure behind my breastbone. A heat with no source. It always passed by morning, and I always told myself it was nothing, a dream I could not remember, and I almost believed it.

I did not have a word for it yet. I would learn the word later, and I would wish, with everything in me, that I never had.

* * *

By the time the moon rode high I could not stand the noise any longer. It came up through the floorboards, the music and the shrieking and the low animal sounds beneath both, and it crawled under my skin and made that strange heat worse. Sleep was not coming. So I did what I always did on nights like this. I went down for a glass of warm milk, the way my mother used to make it, and I told myself it was the milk I missed and not her.

The back stairs were dark and blessedly empty. The kitchen too, lit only by the coals banked low in the hearth. I found the pan, found the milk, and had just set it to warm when the air behind me changed.

I want to say I heard him. I did not. He made no sound at all. It was more that the room seemed to grow smaller, as though the walls had leaned in a fraction to make space for something larger than they were used to holding. The hair rose along my arms. Every wolf instinct I had went still and sharp at once, the way you go still when you realise you are not, after all, the most dangerous thing in the room.

I turned.

He was leaning in the doorway as though he owned it, and everything past it, and possibly the night sky above it too. Tall, with black hair tied back off a face that had plainly never once been told no. There was a scar at the corner of his mouth, pale and old, and it deepened when he smiled at me, which he did now, slow and unhurried, like a man who had all the time in the world and meant to spend it looking at me.

His eyes were the worst of it. Ice blue, pale as a winter morning. They moved over me once, unhurried, and came back up to my face with something like amusement in them.

"You're not at the party," he said.

"Neither are you."

"I got bored." He pushed off the doorframe and came into the room, and I made myself hold my ground, though everything in me wanted the table between us. "All that eagerness. It gets tiring, being wanted by people who don't know you."

"How terrible for you," I said. "Being wanted."

The smile widened. Behind me, the milk began to hiss.

"There she is," he murmured, as though I had confirmed something he had suspected from clear across a crowded courtyard. "I saw you. Up in the window, looking down at all of it like it disgusted you." He tilted his head. "It did, didn't it."

I said nothing. I reached back and lifted the pan off the heat without looking, because I would sooner have scalded my own hand than turn my back on him.

"Most of them would trade a year of their lives for one night of my attention," he said, and there was no arrogance in it, which was somehow worse. He simply believed it, the way you believe the sun will rise. "And here you are. Making milk."

"Here I am." I lifted my chin. "Was there something you wanted, or did you follow me down here just to admire my indifference?"

For a moment he only looked at me. Then he laughed, low and genuinely surprised, and the sound of it did something to the strange heat behind my ribs that I did not like at all.

"Caden," he said. "Caden Wolfe."

He said it like a name I was meant to recognise. A name that opened doors and ended arguments. And perhaps it was. But I was a girl with no pack and nothing left to lose, and I had made myself a promise, in the smoke of my burning home two years before, that there was one thing in this world no one would ever take from me without my leave.

"Vera," I said, and did not offer my hand. "And whatever it is you think is going to happen here tonight, Caden Wolfe, it isn't."

Something flickered across that beautiful, arrogant face. Not anger. I had braced for anger.

It was delight.

"Oh," he said softly, and those winter eyes lit as though he had just been handed the only interesting thing that had happened to him in years. "You have no idea what you just did."

Neither did he. Neither of us did.

Because somewhere far beneath the both of us, older than the treaty stones and older than the law, the old blood had already begun to wake.