Moon Of Ashes

The Omega Returns

Rain came sideways off the cliffs above Ashfall, and I stood at the edge of the treeline with seawater in my boots, a knife strapped to my thigh, and no plan to use it yet. Twelve years since I'd smelled this coastline. Twelve years since they'd dragged me off it as a child, screaming, while my mother bled out on the healer's floor behind me.

I wasn't screaming now. I was smiling. That felt worse, honestly.

"You're not from here."

The voice came from behind a slab of rock, unhurried, like I'd interrupted nothing more urgent than a nap. A guy stepped out — broad, sharp-eyed, some kind of guard insignia stitched onto his collar crooked enough that he'd probably sewn it on himself. "Omegas don't wander onto Ashfall land in a storm for fun. What are you doing here?"

"Looking for work."

"You don't look like you've got much of a back on you."

"Try me."

His mouth twitched — half amused, half deciding whether I was a threat or a joke. I let him land on joke. Easier that way. It's always easier when they underestimate an Omega.

"Name?"

"Lela."

"Just Lela?"

"Just Lela."

He looked at me a beat too long, the way pack wolves do when they're weighing you up. Then he shrugged, like it wasn't his problem either way. "Follow me. Cassian doesn't turn down a hand willing to work. But if you're lying to me, girl, the sea's colder than any grave I'd dig for you."

"Comforting," I said, and followed him in.

---

The pack hall hadn't changed as much as I thought it would. Same black timber, swollen and salt-warped with age. Same iron chandeliers dripping wax onto a floor I was almost certain still held the ghost of a stain no amount of scrubbing could get out. I kept my eyes forward. I didn't look down. I couldn't, not yet.

"New Omega," the guard called out, not quite a shout, just loud enough. "Says she wants work."

A few heads turned — not many, a dozen wolves scattered around a long table, mid-meal, mid-argument about something to do with fishing rights that died the second I walked in. Then a chair scraped back at the head of the table.

He was younger than I'd built him up to be. That was the first thing that threw me — twelve years of nightmares had turned him into something twice his actual size, and the man wiping his hands on a linen cloth like he'd been caught mid-bite looked almost ordinary. Dark hair pushed back, damp from rain that had gotten in through the shutters. A scar along his jaw I didn't remember. Not that I'd ever actually seen his face. Only heard it, in my mother's shaking voice, in the way the other exiles used to lower theirs whenever his name came up.

"You're bleeding," he said.

I blinked. "What?"

"Your hand." He nodded at me, and I looked down — a thin cut across my palm, torn open on the climb up the rocks, forgotten the second adrenaline took over. "You didn't even notice."

"It's nothing."

"It's blood on my floor, and I just had that floor cleaned." A faint smile, not unkind, which somehow unsettled me more than cruelty would have. "Sit. Let someone look at it."

"I said it's fine."

"And I said sit down." No growl behind it, no weight thrown in like an order. Just a tired kind of authority — a man who'd said that sentence a thousand times and, for once, expected to be heard.

I sat. Told myself it was because refusing would draw more attention than going along with it. Not because something in his voice had reached in and tugged at something I didn't want tugged.

He crouched in front of me without asking, took my hand like it was nothing, and pressed a cloth to the cut. His fingers were warm. That was the second thing that threw me.

"You're new," he said, not looking up. "We don't get many Omegas asking to stay here. Most people who wash up on this coast are running from something."

"Aren't you?"

His eyes flicked to mine. Something moved behind them, quick and buried, gone before I could name it. "Everyone's running from something, Just Lela. Question's whether you're running toward anything better."

"Ask me again in a few weeks," I said, and meant it more than I wanted to.

"Fair enough." He tied off the cloth, stood, held out a hand I didn't take. "You'll bunk with kitchen staff. Work starts before dawn. And if you steal from me, I'll know — I won't be as gentle as I was with that cut."

"Is that a threat?"

"Policy." He was already three steps toward the far door when he stopped, glanced back like an afterthought he couldn't quite shake. "Your face is familiar. Have you been here before?"

My heart went cold and still, the way it used to when I was small and hiding under floorboards while a house burned over my head.

"No," I said. "Never."

He held my gaze a second too long. "Strange. Could've sworn I've seen your eyes somewhere."

Then he was gone, and I sat alone at that long table with my bandaged hand curled into a fist, and the knife on my thigh felt very far from where I needed it to be.

---

I didn't sleep. Lay on a thin cot in the kitchen quarters listening to the sea slam into the cliffs, thinking about how gentle his hands had been, and how gentleness from a murderer is its own kind of violence, and how I'd let him touch me without flinching. Twelve years of practicing this exact moment in my head, and I'd folded like paper the second he looked at me like I was a person instead of a threat.

Tomorrow, I told myself. Tomorrow I start asking questions. Find what's left of the old healer's quarters. Find whoever's still around from the purge. Get proof solid enough to justify crossing three territories for this.

I was maybe three-quarters into a rough, angry sleep when the door to the kitchen quarters creaked open.

Not the guard. Not the cook rousing everyone early.

Cassian stood in the doorway, storm-lit, blood soaking through the front of his shirt, one hand braced against the frame like it was the only thing keeping him standing.

"I need the healer," he said, voice cracking on the word. Then his knees gave out, and he was falling, and I — I who had spent twelve years promising

myself I'd be the last thing this man ever saw — was the only one close enough to catch him.