The Male Omega

Chapter 5: Summoned to Blackthorne

I did not want to go to the Blackthorne estate.

That thought lived in me all night, heavy and cold and impossible to put down.

I did not sleep much. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw it too clearly—the long dark halls, the polished stone, the way voices would quiet when I entered. I imagined servants looking at me and then away, imagined the sharp curiosity of people who had never bothered to know I existed suddenly finding me worth staring at.

Worse, I imagined Xervic Blackthorne.

Not because I knew him.

That was the problem.

I didn’t.

I only knew of him in the way everyone in the pack knew of him—our alpha, young and powerful, already carrying himself with the kind of authority that made people lower their eyes before he ever spoke. I had seen him from a distance a few times at public gatherings. Once on horseback near the training fields. Once beneath the Moon Hall lanterns with his family gathered around him like shadows cast by the same flame.

He had never looked at me.

Now I was being called to stand in front of him because my body had betrayed me in the worst possible way.

By morning, I was shaking.

Not badly enough for Rowan to call it fear aloud.

But badly enough that I could not fasten the ties at my wrists properly.

Rowan stood behind me in Mara’s small guest room, watching my hands fail once, then twice. Without saying anything, he stepped closer and tied them for me with quick, practiced fingers.

The silence between us felt soft in a painful way.

I looked down. “Sorry.”

His hands stilled at my sleeve.

“For what?”

I stared at the floorboards. “For making this harder.”

There it was again—that terrible, familiar thing in my chest, the instinct to apologize for existing too heavily in someone else’s life.

Rowan finished tying the cuff and moved around to stand in front of me.

He was wearing his darker coat, the one he used when he wanted to look less like a retired hunter and more like someone difficult to challenge. His expression was hard already, but his eyes were tired.

“Kyle,” he said quietly, “do not apologize to me today.”

That should have comforted me.

Instead it made my throat ache.

I nodded because I did not trust my voice.

Mara insisted I eat before we left. I tried. The bread felt dry in my mouth, and the tea was too hot, too bitter, too much. I swallowed anyway because Rowan was watching and because I knew if I didn’t, he would worry harder, and I could not bear adding one more thing to his face.

Outside, the morning was gray and cold.

A carriage from the Blackthorne estate waited at the edge of the lane.

My feet stopped before I meant them to.

It was not especially ornate. No gold trim, no heavy display. It did not need any of that. The Blackthorne crest on the door was enough. Dark wood, silver mark, severe lines. It looked exactly like the kind of carriage sent to collect people who were not being asked.

Rowan noticed my hesitation immediately.

His hand touched the middle of my back, warm and steady.

“You’re not alone,” he said.

I wanted to believe him.

I nodded again and forced my feet to move.

The servant waiting by the carriage door looked at me only once. His expression did not change, but I still felt the glance like a bruise.

Not because he had been openly rude.

Because he had not.

Politeness was somehow worse. Politeness meant I had already become the sort of thing people handled carefully so they would not have to reveal what they really thought.

Rowan climbed in after me without waiting for permission.

The servant’s mouth tightened almost invisibly.

“I will accompany my brother,” Rowan said.

He did not raise his voice.

He did not need to.

The servant hesitated, then closed the door without argument.

The carriage jolted into motion.

For the first few minutes, I could only hear wheels over stone and the muted shift of Rowan’s breathing across from me. The space was too small. Or maybe I was the one who had become too full of sharp edges and frightened thoughts.

The scent of leather and old wood pressed in around me.

So did my own.

That was the worst part.

No matter how tightly I held myself, no matter how still I sat, I could smell the truth of what I had become. It lived in my skin now, faint but undeniable. Different from before. Softer, warmer, wrong in a way I could not stop noticing.

I pressed my gloved hands together in my lap.

Rowan watched me for a while, then said, “Talk to me.”

I blinked. “About what?”

“Anything.”

The answer that rose first was childish: I don’t want to.

Instead I said, “I don’t know what to say.”

Rowan leaned back against the carriage wall, though his eyes stayed on me. “Then tell me what you’re thinking.”

That made something twist in my chest.

Because what I was thinking was shameful.

I was thinking that if I had stayed ordinary, none of this would be happening.

That if my body had not waited nineteen years only to turn cruel and strange, Rowan would still have his old life, and I would still be small in the harmless way I had always been.

I looked out the carriage window at the blurred line of trees and said, too softly, “I think they’re going to hate me.”

Silence.

Then Rowan said, “Some of them already do.”

I looked at him in surprise.

Not because the words were wrong.

Because he had said them out loud.

He saw my face and his own expression softened a little.

“I’m not saying that to hurt you,” he said. “I’m saying it because if they do, then it belongs to them. Not to you.”

I stared at my hands.

That sounded kind.

It also sounded impossible.

The road climbed as we neared the Blackthorne estate. I could feel it in the carriage’s slow pull, in the heavier rhythm of the wheels. Through the glass, the lower district fell away bit by bit until the great dark shape of the estate came into full view.

It was larger up close.

Much larger.

Stone and timber, high windows, long sloping roofs dark against the winter sky. The front grounds spread out in wide orderly lines, all bare trees and pale gravel and carved posts marking old pack symbols I had only ever seen from a distance.

My mouth went dry.

This was not a place people like me entered by choice.

The carriage rolled beneath the front arch and stopped.

I could not seem to move.

Rowan opened the door first and stepped down, then turned back and held out his hand to me without a word.

My fingers were cold inside my gloves.

I took his hand anyway.

The air outside bit hard at my face. Somewhere nearby I could smell pine resin, damp stone, old smoke, and wolves—too many scents layered over one another, all carrying traces of power and territory and a place that was not mine.

A servant approached.

“Mr. Knox,” he said to me, then looked at Rowan. “Only the summoned party was requested.”

My stomach dropped.

Before I could speak, Rowan said, “Then request again.”

The servant’s expression tightened.

I hated this.

I hated being the reason people looked at Rowan like that. Hated feeling like something being argued over at the door.

“It’s alright,” I whispered.

Rowan did not look at me. “No.”

That single word wrapped around my ribs in a painful way.

The servant hesitated just long enough to make my humiliation burn hotter, then said, “You may both enter. But only Mr. Knox will be received in the inner hall.”

Received.

My legs felt weaker with every polite word.

We followed him inside.

The entrance hall was warm, but I still shivered. Light from the high windows fell cold over polished floors. Dark portraits lined the walls. Everything smelled clean and old and expensive—wax, cedar, stone, fine cloth, wolf.

I kept my eyes lowered, but that did not stop me from feeling it when heads turned.

Servants.

A guard near the stair.

A woman in dark blue crossing the far hall.

Their attention slid over me, paused, and shifted away too late.

They knew.

Of course they knew.

The news had reached the estate before I had.

My pulse started hammering so hard I thought surely everyone could hear it.

The servant led us through two more corridors before stopping outside a pair of carved doors.

I could barely feel my hands.

“Wait here,” he said.

Then he stepped inside, leaving me alone with Rowan in the silent hall.

I stared at the seam in the door and tried to breathe.

Rowan moved closer. “Kyle.”

I looked at him.

He touched my shoulder lightly, then my hair, smoothing back a strand that had fallen loose near my temple.

It was such a small thing.

That almost made it worse.

My voice came out thin. “What if I say the wrong thing?”

“Then they’ll hear me next.”

I let out a weak breath that might have been a laugh if I had not been so close to shaking apart.

Rowan’s expression changed. He lowered his voice.

“You do not have to make yourself smaller for them.”

I wanted to tell him I did not know how to be anything else.

Before I could, the doors opened.

The servant stepped back into the hall and bowed slightly.

“The alpha will see Mr. Knox now.”

My heart stumbled.

Rowan’s hand slipped from my shoulder.

For one terrible second, I felt like a child being led somewhere dark.

Then I stepped forward because there was nothing else left to do.