The Male Omega

Chapter 9: The Wrong Room

The room they gave me was too far from the heart of the estate.

I knew that even before Rowan said it.

We had been walked down a narrower corridor this time, away from the carved halls and moonlit chambers of the main wing, past shuttered windows and smaller doors and a stair that led toward the servants’ level. The farther we went, the colder it seemed to get. Not from winter. From distance.

By the time the servant stopped and opened the door, I already understood what this room was.

Not a place for an alpha’s fated mate.

A place for something inconvenient.

I stepped inside anyway.

It was not ugly. That would almost have been easier. Ugly could be named. Ugly could be resented openly.

This room was simply… lesser.

The bed was smaller than the one in the guest chamber Mara had used. The hearth was narrow and had not been lit long enough to properly warm the stone. The curtains were plain. There were no flowers, no carved furniture, no silver moon emblems worked into the walls the way I had seen in the halls closer to the shrine.

Just a room.

Just enough.

The servant turned to me with his hands folded neatly in front of him. “If you require anything, Mr. Knox, inform the lower staff.”

Lower staff.

Not the household attendants assigned to important guests.

Not the family servants.

Lower staff.

I nodded because my throat had tightened too much to trust.

When he left, Rowan shut the door with more force than was strictly necessary.

Then he looked around once.

I watched the realization spread through him in stages.

First disbelief.

Then anger.

Then something colder and sharper that made him seem suddenly older than twenty-four.

“This is where they put you?” he said.

I sat slowly on the edge of the bed. “It’s fine.”

The words came automatically.

I hated that.

Hated how quickly they left my mouth, how naturally my body reached for the shape of making things smaller before anyone else could call them what they were.

Rowan turned on me at once. “No.”

I looked down at my hands.

One palm still stung where the shrine blade had cut it. Mara’s cloth binding was clean, but the ache underneath it was steady. A reminder I did not need.

“It’s only a room,” I said quietly.

“That’s the problem.”

His voice had gone low in the dangerous way it sometimes did, the way I remembered from the years before he left the hunters’ guild. He crossed to the hearth, touched the stones, then pulled his hand back with a look of disgust.

“It’s barely warm. It’s at the back of the east wing. And they told the lower staff to attend you.”

I swallowed.

Said nothing.

Because he was right.

Because saying he was right would make this humiliation more solid than I could bear.

Rowan turned to face me fully. “Kyle.”

I forced myself to look up.

His eyes were bright with anger, but not at me. Never really at me.

“This is deliberate.”

My chest hurt.

I tried to smile, but it came out wrong. “Maybe they didn’t know where else to put me.”

The moment I said it, Rowan’s face changed.

Not to anger.

To pain.

That was worse.

“You cannot keep doing that,” he said softly.

“Doing what?”

“Making excuses for people while they hurt you.”

I looked away at once.

The room blurred slightly around the edges. I knew that feeling now. Not tears exactly. The pressure before them.

“I’m not,” I whispered.

“Yes, you are.”

Silence stretched between us.

I could hear the small crackle of the underfed fire and the faint rattle of winter wind against the shutters. Somewhere beyond the wall, footsteps passed and kept going.

No one stopped at my door.

Of course not.

No one important stayed in rooms like this.

Rowan exhaled through his nose and crossed the room again, slower this time. He crouched in front of me and rested his forearms lightly on his knees.

“I know you’re scared,” he said.

That made my throat close.

Because I was.

Because I had been scared since the market, since Mara’s hands, since the first whisper outside the healer’s wall.

Because now fear had changed shape and become something heavier: not just what I was, but what people would do with it.

“I don’t want them to hate me more,” I admitted, barely above a whisper.

Rowan’s expression tightened. “Kyle.”

“I know,” I said quickly, hearing the apology in my own voice and hating it. “I know that sounds stupid, I just—”

“It doesn’t sound stupid.”

I looked at him.

His face was gentler now, though the anger had not left it. It sat behind everything else, hot and waiting.

“It sounds like you,” he said.

That should not have hurt.

It did anyway.

I folded my hands together in my lap so tightly the knuckles ached. “He looked at me like he regretted it.”

I had not meant to say that out loud.

The words slipped free before I could stop them.

Rowan went still.

“Xervic?”

I nodded once.

My face was burning now, and there was no hiding from that. “Not openly,” I said quickly. “He didn’t say anything cruel. But after the light, after they knew…” I swallowed. “He looked displeased.”

Displeased.

Such a neat, small word for the way it had hollowed me out.

Rowan sat back on his heels and dragged one hand over his face.

“He is the alpha,” he said at last, voice flat with anger. “If he wanted this handled differently, it would be.”

That lodged inside me in a painful way because I knew it was true.

Even if the Blackthorne family hated me, even if Amanda Vale looked at me like I had stolen something sacred from her hands, even if half the estate whispered behind closed doors—Xervic was still the alpha.

This room meant something.

It meant distance.

Containment.

A place where I could be kept without being welcomed.

My lips pressed together to keep them from shaking.

Rowan must have seen it anyway. He rose without another word and began moving around the room.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Fixing what I can.”

He opened the wardrobe, inspected the blankets, checked the shutters, the washstand, the coal box. He moved with quick efficiency, the old hunter in him turning anger into practical work.

“There aren’t enough blankets,” he muttered. “And this latch sticks.”

“Rowan—”

“I know.”

His tone gentled immediately, but he did not stop moving. “I know it won’t fix everything.”

That was not what I had meant.

What I had meant was don’t make trouble.

What I had meant was please don’t leave me.

I looked down again.

After a moment, Rowan crossed back to me and knelt once more, this time taking my bandaged hand carefully into his.

“You are not staying here alone tonight,” he said.

Relief hit me so quickly it almost made me dizzy.

I had not asked.

I had wanted to.

I had been too ashamed.

He must have seen something of that on my face because his grip tightened, warm and sure.

“I’ll sleep by the door if I have to,” he said. “Let them object.”

A weak breath left me. Not quite a laugh. Close.

That, more than anything else, nearly broke me.

Because this room was wrong.

Because the estate felt too large and too cold and too full of eyes.

Because somewhere beyond these walls, the Blackthorne family had already begun deciding what kind of burden I would be.

And still Rowan looked at me as if I was something worth protecting.

I bowed my head before he could see too much in my face.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

His thumb brushed lightly over the edge of my bandage.

Then, in the same steady voice he had used all my life whenever something frightened me more than I could admit, he said:

“I’m here.”