His Omega, His Ruin

Scars and Stories

The incident in the foyer had left him unsettled.

Magnus couldn't seem to sit still. His energy was jagged and restless, filling the room with a low, vibrating tension that had no clear outlet. He paced. He stood at the window. He paced again. Eventually he came to a stop behind me as I sat at the vanity, and he picked up the silver hairbrush from the table. The simple, domestic object looked almost comical in his large, scarred hand. But the way he held it was reverent.

"May I?" he asked, his eyes finding mine in the mirror.

I nodded.

He began to brush my hair—and he didn't just drag the bristles through the tangles the way I had always done it, rushed and impatient and always watching the door. He worked with a slow, hypnotic rhythm. Starting at the ends, gently working through the knots, before moving to long, sweeping strokes from the crown of my head all the way to my waist.

The sensation unraveled something in me.

No one had ever groomed me like this. In my pack, Omegas did it quickly and efficiently, heads bowed, always half-listening for footsteps. This was different. This was slow, careful attention. This was savoring.

My eyes fell closed. My head tipped forward. The sound of the bristles was a soft, rhythmic shhh-shhh that gradually quieted the anxious noise in my brain. I felt his fingers graze the nape of my neck as he lifted my hair to brush the underside.

Then his hands went still.

I opened my eyes, confused, and saw him staring at the back of my neck in the mirror. The focused calm had drained from his expression. What had replaced it was a cold, deadly stillness that made my stomach drop.

He reached out, his fingertip tracing a raised, jagged line of silver skin that ran from behind my ear down to my collarbone. Old. Ugly. Thick in the way that only silver wounds were thick, the way they stayed because they were made to stay.

"What is this?" Magnus asked. The inflection was entirely gone from his voice. Flat. Terrifyingly empty.

I flinched and reached up to cover the scar. "It's nothing," I said quickly. "Just an accident when I was younger. I fell."

"Wolves do not scar from falls, Mira." He pulled my hand away from my neck, gently but completely firmly. "We heal. This was silver. This was done to keep it from healing." He leaned closer, examining the mark with the precise, clinical attention of someone assessing a wound made in battle. The muscle in his jaw was ticking hard. "Who did this?"

I looked down at my hands.

Shame burned my cheeks, hot and familiar. I didn't want him to know. I didn't want him to see how easily I had been broken. "It was the Gamma's son," I whispered. The memory clawed its way up my throat. "I was twelve. I spoke out of turn during a pack meeting. I corrected him about a hunting route." My voice had gone very small. "He said Omegas needed to learn that their voices didn't matter. He used his father's silver-tipped cane."

The silence that followed was heavy enough to crush the breath from my lungs.

I braced myself. Waited for Magnus to tell me I should have been smarter. That I should have known my place. That I had provoked it by forgetting my rank. That was what Caleb had always said.

Instead, I heard a sharp snap.

I looked up. The silver hairbrush lay in two clean pieces in Magnus's hand, the handle sheared off by the force of his grip. He didn't seem to notice. He dropped the broken pieces onto the vanity without looking at them, his eyes fixed somewhere beyond the mirror—staring at a ghost I couldn't see. The gold of his irises had burned down to a cold, blue-white fire.

"He hurt you," Magnus said. He wasn't speaking to me. He was speaking to the fact of it. Working to hold it in his body without shattering. "He took a weapon to a child. To my mate."

"It was a long time ago," I said quickly, reaching back to touch his arm. "It doesn't hurt anymore."

Magnus turned me on the stool until I faced him. Then he knelt, slowly, deliberately, until his face was level with the scar on my neck. He pressed his lips to the raised skin—soft, careful, apologetic—and kissed the length of the old wound as if he could erase the history with his touch. When he pulled back, his face was damp with a sweat born entirely of restrained fury.

"They will answer for this," he said. His voice was quiet in the way that was far worse than shouting. "Every person who watched and did nothing. I will write your name in what remains." He took my face in both hands. His eyes were raw. "You tell me it doesn't hurt anymore, Mira. But it hurts me. It hurts me to breathe knowing that the air is shared with the people who touched you like that."