The Cursed Omega's Revenge

Chapter Three

SAMIRA

Mickey's scream cuts through the morning mist like a blade through silk, and something ancient in my blood answers.

I know that voice the way I know my own heartbeat—five years of sleeping curled against his warmth, breathing in his scent of mountain snow and wild honey. Five years of watching alphas circle him like wolves round a wounded deer, their eyes dark with hunger for his impossible beauty. Beautiful Mickey with his moon-pale skin that seems to glow in candlelight, eyes like winter honey caught in amber, who sings lullabies in the mountain tongue of his stolen childhood. The sound makes even the cruelest guards pause, transported to gentler times. Mickey who turns eighteen when the moon goes dark, though we both know he won't live to see that birthday if the rumors taste true.

The mushroom basket falls from my hands, chanterelles scattering like gold coins across the forest floor. My bare feet know these paths—every root that reaches for ankles, every stone worn smooth by centuries of wolves, every place where the earth dips and swells like a sleeping body. But today the forest feels different. Hungry. Watchful. Like it's been waiting for blood to water its roots, for the old bargains to be paid.

The morning mist clings to my skin like phantom fingers, and somewhere in the canopy, crows gather. They know what I know—death walks these woods today.

I find him where the old trapping grounds meet the new growth, his leg twisted wrong in rusted metal teeth. The trap's a relic from when this land knew different masters, before Remus turned the hunting grounds into omega training runs where we learn to flee or die. Mickey's face has gone the color of bone china, translucent and fragile, and his blood—goddess help us, his blood smells like copper pennies and crushed violets, like innocence spilling into ancient soil.

"Don't look," he gasps, but I'm already looking, already seeing how the metal bites through muscle like a lover's cruel kiss, intimate in its violence. "Mud, you gotta go get—"

"Hush." I drop beside him, my hands shaking as I examine the damage. The trap's teeth have found the sweet spot between bone and tendon, right where an omega's worth lives or dies. A lame omega don't run. An omega who can't run ain't worth keeping. "Save your breath for surviving."

Other omegas crash through the underbrush—Rosie with her knowing eyes that have seen too many winters, Ben who ain't spoke since his brother got sold to the southern flesh markets, little Tam who shouldn't be seeing this but sees too much already. Their faces wear the same knowledge mine does: if we take him back broken, Hector will finish what the trap started with his particular brand of artistic cruelty. If we don't take him back at all, we'll all bleed for it.

"The gamekeeper's cabin," Rosie says, and we all know what she's really saying. The old cabin where omegas used to birth babies that disappeared come morning, swallowed by darkness and Alpha greed. Where forbidden things happened when the moon turned her face away. Where the walls remember screaming and the floor knows the weight of secrets buried deep as bones.

We fashion a litter from branches and desperation, our hands working in the wordless synchronization of the perpetually hunted. Mickey bites through his own shirt to keep from screaming as we move him, and I see the moment his beauty becomes something else—something raw and wild and achingly mortal. The alphas want him for that face carved by mountain gods, those honey eyes that promise sweetness, the way his body moves like water when he serves their table. They don't want this broken bird bleeding out real human blood, proving he's flesh and not fantasy.

The cabin squats in the deep woods like a toad made of rotting timber and old sorrows. Moss covers it like a shroud, and the door hangs crooked on hinges that sing rust-songs when we push inside. The air tastes of endings and beginnings, of birth-blood and death-rattle. Inside, it smells of mouse droppings and something sweeter—moonflowers growing through the floorboards, their pale blooms opening even in daylight, defying nature's laws. Mama used to tell stories of moonflowers before the night that swallowed her whole. Said they only grew where old magic bled into earth, where the veil between worlds wore thin as omega skin.

"Put him here." I clear a space near the window where thin light filters through glass cracked in spider-web patterns. The others hover like moths, drawn to disaster but afraid to touch the flame. "Rosie, I need water. Ben, find me spider silk from the rafters. Tam—"

"I ain't leaving." The child's chin juts stubborn as mountain stone. "Mickey's mine to protect."

Something in my chest cracks at that, fault lines spreading through a heart I thought calcified. We all got our people, the ones we'd bleed for in this place that teaches us not to love nothing we can't stand to lose. Mickey's got half the omega quarters ready to die for him, just for the way he makes ugliness bearable with his mountain songs, for the glimpses of beauty in a world gone gray.

I work the trap's release, each movement careful as prayer to gods who've forgotten our names. The metal screams louder than Mickey does, rusty hinges protesting their interrupted meal. When it finally releases, his blood flows free and terrible, painting the old boards in patterns that look almost like runes, like the old language written in iron and salt.

This is where it gets dangerous. This is where I gotta be careful.

I got healing in my hands—not much, not like the stories of silver wolves who could mend bone with a touch and resurrect the dead with tears. Just enough to stop bleeding sometimes, to cool fever, to coax torn flesh into remembering its proper shape. Rosie knows. She's the one who taught me to hide it, to use it only when death comes knocking loud enough to drown out common sense. She's the one who whispered warnings about gifts that mark you different in a world that devours difference.

But Mickey's blood won't stop flowing, and his honey eyes are going glassy as winter windows, reflecting nothing but sky.

"Everyone out." My voice carries more authority than an omega should own, power leaking through cracks in my careful mask. "Now."

"Mud—" Rosie starts.

"Out!" The word tears from somewhere deeper than throat, from the place where my wolf lives bound and muzzled, and they obey because sometimes survival means knowing when to run.

Alone with Mickey and the watching moonflowers, I let the careful walls drop. My hands find his ruined leg, and I reach for that spark inside me—that taste of lightning before rain, that echo of forgotten storms. It fights me, this power that ain't supposed to exist in a mud-brown omega. It writhes under my skin like trapped starlight, wanting out, wanting free, wanting more than my careful life allows.

The moonflowers lean closer, their petals trembling with anticipation.

"Please," I whisper to gods I ain't sure remember my name. To the moon who hides her face. To whatever watches from between the shadows. "Not much. Just enough."

Heat builds in my palms, spreading like honey-slow fire, like molten silver seeking channels in my veins. Mickey gasps as it touches him, his back arching off the floor in an arc of beautiful agony. I see it happening beneath his moon-pale skin—vessels knitting closed like lovers reuniting, muscle remembering its shape like a song returning to the throat, bone singing itself whole in harmonies older than wolf-kind. The moonflowers lean closer, their petals glowing faint as fox-fire, as if they recognize kinship in what pours from my hands.

But healing costs. Always costs. The universe demands its tithe.

The room tilts sideways as payment comes due. My own life force pours into Mickey's wounds, teaching his body to remember wholeness while forgetting my own. Black spots dance in my vision like crows come to collect, and I taste copper on my tongue—not his blood but mine, welling up from somewhere deep. Too much. I'm giving too much. But I can't stop, won't stop, not when his breathing steadies and color returns to those honey eyes like sunrise after the longest night.

"Mud?" His voice sounds like it's coming from underwater, from the place where drowned girls sing. "What are you—your hands are glowing."

Silver light. Not the muddy brown of my wolf, but silver like moonlight on water, like the old stories whispered in darkness.

The last thing I see before darkness claims me is Mickey's face, beautiful and whole and wearing an expression I ain't never seen before. Like he's seeing me for the first time. Like maybe I ain't just Mud after all.

Like maybe he's glimpsing what burns beneath the spell.

***

I wake to familiar darkness and the sound of Rosie crying—soft, hopeless tears that fall like rain on drought-dry earth.

"Foolish girl," she whispers, cool cloth on my burning forehead. "Foolish, brave, stupid girl."

The omega quarters' ceiling bears down like a stone mouth ready to swallow. Everything hurts—bones feel hollow as bird's, blood runs thick as sap, the spaces between heartbeats echo like caverns. This is what happens when you spend life force like water in a drought. When you pretend to be more than mud and shadow, when you reach for light that was never meant for your hands.

"Mickey?" My voice comes out cracked as old leather, tasting of ash and moonflowers.

"Walking. Running. Perfect as morning." Rosie's tears fall on my face like benediction. "You saved him, pup. Saved him complete. But at what cost?"

The door crashes open before I can process that. Housekeeper stands there like judgment day in a stained apron, her face the kind of ugly that comes from years of taking pleasure in others' pain. She smells of sour milk and rotted dreams.

"Get up." She grabs my arm, nails digging deep enough to draw blood. "Cook needs hands, and you've slept long enough."

"She's sick—" Rosie tries, but Housekeeper's backhand sends her sprawling, and I hear the sharp crack of brittle bones meeting floor.

"Omega's either working or dying. No in-between." She hauls me upright, and the world spins like a broken compass seeking true north in a land where all directions lead to suffering. "Move."

I move. What else is there? My legs shake like newborn fawn's learning the weight of the world, and my vision keeps sliding sideways into silver shadows, but I move. Through the quarters where other omegas watch with eyes full of pity and fear. Up the twenty-three stairs that feel like mountains, each step a small death. Into the kitchen where steam hits like a fist and Cook's already screaming about dinner preparations.

The knife feels like it weighs a hundred pounds, forged from fallen stars. Potatoes blur together, and I can't tell if I'm peeling or bleeding. Once, twice, I catch myself on the counter. The third time, I don't catch nothing but floor, and the stone rises up to kiss me cruel.

"Useless!" Cook's boot finds my ribs with practiced ease. "Can't even stand up straight!"

Another kick. Another. I curl small, protecting what I can, tasting blood and moonflowers and the echo of Mickey's healing. Was it worth it? This pain for his wholeness?

Yes. Always yes. In a world that takes everything, giving becomes rebellion.

"Enough."

The voice cuts through Cook's rage like winter through wool, like silver through shadow. Luna Margaret stands in the doorway, and the kitchen goes silent as a held breath before the scream.

I ain't seen our Luna this close in years. She moves like something broken and mended wrong, like a bird with clipped wings remembering flight. Favoring her left side where old breaks never healed proper, shoulders curved in permanent submission. But her eyes—goddess help me, her eyes hold depths that make me think of drowned stars. Grey-green like storm-tossed seas, holding secrets that could swallow ships whole. Eyes that have seen the beast beneath the man, have survived his teeth and still remember their own light.

"The omega is clearly ill." Her voice carries old authority, rusted but not forgotten. "She'll be no use dead."

Cook sputters, but you don't argue with Luna. Not even a Luna who limps and speaks in whispers. Not even a Luna who wears bruises like jewelry under her high collars, purple and yellow gems marking ownership.

Margaret approaches me slow, like I'm something wild that might bolt. Like she recognizes wildness calling to wildness. Her hand touches my forehead gentle as butterfly wings, and I feel something pass between us—recognition, maybe. Or warning. Her fingers carry the scent of moonflowers and old magic, and for a heartbeat, I swear I feel another presence looking through her eyes. Something ancient. Something that remembers when wolves were more than flesh.

"Take her back to her quarters," she tells Rosie, who's appeared like smoke in the doorway. "Let her rest until tomorrow."

She turns to go, that painful limp making each step a negotiation with gravity and ghosts. But as she passes, her hand brushes mine, and she presses something into my palm. Quick as secrets. Silent as graves. Her touch burns cold, like moonlight given form.

Then she's gone, swallowed by shadows and whatever horrors wait in the Alpha's chambers, where beautiful things go to die slow.

I don't look at what she gave me until we're back in the safety of our closet-room. Only then do I uncurl my fingers to find a small vial of clear liquid that catches light like trapped stars, like tears of the moon herself.

"Essence of moonflower," Rosie breathes, wonder and fear warring in her voice. "For strength. For healing. For..." She don't finish, but I hear what she don't say.

For power that ain't supposed to exist. For gifts that could get us all killed. For the awakening that comes whether we're ready or not.

I clutch the vial and think of Mickey's healed leg, of Luna Margaret's drowned-star eyes, of the way the moonflowers glowed when I poured my life into another's veins. Think of silver light where there should be brown shadow.

Something's stirring in Bloodthrone. Something that tastes of old magic and older vengeance. The very stones whisper of change coming on silver paws.

And maybe, just maybe, something in me is stirring too. Something that's been sleeping for twenty years, bound by a mother's dying spell but never truly tamed.

The essence of moonflower burns sweet on my tongue, like drinking liquid starlight, and I dream of silver light and justice that comes on silent paws. Dream of a world where beauty like Mickey's don't make you prey. Where Luna's eyes don't hold such terrible depths.

Where a mud-brown omega might be something more than shadow and servitude.

But dreams are dangerous things in places like this.

Almost as dangerous as hope.

Almost as dangerous as the truth burning beneath my skin, waiting for the spell to crack, waiting for the moon to call me home.