Heir of Seredon

Chapter 1 The knife went in before she understood what was happening. Adaline felt it as heat first, a searing line low in her side, and then as absence, the sudden, sickening awareness that something inside her that had always simply been there was no longer whole. She looked down. Her hands, closing instinctively over the wound, came away red. She stared at them as though they belonged to someone else, as though the blood soaking through her fingers were a color she'd never seen before in her life. "You," she said, and her voice came out smaller than she wanted it to, smaller than thirty one years of building an empire should have allowed. "You wouldn't." Marcus did not look away from her this time. That was the part that broke something loose in her chest even faster than the blade had. In every version of this moment she might have imagined, if she'd ever let herself imagine it at all, he flinched. He hesitated. He looked, at the very least, sorry. He looked bored. "I would," he said, and wiped the knife on the sleeve of his own jacket, unhurried, as though tidying up after a meal rather than a murder. "I did." Behind him, in the doorway, her sister stood with her arms folded, watching with an expression Adaline had spent her whole life mistaking for love. "Don't make this harder than it needs to be, Addy," Priya said, and the childhood nickname landed like a second blade, worse than the first because this one she'd never see coming until it was already inside her. "You always did think you were the only one who deserved everything." The pain in Adaline's side had become the entire world, a white, screaming heat that made it hard to hold onto words, hard to hold onto anything at all except the animal need to stay upright, to keep breathing, to not let this be the end of a story that was supposed to have decades left in it. She staggered back against the edge of her own desk, the desk where she had signed away her father's shipping fortune into Marcus's name not three hours earlier, because he had asked her to, because she had believed, with the whole foolish weight of her heart, that a man who held your hand while you signed something important was a man who would never use that signature against you. "Why," she managed, and it came out as barely more than breath. "I gave you everything. I gave you both everything." "That's exactly the problem," Priya said, stepping into the room now, her heels clicking against the marble floor Adaline had chosen herself, three years ago, back when she still believed this house would be full of people who loved her. "You never once stopped to ask if we wanted to spend our whole lives being grateful to you for it." Adaline slid down the side of the desk, her legs no longer willing to hold her, and the marble was cold against her back, colder than she expected, colder than anything should be allowed to feel in the last minutes of a life. She pressed her hand harder against the wound, felt the wet heat pulsing out between her fingers no matter how hard she pressed, and understood, with a clarity that felt almost cruel in its suddenness, that pressure was not going to be enough. Nothing was going to be enough. She was going to die on the floor of a house she had paid for, killed by the two people she had loved most in the entire world, and neither of them was even going to have the decency to look away while it happened. "Someone will find out," she whispered. It was the only weapon she had left, the only threat her dying breath could still make, and even as she said it she could hear how hollow it sounded, how little it mattered to the two people standing over her. Marcus crouched down, close enough that she could smell the cologne she had bought him for his birthday, close enough that his face filled her entire narrowing field of vision. "No one is going to find out," he said, gently, almost kindly, the way one might reassure a frightened child. "By the time anyone asks questions, Priya and I will already be married, and grieving, and terribly, terribly sorry that we couldn't save you from whatever desperate men you must have owed money to." He tilted his head, studying her the way he might once have studied a contract, looking for the last loophole before signing. "You made this very easy for us, actually. All that money, and no one left who'd think to look at the people you trusted." The room had begun to blur at its edges, the gold trim on the ceiling swimming into the white plaster, the sound of Priya's heels retreating toward the door fading into something distant and underwater. Adaline tried to hold onto anger. Anger, at least, felt like something she could keep. But even the anger was slipping now, dissolving into the enormous, impossible tiredness of a body that had decided, without asking her permission, that it was finished fighting. I gave you everything, she thought, and the thought came slower now, syrup thick, barely holding together as it moved through her mind. And you couldn't even give me the truth. The last thing Adaline Voss heard was Marcus's footsteps crossing the room toward the door, unhurried, the footsteps of a man who had never once doubted this would work. The last thing she felt was the strange, terrible relief of no longer having to hope for anything from anyone, ever again. And then, nothing. Then, everything. Pain came first. Not the pain of dying. The pain of being, sharp and total, a body remembering itself all at once, and Adaline gasped, and the gasp did not sound like her own voice. It was younger. Rougher. Frightened in a way she had not allowed herself to be frightened in years, not since she was a girl young enough to still believe the world owed her safety simply for existing in it. She opened her eyes to a ceiling of raw wooden beams, water stained and sagging, nothing like the gold trimmed plaster she'd just watched blur into darkness. Where. Fragments assembled themselves out of a stranger's memory, sliding into place like puzzle pieces she hadn't asked for and couldn't refuse. A name that was not Adaline. A body that was not hers, and yet now, unmistakably, was, smaller, thinner, marked at the back of the neck with something that made her fingers go cold when she touched it. A bonding scar. Fresh. Unclaimed. Omega, the fragments whispered. You are omega now. Adaline sat up too fast, and the room spun, and for one horrifying moment she thought the wound was still there, that Marcus's knife had somehow followed her into whatever this was, but her hands found only smooth, unbroken skin beneath a thin, worn nightshirt that was not hers either. She pressed her palm flat against her own ribs, feeling her heart slam against it, too fast, too young, too alive. She was not dead. She was, impossibly, somehow, something else entirely. Somewhere beyond the shuttered window, a bell began to toll, slow and ceremonial and wrong for the hour, and voices rose in the street below, first one, then many, all repeating the same words with the particular hush of people afraid to say them too loudly. "The city burns again. The Gods have not chosen. Seredon has no heir." She went very still. Seredon. The name settled into her like a key finding its lock, and beneath it, buried in this stranger's blood and bone, something ancient stirred awake, and recognized her back. Adaline Voss pressed her hand against her chest, feeling the frantic, unfamiliar rhythm of a heart she hadn't earned and hadn't asked for, and made herself a single, quiet promise in the dark. Whatever this was. Whoever had done this to her. She was not going to spend this life the way she had spent the last one, handing her trust to anyone who smiled at her warmly enough. She had already died once for that mistake. She did not intend to make it twice.