The Alpha’s Cursed Omega

Seraphine The horse had better be worth it. Seraphine told herself this as she unlatched the paddock gate with the particular kind of careful that came from years of not getting caught. It was the same careful she used when extracting arrowheads from soldiers who'd rather bleed out than admit they needed a healer. Slow. Deliberate. Absolutely certain of the destination. The horse in question - a bay gelding with a fever sweat matting his coat and one hind leg held just slightly too still - watched her approach with the resigned expression of an animal that had given up expecting good things from humans. "I know," she told him. "Same." His owner, a heavyset man named Aldric something, was currently three cups into a skin of apple wine and conducting an argument with the fence post about grain prices. He had been hitting the horse with a crop earlier. Not in the way of a man working an animal. In the way of a man who needed to feel large. Seraphine had watched from across the yard and done the mental arithmetic that she always did when she probably shouldn't do a thing: weighed the trouble it would cause against the specific feeling in her chest when she didn't act. The chest feeling won, as it always did. Her grandmother had called it a conscience. Her old pack had called it a liability. She called it Tuesday. She got the rope on him quietly. He was too tired to protest, which made her more angry at Aldric something, not less. “Easy,” she murmured, close to his ear. “We’re leaving. I have a very good feeling about the road east.” She did not, in fact, have a very good feeling about the road east. She had a reasonably adequate feeling about it, which for her constituted optimism. The gate swung open without squeaking, because she had oiled it that morning while pretending to examine the fence for a termite problem she'd invented on the spot. She led the horse through and turned right, toward the edge of town, where the cobblestones ended and the pines began and the world got darker and quieter and considerably less interested in her business. She was forty feet from the gate when the road filled up with soldiers. There were a dozen of them, which she thought was excessive. They were mounted, armoured, and carrying the kind of torches that suggested they were not here for a pleasant evening ride. The banners they carried were black and gold - not colours she recognised immediately, which meant not local, which meant worse. The commander at the front was young for his rank, with the tight-shouldered posture of a man who took himself very seriously and expected others to do the same. He looked at her. He looked at the horse. "That horse have a name?" he said. Seraphine considered her options. They were limited. "I've been calling him Inheritance," she said. "He was left to me by my late uncle." "Your uncle." "A grief I carry daily." The commander's jaw worked. Behind him, one of the soldiers made a sound that might have been a suppressed laugh. He did not appear to find it funny. "We're looking for a person," he said. "A healer. Travelling alone. There have been - incidents. In the territories she's passed through." Seraphine kept her face very pleasant. This was a skill she'd developed early and perfected out of necessity. She was, in fact, a healer. She was, in fact, travelling alone. The incidents in question were almost certainly the soldiers who had tried to claim her as mate over the past year and died abruptly within a week of attempting it. She was aware that from the outside, this looked concerning. "What kind of incidents?" "Deaths." "How terrible." She tilted her head. "I'm a baker." A long silence. "A baker," he repeated. "The horse carries flour." She met his gaze steadily. "Lovely evening, by the way. Very atmospheric with the torches." The commander opened his mouth. Then the air changed. It was the only way Seraphine had ever been able to describe it — a shift in pressure, like the moment before a storm, like the instant between lightning and thunder when the world held its breath. She had felt it three times in her life. Each time had ended in a funeral. She felt it now. The soldiers' horses moved. Not in alarm - in deference, all shifting sideways in the practiced, instinctive way of trained animals that had learned to make space for one specific presence. Seraphine turned before she'd decided to turn. The man who rode into the torchlight was not wearing armour. He didn't need to. He wore dark travelling clothes, a long coat that moved with the wind, and the particular expression of someone who had absolute authority over everything within his line of sight and found the fact more tedious than impressive. He was large in the way of old-bloodline wolves - not built for show but for endurance, for war, for the specific purpose of being harder to kill than anything that tried. His eyes landed on her. They were dark in the torchlight and then, for just a moment, not - a flash of gold, there and gone, the involuntary tell of an Alpha whose control had registered something significant before the rest of him caught up. She had heard about it. She had never seen it. She filed it away and did not look away. And the world stopped. Seraphine knew what a mate bond felt like. She'd felt it once before, at eighteen, just long enough to understand what she would never have again. It hit like recognition, like gravity, like the memory of a song you didn't know you'd learned. It hit like coming home to a house that was already on fire. She went very still. The man on the horse was watching her with an expression she couldn't read. Something had moved behind his eyes - she'd caught it, just for a moment, before it was gone, locked behind a face that gave away exactly nothing. Alpha King, she thought, brain assembling the pieces with the speed of someone who had learned to assess threat levels quickly. That's who he is. That's whose soldiers these are. That's whose ward-hunting party has found me. She looked away first. It cost her something she couldn't name. I need you to leave my tent," she said, which was technically incorrect as she was outdoors and the tent was thirty feet away, but the principle stood. No one said anything. Inheritance the horse leaned his head against her shoulder and sighed. "Right," said the commander, eventually. "We’re going to need you to come with us." Seraphine closed her eyes for exactly one second. Then she opened them, squared her shoulders, and made the decision she always made: cooperate now, escape later, and do not, under any circumstances, let them see that you're afraid. "Fine," she said. "But the horse comes with me."