The Alpha’s Cursed Omega

Chapter 3

Seraphine

Wren was going to be furious.

Seraphine thought about this as she lay on the (admittedly very good) cot in the (admittedly very clean) guest tent they'd assigned her, staring at the canvas above her head and cataloguing her situation with the dispassion of a woman who had learned to treat disasters as interesting problems.

Problem one: she had been acquired by the Alpha King's soldiers.

Problem two: the Alpha King in question was her fated mate.

Problem three: she had felt the bond, which meant the ward had felt it too, which meant at some point in the near future, the most powerful wolf in the known territories was going to understand precisely why his scouts had been dying. The last thing she needed was for him to decide she was a weapon.

Problem four: she had left Wren a note saying she'd be back by moonrise and it was now well past midnight.

This last problem was, in the hierarchy of concerns, both the least serious and somehow the most immediately vivid. Wren worried in a very active way. She expressed it through sarcasm and snacks, but it was worry nonetheless, and Seraphine did not like causing it.

She sat up.

The camp outside was quiet - the measured quiet of a military camp that ran on schedule even in sleep, sentries pacing, horses breathing, the low murmur of whoever had drawn the late watch. She could hear the Alpha King's tent from here. Not him, specifically, but the absence of sleep sounds - the particular silence of someone awake and thinking hard.

She knew that silence. She lived in it.

In the morning they broke camp with the efficiency of people who had done it ten thousand times. Seraphine was given a horse (not Inheritance, who was being cosseted in a padded stall and clearly thriving, the traitor), a pack with provisions, and a wide berth from the soldiers, who watched her with the specific wariness of people who knew about the ward but had been ordered to treat her as a guest.

General Idris Vane rode up beside her an hour into the journey.

She had been watching him since last night. He had the look of a man who thought before he spoke and spoke less than he thought, which she respected. He also had the look of a man with a very large and well-managed collection of private concerns.

"The King says you believe the ward is family magic," he said, by way of preamble.

"The King shared that, did he."

"He mentioned it was relevant." A pause. "He doesn't often share things that are relevant."

Seraphine looked at him sideways. "Is that your way of telling me he found the conversation interesting?"

Idris did not answer, which was, she was beginning to understand, his version of yes.

"My grandmother was a hedge witch," she said. "Low-level stuff - cures, protections, the kind of magic that's been in rural bloodlines for a thousand years. She died when I was fourteen." A pause. The road wound on. The horses breathed. "She used to say that the best magic was just - deciding. Deciding something was going to be protected, and meaning it completely. She said the meaning was where the power came from." She kept her voice even. "I thought she left me nothing. I was wrong about that, apparently."

"What changed your mind?"

She was quiet for a moment. The road wound through pine forest, morning light slicing through in long pale columns, and the horses' breath steamed in the cold.

"My mate died," she said. "Three days after we bonded. I was eighteen. And then others - soldiers, travellers, anyone who tried-" She stopped. Breathed. "I started noticing the pattern. It wasn't grief and it wasn't bad luck and it wasn't, as my old pack informed me quite publicly, a curse from the Goddess for unknown sins. Something was protecting me. Aggressively."

"You don't call it a curse."

"No." She met his eyes briefly. "It has kept me alive and alone for four years. I haven't decided how I feel about it yet."

Idris was quiet for a long time after that.

"For what it's worth," he said at last, "the archive scholars at the Sovereignty are very good. If the answers are in your bloodline, they'll find them."

"And then?"

"And then-”

He hesitated, which she suspected was unusual for him.

“And then the King will decide what comes next."

Seraphine nodded.

What she did not say, to Idris or to herself or to any part of the dark logic she kept very quiet in the back of her mind: she already knew what came next. The ward would be examined. The bond would be discussed. The King would do what powerful men with six weeks until a political deadline always did. He would assess the liability, calculate the cost, and make the rational choice.

He would reject her.

And this time, if the ward held - if it did to him what it had done to the others.

She made herself stop.

She was very good at stopping thoughts before they finished.

The road curved, and through the trees the first mountains of the Dawnveil Sovereignty came into view - ancient and enormous, their peaks lost in cloud. The sight of them knocked something loose in her chest. She had been moving for four years. She had forgotten what it felt like to see something built to last.

Ahead of her, at the head of the column, the Alpha King rode without looking back.

She was glad. She wasn't ready to look at his face again.