Omega Life

The wine is too warm.

I know before the Alpha even tastes it. I can smell the temperature, feel the wrongness in the weight of the crystal goblet. But there's nothing to do now except carry it forward on the silver tray, keep my head down, and hope Viktor is drunk enough not to notice.

Hope has never served me well.

The full moon ceremony fills the great hall with sound, laughter, boasting, the wet crack of bones as warriors shift back and forth to show off. Pack hierarchy, raw and loud. The strong posture and preen. The weak serve.

I am the weakest.

Five years as Ironfang's omega. Five years of scrubbing floors, serving meals, taking whatever punishment the pack decides I've earned. My wolf went silent somewhere around year two. I stopped hoping for her to wake around year three.

Now I just survive.

"Wine, Alpha."

Viktor doesn't look at me. He never does. I'm furniture. Less than furniture, at least the chairs don't spill.

I hold the tray steady as he reaches for the goblet. His fingers drag across mine. My whole body locks against the flinch.

He drinks.

Pauses.

"This wine," he says, voice carrying, "is warm."

The hall quiets. Not silent, never fully silent when predators sense blood, but the laughter thins. Heads turn.

My insides clench.

"I apologize, Alpha." I keep my voice flat. Emotionless. Showing fear makes it worse. "I'll bring another..."

The backhand catches me across the face.

I don't fall. Falling makes it worse too. I've learned to absorb the blow, turn my head with it, stay on my feet. The tray clatters to the stone floor. Wine splashes across my worn dress.

"Useless," Viktor spits. "Absolutely useless."

Around us, wolves laugh. Someone howls mockingly. The pack loves when the Alpha disciplines the omega. It reminds them they're not at the bottom.

I stay still. Head down. Waiting.

"Clean it up," Viktor says, already turning away. Bored now that the spectacle is over. "And bring me proper wine. Cold. If you can manage something that simple."

"Yes, Alpha."

I drop to my knees. Not submission, not really. Practicality. The wine needs cleaning before it stains the ancient stones. Before someone slips and blames me for that too.

My cheek throbs. By morning it will be purple. By next week, yellow. By the time it heals, there will be a new bruise.

There is always a new bruise.

In the kitchens, I press a cold cloth to my face.

"Child." Old Mira's voice comes from the shadows. She's the only other omega still breathing, too old to work hard, too stubborn to die. "You should have checked the temperature."

"I did. The warming stones..."

"I know." She shuffles closer, her bent spine making her barely taller than my shoulder. "I'm saying you should have checked. Out loud. So witnesses heard. Then the fault is the stones, not you."

Politics. Even at the bottom, there are politics.

"I'll remember."

"You'd better." Her gnarled hand pats my arm. "You're smarter than the others give you credit for. That's why they hate you."

I don't answer. She's not wrong. I was supposed to break years ago. Everyone expected it, the orphan girl with no pack, no protector, no wolf strong enough to fight back. They threw me into omega servitude expecting me to crumble.

Instead, I learned.

How to move quietly. How to hear what wasn't said. How to watch the powerful ones and understand what they wanted before they knew themselves.

Survival skills. Not thriving. But breathing, which is more than some manage.

"The Alpha's wine," I say. "I need to bring it."

"I'll prepare it. Stay here, ice that face."

"Mira..."

"I'm old. He won't hit me hard enough to matter." She's already moving, her hands steady on the wine bottles despite her age. "Besides, I want to see it."

"See what?"

She pauses at the doorway. Her rheumy eyes sharpen, bright with a recklessness I haven't seen before, which is dangerous for an omega to feel.

"Tonight's different," she says. "Can't you feel it? The moon is calling."

Then she's gone, and I'm alone with my cold cloth and my throbbing face and her strange words echoing in my head.

Tonight's different.

I feel nothing different. Just the same crushing weight of another ceremony, another night of serving wolves who see me as less than dirt.

But somewhere deep in my chest, in the place where my wolf used to live, a faint pulse moves.

The howl goes up without warning.

I'm halfway back to the great hall, fresh wine in hand, when the sound tears through the pack house. Not a hunt cry or a victory call.

Terror. Pure, animal terror.

The wine shatters on the floor as I run.

The great hall is chaos. Wolves scrambling, some shifted, some frozen in half-forms. At the center of it all,

Viktor.

The Alpha is on his knees. His face is gray, veins bulging black beneath his skin. His mouth opens and closes like a landed fish, no sound emerging except wet, gurgling gasps.

He's dying.

I should feel horror. Should feel the pack bond straining as the Alpha falls. Instead, I feel...

Nothing. Or almost nothing.

Deep in my chest, that stirring sensation grows stronger.

"The stone!" someone shouts. "Look at the bloodstone!"

I follow their gaze to the dais where the Alpha's throne sits. Behind it, mounted in a frame of ancient silver, rests the bloodstone, a relic from the founding packs, supposedly dormant for three hundred years.

It's glowing.

Silver light pours from its surface, bright enough to make shadows dance. Bright enough to hurt. The wolves nearest to it stumble back, shielding their eyes.

Viktor makes one last sound, something between a howl and a scream, and collapses.

Dead.

The Alpha is dead.

And the bloodstone's light is moving. Sweeping across the hall like a searchlight, passing over wolf after wolf, pausing on no one,

Until it finds me.

The beam locks onto my chest like a physical force. I stagger under its weight. My skin burns, not with pain but with something else. Something waking up.

My wolf.

After five years of silence, she rises. Not gently. Not gradually. She crashes through me like a wave, filling every cell, every thought, every silent scream I've swallowed for half a decade.

"The stone has chosen."

The voice comes from somewhere. I can barely hear it over the roaring in my ears, the silver light flooding my vision.

"The Crescent bloodline lives."

The what?

But I can't ask. Can't speak. Can barely stand as something ancient and powerful finishes unlocking inside me.

The last thing I see before the darkness takes me is the pack, every wolf in Ironfang, dropping to their knees.

They're bowing.

To me.

What the hell is happening?

Then the light swallows everything, and I fall.