Seraphine POV
The gate hit her back before she even found her footing.
One shove. That was all it took. One guard's hand between her shoulder blades, and she was through the iron door and stumbling forward into wet leaves and dark air, her knees hitting the ground hard, her palms scraping against roots she couldn't see.
Behind her, the lock turned.
She heard it clearly. A clean, final sound. Like a period at the end of a sentence.
"Look at me."
Lord Draven's voice came through the bars, calm and almost gentle, the way a man sounds when he has already won and doesn't need to raise his voice to prove it. Seraphine pushed herself upright and turned. He was crouching on the other side of the iron gate, one knee down, head tilted, studying her the way you study something you've already decided to throw away.
He was smiling.
"Omegas don't survive the Tether-break," he said pleasantly. "Your body will give out before morning. Your wolf won't be able to hold the bond damage together. You'll simply stop." He tilted his head the other direction. "No one is going to look for you, Seraphine. You understand that, don't you? No one is going to come."
She stared at him through the bars.
She wanted to say something cutting. Something hard. She wanted to find a single sentence that would crack that smooth smile off his face and make him feel even one splinter of what she was feeling.
She had nothing. The pain was still moving through her in slow, deep waves, and her mind kept slipping sideways, and all she could do was stand there and breathe.
Draven stood, straightened his coat, and walked away without looking back.
The guards followed.
The gate stayed locked.
Seraphine turned and faced the Deadwood Forest.
It was darker than she expected. The trees were old, enormous, black-barked things with branches that reached toward each other overhead until they blocked out most of the sky. The moon was up there somewhere. She could feel it more than see it, a pale pressure above the canopy, watching.
She walked.
She didn't have a plan. There was no plan to make. She put one foot in front of the other because standing still felt like giving Draven what he wanted, and she was not even now, even here, even with the Tether-wound burning a hole through the center of her chest, she was not going to give that man what he wanted.
The pain surged again, and she grabbed the nearest tree trunk and held on.
It came in waves. She had figured that out in the throne room. Big, crashing waves that took her vision and her breath and her legs all at once and then a trough, a few minutes of something almost bearable, before the next one built. She just had to survive the waves.
Just keep moving.
Behind her, through the trees, through the iron gate and the palace walls, and however many corridors of marble and gold, she heard the bells.
Deep, resonant, joyful bells. The kind that rang for coronations. For victories. For celebrations.
They were already celebrating.
The ceremony was over. She had been removed. The court had seen what happened to an Omega who aimed too high, and now they were drinking wine and eating from silver platters and laughing about something else entirely. Seraphine Ashveil was already a story. A cautionary one.
She let go of the tree.
She walked deeper into the dark.
The bells faded slowly, swallowed by distance and trees and the sound of her own ragged breathing. When she couldn't hear them anymore, she stopped and pressed her back against a trunk and slid down until she was sitting in the leaves, her knees pulled to her chest, her head tipped back.
She thought about her mother.
Her mother had died when Seraphine was six. A fever, the court said. Quick and quiet. Seraphine barely remembered her face anymore, just impressions. Dark hair. Warm hands. A voice that hummed without words when she thought no one was listening. She had been raised in the outer court by a string of distant relatives who made it clear, in small and daily ways, that she was a charity case and should be grateful.
She had been grateful. She had been quiet. She had been careful.
She had hidden every sharp edge she had and made herself small and waited.
And then Caelum had looked at her, and her wolf had told him, and she had thought she had genuinely, foolishly thought.
Another wave hit.
She pressed her fist against her sternum and made herself breathe through it. In. Out. In. The pain crested, and she felt her wolf straining against it from the inside, and that was the strange thing, the thing she kept noticing her wolf was straining. Not breaking. Not fading. Fighting.
Omegas didn't fight the Tether-break. They couldn't. Their wolves weren't built for it. The bond kept them alive, and when the bond broke, they simply stopped, as Draven said. Like a candle going out.
Her wolf was not going out.
Her wolf was pacing, snarling, throwing itself against the pain like it was a wall that could be knocked down if she just hit it hard enough.
That's not right, she thought distantly. Omegas don't do that.
She didn't have time to think about what it meant.
Footsteps.
She was on her feet before she processed the sound, every nerve in her body snapping to attention. Something was moving through the trees to her left. Not a guard, the steps were too light, too unhurried. Not an animal. Too deliberate.
A shape emerged from the dark.
An old woman. Small, slightly bent, wearing a rough wool cloak that had seen better decades. Her hair was white and loose around her shoulders. Her eyes were
Her eyes were completely grey. Flat and pale like river stone.
Blind.
She stopped a few feet away and tilted her head the same way a wolf does when it's reading the air. Her nostrils flared.
"You smell like the palace," the old woman said. Her voice was low and unhurried. Not afraid. "And like a Tether-break."
Seraphine said nothing.
"You're still standing." The old woman said it like a statement and a question at the same time. "Interesting."
"Who are you?" Seraphine's voice came out rougher than she intended.
"Maren." Simple. She didn't offer more. Her head tilted slightly in the other direction. "You're the girl from the ceremony."
Seraphine's jaw tightened. "News travels fast in Deadwood."
"Everything travels through the Deadwood." Maren took one step closer, and Seraphine fought the instinct to step back. The old woman reached out, not grabbing, just slow and careful, and pressed two fingers to the side of Seraphine's throat, just under her jaw.
Checking her pulse.
Her blind eyes went very still.
"You should be dead," Maren said softly.
"I'm aware."
"No." Maren lowered her hand. Her expression had shifted into something Seraphine couldn't read as pity. Not fear. Something closer to awe, which made absolutely no sense on the face of a blind old woman in the middle of a death forest. "You don't understand. You should be dead. Your body should have quit an hour ago. I've watched twelve Omega wolves die of Tether-breaks in this forest. I know what it looks like. I know what it smells like." She inhaled slowly. "You don't smell like that."
The pain moved through Seraphine again, lower and slower this time, and she breathed through it.
"What do I smell like?" she asked.
Maren was quiet for a long moment.
"You are not what they said you were," she said.
Six words. Plain and quiet and simple.
They hit Seraphine somewhere behind the sternum, not in the wounded place, but just beside it. In a place she hadn't known was waiting.
"What does that mean?" Her voice came out smaller than she wanted. "What am I?"
Maren opened her mouth.
And then stopped.
Her head snapped to the side, not the slow tilt of a blind woman reading the air. A sharp, sudden movement. Alert. Animal.
"Someone is in the forest," she said quietly. "Moving fast. From the palace side."
Seraphine went cold. "Guards?"
"One person." Maren's hand closed around Seraphine's wrist with surprising strength and pulled her sideways, behind a wide tree trunk. "Single set of steps. Too heavy for a servant. Too quiet for a soldier."
Seraphine pressed her back against the bark and held her breath.
The footsteps moved through the dark. Steady. Purposeful. Getting closer.
A figure stopped in the small clearing she had just been standing in.
He was in plain clothes, no royal coat, no guards flanking him, but she would have known him in complete darkness. She would have known him at the bottom of the ocean. The Tether-wound in her chest pulled toward him like a hook.
Caelum Voss stood in the Deadwood Forest in the middle of the night and looked at the ground where she had been sitting.
His jaw was rigid. His hands were fists at his sides.
He looked, Seraphine realized with a shock that nearly made her breathless, wrecked.
He crouched down and pressed his fingers to the dirt to the exact spot where she had sat and tried to survive the pain he had put in her. He stayed there for a long moment, perfectly still.
Then, in a voice so quiet she almost didn't catch it:
"What did I do?"
Not a question. The way a man talks to himself when he already knows the answer and hates it.
Seraphine's hand pressed over her mouth.
Maren's grip on her wrist tightened as a warning.
Don't move. Don't breathe. Don't let him find you.
Caelum stood slowly. He looked into the trees directly toward where they were hidden, and Seraphine's heart stopped completely.
His eyes moved on.
He walked deeper into the Deadwood, calling her name in that same wrecked, quiet voice.
"Seraphine."
She stayed behind the tree until she couldn't hear him anymore.
Then she turned to Maren and said, very carefully: "You were going to tell me what I am."
The old woman's blind eyes found her face with unnerving accuracy.
"Not here," Maren said. "Come with me. There are things you need to know before that man finds you." She paused. "And he will find you. Unless we make sure there's nothing left to find."