Chapter 155: O-Men 1

EDELINA

The memory hit me like a physical blow, sudden and suffocating, triggered by the stink of betrayal on this boy’s uniform. One moment I stood in Johann’s chambers, staring at this retainer who’d confessed to knowing too much; the next I was back in that sterile room, the royal infirmary, watching my life dissolve into black bile and blood.

I remembered the cold of the examination table beneath my back. Not the plush bedding of the royal suite, but hard, unforgiving metal. Cornelius had carried me there himself, his arms trembling, his breath ragged against my ear as he’d rushed through the corridors. I’d tried to tell him to stop, to let me be, but the words had come out as a wet gurgle. Then the darkness took me.

When I woke, the healers were already whispering. Their voices carried that particular hush that precedes disaster. I’d pushed myself up on my elbows, my vision swimming, and saw the vials on the counter. My blood, thick and wrong, black as tar in the glass. The senior healer—a woman named Bellarose, I think, though her face blurs now—had turned to Cornelius with an expression of pure horror.

"She’s Lycan," the woman had whispered. "The curse is in her blood. It’s consuming her from the inside."

Cornelius had gone very still. I’d watched the color drain from his face, watched his hands clench at his sides, the knuckles whitening. He’d known what it meant. A Lycan could not be his Luna. A Lycan was an abomination, cursed by the goddess herself, a threat to the purity of the pack. The law was clear. The law demanded death.

I’d waited for him to do it. I’d braced myself for the snap of my neck, for the swift mercy of an Alpha King who understood duty. I’d even closed my eyes, ready to accept the judgment I’d spent years avoiding, the secret I’d buried beneath a hidden identity, powders, potions, and lies.

But the killing blow never came.

Instead, I’d heard him exhale—a long, shuddering breath that sounded like defeat. When I’d opened my eyes, he’d been staring at me with something that looked suspiciously like grief. Not anger. Not even revulsion. Fucking grief.

"Get out," he’d told the healers, his voice barely audible.

"Your Majesty," The main healer then had protested, clutching her test results. "The law—"

"I said get out."

He’d locked the door behind them. Then he’d turned to me, and I’d seen tears in his eyes. Actual tears. The great Alpha King Cornelius, weeping over his dying, cursed wife.

"You knew," he’d accused, but there was no strength in it. "You knew and you still tricked me inyto marrying you. I thought your kind were dead and extinct already."

"Of course I knew," I’d rasped, my throat burning with the residue of black blood. "I was born into this insanity. Is it so wrong that I wanted to break it. You would not—"

A coughing fit had seized me then, violent and wet. I’d doubled over, retching onto the floor, and he’d caught me, held me, cradled my head as I’d vomited more of that tarry substance onto his boots. He hadn’t pulled away. He’d stroked my hair and whispered nonsense. Promises maybe, or prayers for his own soul and sins.

When it had passed, I’d looked up at him, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. "If you have to kill me as your barbaric law dictates for infiltrating your pack, your world and people," I’d told him. "You’d have to kill Johann too. He’s hybrid. The curse will show in him eventually. Can you bring yourself to do it? He might be part of me... Part Lycan. But he is part you as well. Can you end your own blood?"

He’d shaken his head, stubborn as a child. "No."

"But they’ll know," I’d insisted. "They will all know. The healers will talk. The tests are logged. Someone will find out."

"Then they won’t talk," he’d replied, and in that moment, I’d seen the steel beneath the sentiment. Not the steel of an Alpha upholding law, but the steel of a man who’d decided to burn the world rather than lose one thing he loved.

His pride. Well no... That would be a lie.

I knew all too well what it was like if I had called Cornelius a weak man. Even though I had told myself that he did it for his own stability and how he would be remembered as King.

If anyone got there, I would say it was an Alpha King’s pride. But that was far from it.

But I knew the truth even then, buried beneath the convenient lie I kept repeating to myself and to my son in equal measure. It wasn’t weakness at all. It was love. The fool genuinely loved me, even knowing precisely what I was, even understanding exactly what that love would eventually cost him as Alpha King, as a man sworn to an entire kingdom’s safety. And because he loved me, and because he still wanted desperately to keep his pride intact alongside his sacred promise to the werewolf people he’d sworn to protect since the day he took that throne, he found another solution entirely. A quieter one. A crueler one, in its own particular way, though he would never have called it that himself when he left the room.

I’d learned later what he’d done.

He killed every healer and every Omega in that infirmary wing who had learned what I was during those tests.

Not swiftly, and not mercifully either, from what little I ever managed to piece together afterward through whispered rumors and careful questions asked of people too frightened to answer fully. He ordered a complete blood cleanse of the entire infirmary once the healers were gone, utterly convinced that knowledge of my true nature might have already spread beyond those four walls despite every precaution, despite every silenced mouth. Bradley, high and mighty, loyal to Cornelius beyond any reasonable measure of devotion, had helped carry out every piece of it without once questioning the order aloud, the way he questioned nothing his King ever demanded of him. That retainer, the one who had just stood in front of me moments ago with murder and betrayal both written plainly across his young face, must have helped too, back then, before whatever conscience he still carried finally caught up with the weight of what his own hands had done on someone else’s command.

And then, of course, Cornelius began rewriting everything else that mattered. Quietly, patiently, over years rather than weeks. Ensuring Johann, his own hybrid son, the boy he’d held and fed and watched grow into a young man believing himself destined for that very throne, would never actually sit upon it. Shipping me off eventually to rot quietly in some distant healer’s shack, far from court, far from scrutiny, hoping, I was absolutely certain even now, that I would simply die there in peace and spare him the unbearable burden of ever having to explain a single piece of it to anyone, least of all to the son we’d made together.

The memory released me, snapping back into the present like a rubber band. I stood in Johann’s chambers, my son’s face still half swollen from Lysander’s fists, and stared at the retainer who just stood there offering me his bitterness like a gift.

"You think you’re the only one who’s suffered?" I asked him, my voice steady despite the memory’s tremor. "You think you’re the only one who’s woken up screaming in your head and contemplating if you are the monster?"

The retainer—he had a name I was sure, but I refused to learn it and humanize him further—lifted his chin. "I think you’re all parasites. You feed on us until there’s nothing left, then you discard the husk. Why would I care about your pain, much less your own suffering? It can never compare to ours."

Johann started to move stealthily, his hand moving toward what I was certain was a knife he kept beneath his drawer. I shot him a look, a quick slash of my eyes, and he stilled, though his fingers kept twitching.

"You could help us," I told the boy, stepping closer. "You know the truth. You know what Cornelius did, what Bradley did. But we are not them. We are not like that. You could stand with us. We’re not the villains in this story. We’re the survivors too. We’ve committed our share of atrocities; I won’t insult you by pretending otherwise. But our hands were tied long before either of us ever held the power to untie them ourselves."

The boy laughed, a short, harsh bark that held no humor. "Help you? Help you do what? Kill more innocents? Hide more secrets? I watched some of my brothers die by the worst kind of hanging today and by your son’s hands because your kind decided they were loose ends. I’m not interested in your barbaric little war, Your Majesty."