Strange Face

AZIZA 

She was beautiful. Softer and more striking than my own face with a full mouth, large dark eyes with lashes that caught the low light. The kind of face that made people look and then look again. I stared at her for a moment that was both too long and not long enough.

Then I reached for a larger piece to see more and the glass shifted under my fingers. A sharp edge caught my palm before I could pull back and a clean line of red opened across my hand. I watched the stranger in the mirror bleed and felt the sting.

I put the shard down and slowly turned to my parents.

My mother's ring was still on her finger. The thin gold band my father gave her at their bonding ceremony, the one she never removed in my lifetime. I took it off carefully. Then I crossed to my father and took his, the heavier one with the Goldencrest crest pressed into the gold.

I put both rings on the chain around my neck, under my clothing, against my skin.

I pressed my bleeding hand to my chest as I walked out without looking back. If I looked back I would not leave.

~

The corridors were worse now. There was thicker smoke, crying from somewhere above. Ironfang soldiers moving in pairs barely glancing at the small omega picking her way through the wreckage with her head down and her bleeding hand pressed to her side.

They did not look at me twice.

I walked through the outer gates with a group of displaced pack wolves being herded toward a holding area. I was assigned a number and directed to the omega holding group.

I walked where I was pointed and then I looked up.

He was standing at his father's shoulder across the compound.

Rhydian Ironfang. I knew his face from years of intelligence documents. He had dark skin, and his locs were pushed back from his face. His jaw looked permanently tense and his eyes were full of an expression I hadn’t seen in a long time. Was it guilt?

His father leaned in, said something and laughed. The sound flowed across the compound easily. It was full and satisfied, the laugh of a man who had just conquered a peaceful Pack and planned to turn their people to slaves.

I pressed everything I was feeling into the coldest, quietest part of myself and did not move, did not react and did not make a single sound.

Rhydian's eyes moved across the compound and found me before I could look away. His gaze passed over me the way a ranked wolf's gaze passes over an omega, automatic and dismissive, and then it stopped. Came back and stayed.

I looked down first.

I listened to his father laugh.

I thought about my mother's ring sitting against my sternum and my father's ring sitting beside it, both of them cold and now mine.

I just needed time.

RHYDIAN

I looked at her for a moment longer than I should have. I don’t know why my eyes found her in the crowd. Her face was so distinct, it held me captivated.

Staring into her deep pools of eyes, I couldn’t help but wonder the horrors she had seen. The horrors she had to go through all because of my tyrant father.

I turned and walked back toward the inner camp and put her out of my mind. Or I tried to. The trying was the part that bothered me.

I had work to do. I always had work to do the morning after my father took something new. The actual fighting, the breach, the blood, that was his. The part that came after, the accounting, the organisation, the management of several hundred displaced wolves who needed to be fed and housed and processed, that landed on my desk.

It had always been this way. My father conquered. I administered. He called it a natural division of labour. I had stopped arguing about what I called it.

The Goldencrest records were extensive. Their Alpha had been meticulous, everything documented and dated, territory maps cross-referenced with resource inventories going back forty years. I sat with them for three hours in the administrative tent and by the end I had a clear picture of what we had taken.

The water territory was worth more than the briefing had indicated. The agricultural land in the southern quarter was worth more than that. Goldencrest had been quietly prosperous in the way that careful, unbothered packs sometimes are, building steadily without drawing attention.

That was probably why my father had finally moved on them.

I closed the last folder and set it aside and went to find him.

~

He was in the main hall of what had been the Goldencrest pack house, sitting at a table that had belonged to someone else yesterday, eating a feast. Three of his senior soldiers were with him. They stopped talking when I walked in.

"The omega processing was incomplete," I said. "Forty-three wolves are still unregistered. The holding area has no shelter and no water access. The temperature dropped last night."

My father looked up from his plate. "And?"

"And people will get sick. Sick wolves are a resource drain. We need to move them into the south compound before nightfall."

He picked up his cup. "They are absorbed wolves, Rhydian. Not guests."

"They are our wolves now. That is the point of absorption."

The soldiers at the table were very still, they had learned that stillness was the safest response to this particular conversation. My father set his cup down.

"You want me to put conquered wolves in the south compound."

"I want us to not waste what we just spent three weeks trying to take." I kept my voice even. "Dead omegas and sick betas don't harvest crops or maintain territory. It is a practical matter."

He looked at me for a long moment with the expression I had been looking at my whole life, somewhere between assessment and disappointment, like I was a stain on the fabric of his legacy.