Chapter 7: What's In The Blood

The folder is thicker than I expected.

I take it back to my room because reading it in the kitchen with Thalrion's coffee smell everywhere and his thumb still warm on my memory is not a situation I am capable of being objective in. I sit cross legged on the bed with the morning light coming grey through the glass and I open it and I start from the beginning.

The Nyther bloodline goes back six generations.

Six generations of male Omegas, rare enough that the werewolf world considered them myth, and specific enough that someone thought they were worth documenting in detail. The file reads like a case study, cold and clinical, names and dates and biological notations that strip living people down to their components. I find my grandmother's name on page four. My mother's on page seven. My own on the last page, which has significantly more recent annotations than any of the others.

I read it all.

It takes an hour.

When I close the folder, I sit with it in my lap and look at the ceiling and try to process the fact that I have spent eight years running from something I only half understood and the half I was missing is somehow worse than what I knew.

Male Omegas exist in low numbers across the werewolf world. Rare but not unheard of. Documented. Managed, which is a word the file uses in ways that make my skin crawl. What makes the Nyther line different is not the designation itself. It's the genetic anomaly that runs alongside it, a biological marker that has expressed in every Nyther male Omega for six generations without exception.

I can carry and birth a child. 

And any child I carry doesn't just inherit traits from both parents, it amplifies them.

Alpha dominance, doubled. Omega intuition, doubled. Shift speed, strength, endurance, the ability to influence other wolves that powerful Alphas carry, all of it taken from both bloodlines and compounded into something that shouldn't be biologically possible but apparently is, because it has happened before, twice, in my bloodline's history, and the file has documentation on both of those children.

One of them ended a war at seventeen.

The other one the file is less specific about, which tells me everything I need to know about how that story ended.

I open the folder again and go back to the last page.

My name. My actual name, not any of the six I have worn since. Vaelis Nyther. Last viable carrier. The annotations beside it are in two different handwritings, which means more than one person contributed to this file, and one of the annotations, in handwriting that is smaller and more controlled than the rest, says, located, and has a date from eight weeks ago.

Eight weeks.

He found me eight weeks ago and he waited. Set up the situation with Dex, engineered the meeting, gave me the wrong floor and the right timing, and waited. Two years of searching and eight weeks of patience and he still didn't just take me.

He waited for me to walk through a door.

I don't know what to do with that.

There's a knock.

"Come in," I say, because I already know who it is, my wolf has been tracking him through the building all morning like an embarrassing and involuntary GPS system.

Thalrion opens the door and looks at me on the bed with the folder in my lap and says nothing for a moment. Just reads whatever is on my face, which I am too tired to fully control right now.

"Questions," I say. A statement of what's about to happen.

"I expected more of them faster," he says. He comes in and sits in the chair by the window, not on the bed, and I notice that, the deliberate choice of distance, and I file it.

"The two children," I say. "In the history. The second one. What happened?"

His jaw tightens. "He was taken by a rival Alpha when he was nine years old, used as leverage when his father refused to surrender his territory and the child was killed."

The room is very quiet.

"And his father," I say.

"Burned the rival's entire compound to the ground." Thalrion holds my gaze. "Then surrendered anyway because there was nothing left to protect."

I look down at the folder.

"So the pattern is," I say slowly, "that every time someone gets access to my bloodline the people around me end up destroyed."

"The pattern," Thalrion says carefully, "is that your bloodline has historically been surrounded by people who didn't understand what protecting someone actually requires."

I look up at him. "And you do?"

"I understand it better than anyone who has come before me." He leans forward, elbows on his knees, and his voice is very even. "I have spent two years learning exactly what happened to every person in that file and exactly how each of those situations failed. I am not repeating their mistakes."

"That's a lot of confidence."

"It's preparation." Something moves in his expression. "There's a difference."

I close the folder.

"Noctyros," I say. "How close is he?"

"Close enough that this conversation needed to happen yesterday." He stands. "Which is why I need you to make a decision today."

"What decision?"

He looks at me steadily. "Whether you're staying because you have nowhere else to go," he says, "or whether you're staying because you choose to. Because what comes next requires one of those and not the other, and I need to know which one I'm working with."

I look at him for a long moment.

My wolf is very still and very certain and very unhelpful about the objectivity I am trying to maintain.

"What comes next," I say. "What does that mean exactly?"

"It means I need to introduce you to my inner circle today." His voice is level. "It means the people closest to me need to know you exist and why you're here. It means Noctyros already knows you're in this building and the window for a quiet resolution to that problem is closing."

"And if I say I'm staying because I have nowhere else to go?"

"Then I keep you safe and ask nothing more of you."

"And if I say I'm choosing?"

He holds my gaze and something in those silver eyes does that thing, that layered, complicated thing that I am starting to recognise as what Thalrion Bloodryn looks like when he is being completely honest.

"Then we do this together," he says. "All of it."

The morning light has shifted from grey to pale gold while we've been talking, coming through the glass at a low angle, and the folder is closed in my lap and eight years of running is sitting somewhere behind my sternum, heavy and familiar and very, very tired.

I set the folder on the bed beside me.

"Together," I say.

Something shifts in his face. Quiet and significant.

"Together," he confirms.

He moves to leave and I say, "Thalrion." He stops. "The annotation. In the file. The one that says located with a date." I hold his gaze. "That's your handwriting."

He doesn't deny it.

"Yes," he says simply.

"You wrote it the day you found me."

"Yes."

"Not your people. You."

"No," he says quietly. "Not my people." And he walks out and pulls the door behind him and I sit with the folder and the gold morning light and the understanding that the Alpha King went looking for me himself, and I don't know what to do with that either.

My wolf does though.

My wolf has known exactly what to do with all of this since the moment I walked into the wrong room.