Chapter 1

Elouera's POV 

I stood in front of the floor to ceiling mirror in my private bedchamber, the heavy velvet drapes pulled tightly shut against the morning sun. My fingers, trembling slightly from the lingering chill of the night, grasped the end of the binding cloth. I took a sharp breath expanding my lungs as much as I dared and pulled the fabric tight across my chest.

Pain bloomed immediately, a dull, familiar ache settling deep in my ribs. I secured the pins, making sure the linen flattened every curve, erasing the woman I was born to be and leaving behind the hollow silhouette of Prince Elian.

Through the narrow slit in the drapes, the city of New Avalon mocked me. The Sovereign Empire’s capital was a glittering monster of towering glass and polished steel, stretching out over a sapphire harbor that caught the early morning light. From up here in the Blue Mountain Estates, the world looked perfect. Untouchable. But inside these stone walls, power was measured in blood and deception. And my deception was the deadliest of all.

I turned away from the glass. I couldn't afford to look at the sky for too long; it made me want things I was not allowed to have. Freedom. A name. A life.

Moving to the marble washbasin, I opened the small, silver tin sitting beside the faucet. Inside rested a single, chalky white pill. The suppressant.

Just looking at it made the back of my throat burn. For six years, ever since I turned fifteen and the terrifying, sweet scent of an Omega first threatened to spill from my pores, my mother had forced these down my throat. “Drink it, or I will let them tear you apart,” the Empress had whispered the day she held the first pill to my lips. “You are my son. A beta. Or you are nothing.”

I swallowed the pill.  It hit my empty stomach like a stone. Within seconds, the nausea rolled in, closely followed by the heavy, suffocating blanket of fatigue that always accompanied the drug. The suppressant didn’t just hide my scent and stall my heat; it locked my true nature in a chemical cage, freezing my blood and dulling my senses.

I gripped the edge of the sink, waiting for the room to stop spinning. I was twenty-one years old. By nature's design, I should have presented it years ago. I should have been claimed, protected, revered as one of the rare Omegas in a world dominated by ruthless Alphas. Instead, I was a ghost haunting my own flesh.

When the nausea finally settled into a manageable throb behind my eyes, I reached for my clothes. I didn't dress like a royal heir preparing for court; I put on armor. The tailored military coat was cut broad at the shoulders to fake a masculine build, hanging just loose enough around my waist to hide my slender frame. I fastened the gold buttons with practiced efficiency, my amber eyes staring back at me in the mirror. I looked like a boy. A pale, sickly, unremarkable boy.

Then came the hardest part of the morning. The mental shift.

I dropped my chin. I let my shoulders round slightly, erasing the rigid, martial posture I secretly practiced in the dead of night. I softened my jaw, letting a nervous, uncertain energy seep into my eyes. Elouera, the calculating strategist who mapped out the empire’s flaws while the court slept, vanished. In her place stood Prince Elian. The weakling. The disappointment. The Beta prince who flinched at loud noises and couldn't hold a broadsword to save his life.

A sharp, violent knock on my heavy oak door made my heart kick against my ribs.

"Your Highness," a gruff voice called from the corridor. "The morning assembly convenes in ten minutes. The Crown Prince requests your prompt attendance."

Callan.

Just hearing my older half brother's title sent a spike of genuine ice through my veins. I didn't need to fake my fear of him. Callan was twenty-five, built like a god of war, and completely sociopathic. To him, my existence was a stain on the imperial bloodline.

"I'm coming," I called out, pitching my voice lower, adding just enough of a tremor to sound properly intimidated.

I grabbed my white gloves necessary to hide the calluses on my hands from the secret combat training I endured with my shadow guards and pulled the door open. Two massive Alpha guards in the imperial crimson uniform sneered down at me. They didn't bow. They didn't even incline their heads. I was technically second in line for the throne, but in the Sovereign Empire, a Beta without military backing was lower than a palace hound.

I kept my eyes pinned to the marble floor and stepped out into the viper’s pit.

The corridors of the palace were a suffocating sensory overload. The air was thick with the heavy, aggressive scents of Alpha noblemen and military officials strutting toward the assembly hall. Pine, crushed iron, burning wood, sharp citrus. My suppressed Omega instincts curled in on themselves, screaming at me to hide, to submit, to find a dark corner and weep. I clamped down on the panic, counting my steps. One, two, three. Keep your head down. Don't look them in the eye.

I was halfway to the grand staircase when it happened.

It started as a low, dull burn in my lower abdomen. I paused, my hand flying to my stomach as a sharp cramp tore through my muscles, so violent it stole the breath from my lungs. I stumbled sideways, my shoulder slamming hard into a stone pillar.

No. Not now. Please, not now.

The suppressant had never failed me this early in the day. But the heat spreading through my veins wasn't the chemical burn of the pill; it was biological. It was raw, heavy, and terrifyingly sweet. A cold sweat broke out across my forehead. My chest heaved against the tight linen bindings, fighting for air.

"Well, well. Look what crawled out of its chambers."

The voice was a low, mocking drawl that froze the blood in my veins. The air around me suddenly dropped ten degrees, saturated with the suffocating, heavy scent of frost and dark cedar.

I didn't need to look up. Crown Prince Callan stepped into my path, completely blocking the hallway.

He was impossibly tall, impeccably dressed in his charcoal military uniform, the medals on his chest gleaming in the morning light. His ice blue eyes scanned my hunched, trembling form with absolute disgust. But as he stepped closer, his boots clicking sharply against the marble, his expression shifted.

The sneer faded, replaced by a strange, dangerous narrowing of his eyes.

I tried to push off the pillar, to bow and scurry away like the pathetic prince he expected, but another cramp twisted my insides. I let out a soft, involuntary gasp, my knees buckling slightly.

Callan moved faster than a man his size should be able to. His large, gloved hand shot out, gripping my upper arm in a bruising vice to keep me from hitting the floor. The moment his fingers closed around my arm, a terrifying, electric shock jolted straight through my skin, bypassing the thick layers of my coat.

Callan yanked his hand back as if I had burned him, his chest heaving once.

"What is wrong with you?" he demanded, his voice dropping to a gravelly, dangerous pitch. He didn't sound angry; he sounded disoriented.

"Nothing, brother," I stammered, my voice cracking perfectly. I kept my face turned away, terrified my eyes would betray the panic clawing at my throat. "Just a stomach ache. I am fine."

I tried to step around him, desperate to reach the open air of the assembly hall, desperate to get away from his overwhelming Alpha presence before my body betrayed me completely.

But Callan stepped sideways, trapping me against the pillar. He leaned in, entirely too close, invading my space in a way that made every suppressed instinct inside me scream. He tilted his head, the ash blonde strands of his hair brushing his forehead as he took a slow, deliberate breath through his nose.

He was smelling the air right next to my neck.

My heart slammed against my ribs so hard I thought the bones would shatter. The suppressant was failing. I could feel the microscopic slip of my own scent of wild honey and rain bleeding through the chemical barrier.

Callan’s ice-blue eyes snapped down to meet mine, the disgust utterly gone, replaced by a dark, feral confusion that made him look like a starving predator.

"What," Callan whispered, stepping so close his broad chest brushed against my military coat, "are you hiding, Elian?"