2: LYING OMEGA

Lyra's pov 

My hands are trembling so badly I can barely hold the parchment steady enough to read from it, but I force myself to stand anyway because staying on my knees feels like I've already admitted defeat before I've even spoken. The stone floor has left my legs numb and tingling, and when I finally get upright my vision swims for a second before it clears and I can see the entire hall stretching out before me—hundreds of wolves packed into the gallery seats, all of them watching me with varying degrees of curiosity and contempt and eager anticipation like they're waiting for a show to start.

And I'm the show.

I clear my throat once, then again, because my mouth has gone dry and my tongue feels thick and clumsy. I've practiced this moment a hundred times in my room, speaking these words to my cracked mirror until I could say them without my voice breaking, but standing here under the weight of all these stares is nothing like practicing alone in the dark.

My voice comes out stronger than I expected, clear enough to carry across the hall even though everything inside me is screaming to run.

"Three weeks ago, during the Harvest Moon gathering, my heat came early." The words fall into the silence like stones into still water, and I watch the ripples spread across the crowd's faces—shock, disgust, fascination. "Alpha Silas offered to take me to the healer. Instead, he took me to his private quarters and he—"

"That is enough."

Elder Moira's voice cuts through mine like a blade through silk, and I stop mid-sentence with the rest of the words still trapped in my throat. She turns her attention to the left side of the hall where the high-ranking pack members sit in cushioned chairs that look nothing like the cold stone that's left bruises on my knees.

"Alpha Silas, you stand accused. How do you answer?"

He stands up, and the moonlight catches in his golden hair and makes him look like something out of a fairy tale, like a prince who saves maidens rather than destroys them. He's wearing formal dark clothes that fit him perfectly, and when he puts his hand over his heart in a gesture of sincerity, at least three women in the gallery make soft sympathetic sounds.

"Elder Moira, I'm devastated by this accusation." His voice is rich and warm and so full of hurt confusion that if I didn't know better, if I hadn't lived through what actually happened, I might believe him myself. "Yes, Lyra came to me during her heat. She was in the garden, clearly in distress, and I could smell she'd gone into heat unexpectedly. She was desperate, begging for help, saying the healer had already left for the evening."

The lie flows out of him like honey, smooth and sweet and completely poisonous.

"I tried to refuse her," he continues, his voice dropping lower like he's confessing something shameful. "I told her it wasn't appropriate, that she should wait until morning, but she was insistent. She said the heat was unbearable, that she needed help, that she trusted me." His eyes meet mine across the hall, and they're full of such perfect wounded betrayal that I almost can't breathe. "I was trying to help her through it as gently as I could. I never imagined she would twist it into something so ugly."

His voice cracks on the last word, and he even manages to make his eyes go shiny with unshed tears.

And that made the crowd erupts.

"Lying Omega!"

"She seduced him and now she's crying assault!"

"Trying to trap an Alpha!"

The words hit me from all sides like physical blows, and I spin toward the gallery with my hands raised like I can somehow push back against the wall of hatred.

"That's not what happened!" My voice cracks and breaks, making me sound exactly like what they think I am—a hysterical girl making up stories. "I never begged him for anything! I never—"

"You have made your accusation," Moira says, and somehow her voice cuts through the chaos without her even raising it. "Now we will hear testimony."

They come forward one by one, these wolves who've decided my fate before I ever walked into this hall, and they speak their carefully crafted lies with the confidence of people who know no one will question them. A young Beta claims he saw me watching Silas all night at the gathering, following him with lovesick eyes. An older Omega I've never spoken to swears I was constantly trying to get his attention at pack functions. And then a junior healer from my own workplace stands up and says she caught me reading about heat-inducing herbs and asking suspicious questions about triggering an early heat.

"That's not true!" I'm shouting now, my voice raw and desperate. "None of that is true! I would never—"

But no one is listening because they've already decided what they want to believe, and the truth is so much less interesting than the story they've constructed where I'm a scheming orphan who tried to trap a powerful Alpha and got caught.

The Elders stand and file out through a door behind their seats, and I'm left kneeling on the cold stone again with the pack's hatred pressing down on me like a physical weight. They're gone for maybe five minutes—just long enough to make it look like they actually deliberated instead of having already decided my fate the moment I walked through the door.

When they return, Elder Moira's face is exactly the same as it was before, carved from stone and utterly unmoved.

"The Moon Tribunal has reached judgment."

My heart stops beating, just freezes in my chest like it knows what's coming before my brain can catch up.

"The evidence presented does not support the Omega's claim. The testimony of Alpha Silas Korren is credible and consistent. The testimony of Lyra, Omega of no family line, is found to be FALSE."

The word hits me like a fist to the stomach, and I'm trying to speak, to beg them to reconsider, but Moira isn't finished.

"For the crime of bearing false witness against pack leadership, the sentence is prescribed by ancient Moon Law: ritual silencing."

The words don't make sense at first, just sounds that my brain can't quite process into meaning, but then I see the guard moving toward a table draped in black cloth and he pulls it back to reveal a silver blade that catches the moonlight and throws it back in sharp, cutting angles.

"No." The word comes out as a whisper, then louder. "No, you can't—"

But hands were already grabbing my arms before I can finish, rough hands belonging to guards who pull me to my feet even as I'm struggling against them, trying to break free even though I know it's useless.

"Please! Listen to me! I'm not lying!"

But no one moves, not a single wolf in the entire gallery stands up or speaks out or even looks uncomfortable. They just watch with hungry eyes like this is entertainment.

The guards force me down onto the stone altar at the front of the hall, and the cold bites into my back hard enough to make me gasp. They pin my arms on either side and I'm bucking and twisting but there are three of them and they're so much stronger.

"You should have stayed silent, girl," Moira says, looking down at me with those cold gray eyes. "Now you'll have no choice."

They force something between my teeth to keep my mouth open, some kind of metal device that tastes like old blood and makes me gag, and the guard with the silver blade approaches and the moonlight makes it look like it's glowing.

"No! Please! Somebody help me! I'm telling the truth!"

The last thing I see is the crowd, all those faces watching with interest and disgust and excitement, not a single one showing horror at what they're watching.

The last thing I hear is my own voice echoing through the hall one final time, desperate and terrified and still fighting even though the fight is already lost.

The silver blade descends.

Pain explodes in my mouth, white-hot and all-consuming, and I try to scream but the sound that comes out is wet and choked and wrong. 

Blood floods my mouth, hot and copper-tasting, and I'm choking on it, drowning in it, and the pain just keeps going and going until everything finally, mercifully goes black.