All Chapters of THE OMEGA'S VOW: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

Darius POVLucinda was waiting when I walked in.She didn't stand.I loosened my coat and dropped into the chair opposite her. Three folders sat open on the desk. A fourth had been printed on actual paper — the kind of choice that meant digital trails were a problem.I reached for it.Most of it was blacked out. Paragraph after paragraph buried under thick redaction bars. One visible section near the bottom of the final page.A footnote.Biocontainment specifications per Statute 1.1 sublevel protocol. Two units. Indefinite term.I turned the page over.Nothing."That's it?""The contractor dissolved six months after completion," Lucinda said. "The lead engineer died eight months after that."I set the report down.Two units. Indefinite term. Twelve years old.Lyra had been taken days ago.Which meant the cells existed before her. Which meant someone — or two someones — had been occupying them for over a decade while the Council told the world the Veyrith bloodline was extinct.I filed

LYRAThe drain was the only honest thing in the room.Everything else in the cell had been built to lie. The stone walls were finished smooth in a way that wanted to read as ancient, though I doubted they were older than ten years.The ceiling height had been calculated, I was fairly sure, to feel like more space than it actually held — high enough that you didn't feel buried, low enough that you never forgot you were underground.The drain didn't perform anything. Old grate, rust at the seams, a four-inch gap into whatever ran beneath the floor.I'd found it on the first day, sitting against the wall doing nothing because there was nothing else available to do, and noticed the suppression thinned there. The way frost thins on a window in the first hour of sun — still cold, still solid, but no longer solid enough to block the shape of what was behind it.I'd been sitting over the drain for close to an hour by then, knees against my chest, palm flat on the stone beside the grate, when

LYRAThe alarm didn't sound like an alarm.No siren. No flashing light bleeding under the door. Just a change in the air pressure that I felt before I understood what it meant.There was a low pulse through the walls, once, then again three seconds later, like something enormous had exhaled somewhere far below me.I was still sitting over the drain when it happened.I pulled my hand back from the stone and sat up straight, listening.Footsteps, fast, out of rhythm with the two guards who usually walked this corridor on schedule. More than two sets. Boots moving with the specific urgency of people who hadn't planned for whatever was happening.I stood.The suppression in the room hadn't changed. I checked — reached for the Veyrith presence the way I'd been practicing for two nights, and found it exactly as dim and exactly as pressed thin as it had been an hour ago.Whatever was happening outside this cell wasn't happening to the walls themselves.I could hear voices now. Muffled throug

AELINDRA POVThe safehouse was two hours north, an old hunting lodge that belonged to no pack registry Kael's Enforcers could confirm, which meant it had probably belonged to his father, or his father's father, held in reserve the way careful men hold things in reserve.I sat outside it while the others went in.Lyra had looked back at me twice on the walk from the tree line. I hadn't gone in either time. There was a fallen log at the edge of the clearing, weathered pale, and I sat on it the way I'd sat on the one outside the village three days ago, because some habits outlast the reasons for them.The groove in that alcove floor.I hadn't expected it to still be there.Twelve years, Marcus had said in that cell to Kael, though he didn't know the number was wrong. Fifteen, since they built the facility. But the alcove was older than either count. I'd worn that groove into the stone over years. I stopped counting somewhere past the first decade, sitting in the same position because sit

KAEL POV"You're not doing this alone."Lyra didn't look up from the map spread across the lodge table. "I didn't say I was.""You were thinking it.""I think a lot of things you're not entitled to hear."Gideon, across the room, made a sound that might have been a laugh and turned it into a cough when I looked at him.I pulled out the chair beside her and sat. The map was Aelindra's — hand-drawn, old paper, marks in a hand that wasn't mine or Marcus's or anyone I recognized. Three points circled in faded ink, none of them near the Council complex we'd just left."Where did she get this," I asked."She's been updating it for fifteen years." Lyra traced a line between two of the circled points without touching the paper. "Every time the signature moved, she marked it. This is the whole history of where they've kept her family.""And now yours."She looked up at that. Didn't argue it.The fire had burned down to coals behind us. Most of the others had gone to whatever rooms the lodge ha